Knight Talk: Theology, Faith and Belief

Disturbing or Uplifting?

2011-05-31T13:54:00.000-07:00

Faith Battleground

2010-07-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Intellectual Battleground
Whether you are in and amongst it or whether you tend to take the more circuitous route around the outskirts, there is an Atheist vs. Christian battleground brought about largely by the present conflict between theistic evolutionists (like myself) and Young Earth Creationism/ Intelligent Design/Anti-science fideism, and others of a similar ilk. Although many atheists are happy to engage with non-extremist, science-friendly Christians, it is this unwisdom and unworldliness that has caused the Christian message to suffer the most, and explains why Christians are so in the minority in my place of birth, and also why the best-selling atheists have appealed to so many agnostics and half-hearted religious people. If Christians had been more adroit and competent in defending the faith, keeping it relevant, propagating a message of wisdom and truth, and avoided quarantining themselves from so many of the essential scientific and cultural endeavours Christianity would be in a much more healthy place. The YEC myth and anti-evolution biases have bedevilled our culture for too long now. They retard our progress, and manifest themselves as weaknesses; and just like all weaknesses, the atheists will be attracted to them like a shark is attracted to a blood soaked leg in the sea, or vultures are attracted to carrion.

Much of the YEC and anti-evolution movement was, and is, fuelled by a huge anti-intellectual, anti-institutional component in the American psyche, much of which emerged from the South's healing process after the Civil War – an intellectual rebellion against the more oppressive institutions of the North, and in many cases institutional knowledge itself. Much of the Christian fundamentalism we see nowadays was a reaction to modernism and the historical Biblical scholarship of the late 1800s, much of which included Biblical literalism. It is unfortunate that such reactionary and delusional movements have given ammunition to so many sceptics armed with guns, who are themselves living in their own fort of irrational naturalism – but I suppose the one positive thing to emerge from this is that the subject of faith and religious belief is high on everyone’s agendas again, and that, in my view, can only be good for Christians and, indeed, Christianity – the more open the discussions are, the better it is for our witnessing.

It’s hard to pin down exactly where all the falsity started, as most of the great post-first century Christian scholars seemed to have a sensible view about how the Bible should be interpreted. It was the Archbishop James Ussher who set the cat among the pigeons in 1650 by publishing his ‘Ussher chronology’, which dated the time of creation to be October 23 4004 BC. This certainly sounds ludicrous with today’s improved geological knowledge but in the 17th century people knew no better; in fact, even great minds and innovators such as Kepler, Newton and Lightfoot believed in a young earth. But as we came to know more, support for a young earth declined - most notably from the eighteenth century onwards with the much more fruitful scientific paradigm shifts and movement into the scientific revolution – with Abraham Werner and James Hutton emerging as two of the most established young earth debunkers.

It soon became clear to geologists, even in the eighteenth century, that the tremendous displacements and changes we were seeing on the earth did not happen in a short period of time by means of catastrophe, but that the incremental processes of uplift and erosion had caused them. Discovery after discovery showed that the earth needed to be billions of years old in order to allow time for such changes to occur, and as science has progressed, the many types of radiocarbon and radiometric dating, such as isotropic dating, potassium-argon dating, uranium-lead dating, and rubidium-strontium dating, to name but four, have confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt that we have reliable and independently verifiable scientific schemata that gives us accurate reading of things such as age of the earth and cosmos, decay rates, speed of light, randomness, our chemistry and biology, and all other data that fits nicely together for rationally minded people to form a coherent and consistent worldview.

A very influential (and harmful) book to emerge in the sixties was The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, who, with much pseudoscience and intellectual casuistry, argued for geological evidence for the flood and a young earth, and in the process tried to drown evolutionary theory deep in the water. It didn’t work as any scholar worth his name saw through it, and thus the YEC backlash occurred, and with them very influential conservative organisations in the US quarantined themselves from established and credible science in the form of creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis, The Institute for Creation Research, The Discovery Institute, and Hovind's Creation Science Evangelism Ministry – all of which propagate nonsense as they crassly distort the truth to make their ‘evidence’ support their positions. Much of this is achieved through the rather disingenuous method of ‘quote mining’, whereby they the isolate excerpts from academic texts that appear to support their claims (often by decontextualising them) while omitting the wider context and conclusions that rebut these claims.

Now, thankfully, most Christians saw sense and rejected the anti-science fideism, with the majority assenting to scientific endeavours, and seeing no conflict with the Bible and the findings of science. As I said, sadly it was the rise of fundamentalist Christianity at the start of the twentieth century that saw a revival of interest in many of these nonsensical myths, with only Intelligent Design emerging with any credibility in the present times (most notably with mathematician William Dembski whose contention is that the extraordinary diversity of life is statistically unlikely to have been produced by the same methods of evolution that Darwinists claim, and has the hand of deliberate design imprinted on its fabric). Although ID isn’t quite so blatantly discredited in the same way that YEC is, I personally doubt very much whether one really can scientifically detect the fingerprints of a conscious intentional designer in nature, as I do not think that God’s intentionality can be observed at that zoomed in level – plus I would have to raise issues with Dembski’s lack of scope for falsification in ID.

Of course as science has taken us to this very fruitful and propitious age, we now know for certain that the glass house of creationism has been shattered by unbiased evidence-based scientific enquiries, and that when the creationists are not making claims that have been repeatedly refuted in the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, genomics, anthropology, archaeology, and climatology – they attempt to deceive people with lies and evidential fabrications in the hope that their movements endure.

It ought to be said, it is with this type of intellectual dishonesty that I have a problem – I have nothing against Christians’ decisions to avoid science and concentrate on a more theological journey, only perhaps a slight sadness that they’re missing out on some of the incredible truths about nature. Equally, I am not offended by Christians who are plainly wrong about things like cosmology, geology, and biological evolution – I may think they’re mistaken but being mistaken is no reason to confer on them any feelings of affront or offence.

No, the people who we must speak up against are those who sully the name of Christianity with concealment and dishonesty for fear of being exposed as fraudsters – for they are one of the main reasons that this contemporary best-selling atheism by the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris, has managed to get such a firm conceptual foothold on so many walls of discourse – most of their ammunition has been provided by the worst aspects of Christian thinking that seems so utterly incapable of engaging in a world where critical thinking and evidence-based rationale are cornerstones of learning, progression and truth.

Must we shoulder some of the blame?
I wonder whether we Christians fail to blame ourselves enough for this - it is so easy to transfer the blame to atheists and say they are not understanding the good news, or apply St Paul’s edict about the message of the cross being foolishness to those who do not know Christ, but I suspect it is easy to do this as it helps absolve ourselves of much of the reasonability for which we really ought to be accountable.

If a school decided to stop teaching grammar, the subsequent results would be evident; work would be completed with bad grammar. The same is true of Christianity; it is not surprising that we have an atheist or agnostic majority; we have not done enough to keep Christianity at the forefront of people’s minds. Some people believe the myth that because something appears out of date it must have lost it relevance, but this is a wholly insensible view where Christianity is concerned – after all, how could something that contains the ultimate truths of existence go out of date? If this dip is simply an alteration in taste and relevance, much like a fashion or trend goes out of date and then emerges again, we cannot hope to find out anything about ultimate truths by assessing the characteristic vogues of any particular time, to do so would be to miss the wider picture. It would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°.

When one looks at St Paul (formerly Saul), almost certainly the greatest ever Christian philosopher, theologian and psychologist for the human condition, it is sometime easy to forget just what sort of person he was before Christ took hold of Him on the road to Damascus. Where once he had relied on his own strengths and his passion for intelligent truth, on his epiphantic road to discovery he would see the light and come to rely on Christ. Despite Saul’s aggressive vigour our Lord saw something in him that he could use for greater purposes - he saw a vengeful chrysalis that had the potential to be an extraordinary Christian butterfly. Far from seeing the followers of Jesus as a rivalry to his Pharisaic precepts of legalism, willing to defend the communities that Christ’s tenet of undeserved grace threatened, he would go on to preach the greatest message of grace ever preached. In stark irony the educationalist, scholarly and lawful tenets, and intellectual scrutiny fostered by the Pharisees were not to be abolished by Jesus but supplemented with a new wisdom that conflates law and grace. In one man, the perceived rivalry, although self-inflicted, disappeared as Jesus asked Saul why he is persecuting the Lord Himself, and calls him to be a man of God Himself, and the new creation St Paul is born into Christ.

I wonder how many potential St Pauls have remained chrysalises because they never sought the wisdom, cognitive vitality and intellectual vigour to become Christian butterflies; for whatever else we can say about the persecutor Saul he had the requisite tenacity and intense longing for truth that meant he would fight for what he saw as veritable, and he was able to use his intellectual prowess and cognitive strength to discover an even grater truth by an unexpected encounter. And I think this is the type of impassioned curiosity that will makes us better men and women of God - after all, did not God Himself say that it is better to be at the extreme of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ rather than ‘lukewarm’ (Revelation 3:14-22) – for it seems to be the very essence of stultification that one would turn off one’s passion for growth and settle for a lukewarm existence that fails to strive for critical analysis, cognitive vitality, honest intellectual search, and acquisition of knowledge and wisdom.

But most importantly of all, lukewarm is synonymous with forgetting one’s first love – Christ Himself, who is the very vine from which all wisdom, intelligence and knowledge comes. Thus, given that God uses more than just the Bible to resource His creation, it is imperative that Christians are able to engage with the world, and that must naturally include the sciences, politics, different philosophies, psychology, and the many other tenets of existence with which so many Christians seem either incapable or unwilling to engage.

Most of us can happily remind people that those who tarnish the Christian faith with their anti-science, anti-intellectual, fideistic approach to life are and always have been in the minority, and do not reflect or represent the views of the majority of Christians. And with this age of increasing technology and greater potential for worldwide communication, this is starting to become apparent – even some of the most fervent anti-science brigade are starting to poke their heads above the parapet with slightly embarrassed expressions (as they did with Galileo too) and admit that they may have been hasty with some of their anti-science assertions, and that to admit that oranges are not the only fruit need not be a solecism against the Christian faith, far from it, in fact, the opposite is usually true.

We have seen in the worst Christian cases that when a seemingly unstoppable force such as the pursuit of knowledge in science comes into conflict with the seemingly immovable object of one’s views about the Bible and heresy – there are many biases that seem to pull one into paroxysms of dissent, but as I say, they do not reflect the majority of Christians who take their Bible as it is meant to be taken, not as a book of science, but as God’s word through which He reveals the character of Himself and His gift of salvation to His creation.

Wisdom is strength
In the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament we find every reason to suppose that God intended for us to passionately increase our knowledge of all things, for to do anything less would be to quarantine ourselves from the benefits of discovery and act as though this marvellous story that God displayed for us in nature was never meant to be enjoyed or utilised. The talk of ‘wisdom entering our hearts’ and ‘knowledge being pleasant to our souls’ means far more than simply living by the Bible as the only place to find God at work and closing our ears and eyes to what He is doing in the rest of creation - after all we are told that we cannot flee from His activity or escape His presence – He is sustaining creation, and there will be many elements of His wisdom and character to be found throughout nature.

The book of Proverbs leaves us with little doubt – ‘Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding’, for he will be the man who ‘loves his own soul’ and ‘cherishes understanding’. And I think one can tell quite quickly when they meet a man of God whether he is of this kind, or whether he is likely to prefer his feelings over facts and close his mind to things he perceives as being ‘atheistic’ or ‘materialistic’ or ‘naturalistic’. Sometimes one can’t blame him, in fact, there are times when quarantining himself from science might well help his faith or help him live a more focused and devotional life with as few distractions as possible. To this no one should have any objections, and most do not. But when a man chooses to focus on the devotional side of his life, yet with virtually no knowledge of science maintains that it is wrong or heretical or unchristian to accept an old earth or evolution or the big bang, then he must be reproved for his intellectual slovenliness; for he is probably doing more in harming the enquiring atheists’ causes than he realises.

Let us be people who are not afraid to speak out against this force that has done so much damage in contemporary times. It may be hard to go around putting out all the fires that the anti-science brigade have started, but we may begin by getting our own heads straight, and being clear about the sort of world we are living in, and the intellectual dishonesty that needs exposing if we are to take some of the ammunition away from atheists. Perhaps then we will be able to seize the opportunity and capitalise on the fact that discussions about faith are high on people’s agenda, and realise that we live in an age in which we have every opportunity to be the most influential Christian generation the world has ever seen.

From Celebrity Riches to Moral Rags

2010-02-02T08:10:00.001-08:00

The John Terry affair that has hit the headlines recently has led me to consider this 'rags to riches' story with the signpost reversed. I believe that when we zoom in on our present culture and what much of it is like in this country we can see an interesting and edifying truth about what people really are coveting these days. In John Terry, we see a man who supposedly has what thousands of aspiring young people have; fame, exquisite football skill, trophies, captain of his club and country (although probably not for much longer in the case of the latter), tens of thousands of pounds a week in wages, an attractive wife, beautiful children, and an expensive house in a very salubrious part of London. Yet his affair, betraying his family, letting down his friends and setting a bad example to his young and aspiring admirers exposes the reality of how little fame and fortune really means when one forgets about the fundamentally special things in life - honesty, decency, love, good moral values and, if I may be so bold, a Christian supporting strap.

I watched John Terry score the winning goal at Burnley recently, and of course he could not bring himself even to smile let alone celebrate. Here is a man supposedly with everything who at the moment feels like he has nothing but shame and condemnation and unpopularity - and this just goes to show the sandy foundations on which the fame and fortune lifestyles are really built.

I have not intended here to castigate Mr. Terry - he is only human and we all make mistakes. I am no one's judge, and I can only hope that he is able to learn from this and come out of it a better person. I have only intended to show the limitations of fame and fortune by itself, and that one ought to be careful abut wishing for things purely as things to covet in themselves - they do not provide the riches that one supposes.

Being a Christian I believe those riches can only be found in Christ - at least the richest of all are only those lives who have become poor for His sake and lost what they have for what can be gained through Him. The news and affair of John Terry has not only served as a reminder of the futility of a fame and fortune without any greater aspirations, but that there are better things to be had if one starts with Jesus and makes Him Lord of one's life.

Looking For God In The Right Place

2010-01-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

Where do you expect to find God except in the place He meant for you to find Him? Sceptics will scoff and say there’s a paucity of evidence, but if you want to find God, you must meet Him on His terms, and those terms are Jesus Christ - the fullness of god in man.

Looking for God in your daily routines or in the other areas of life is a bit like looking for Charles Dickens in Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend or A Christmas Carol – of course he is present, even in those who would exile themselves from Him (they too are made in God’s image like the rest of us) - God’s creativity is there in nature, but He is not present in the same way that Miss Havisham or Daniel Quilp or John Harmon or Ebenezer Scrooge are all present in the aforementioned stories, nor is He running through them like water down a stream. To get to know the man behind the stories you would need to meet him in person, and that is what God invites us to do with Christ Jesus.

Jesus is the Creator of the universe, but since the ascension He is not related to the world in the same way that gravity is related to the planets or the electromagnetic spectrum is related to gamma rays and radio frequencies; He is related to nature as Dickens is related to his novels. Each of our own individual stories are, in a sense, related to the whole of nature, just as each character in, say, Oliver Twist (Oliver, Fagin, Nancy, Bill Sikes, Rose Maylie, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Bumble, and so on) is related to the primacy of the story, and to the mind of Dickens himself. Thus demands to see God in nature as some object like a tree, or a snowfall, or a constellation as Ptolemy described them in his ‘Almagest’, or some mathematical formula, or even a person, are as insensible as expecting (or hoping) to see the person of Dickens in one of his stories.

God is the creator, and just as Dickens is the mind behind the characters, so too is God the mind behind all the characters in creation – so in order to know Him one must meet Him on His terms, and His terms are Christ Jesus, and love and grace, and free salvation on the cross. God didn’t want to remain a mystery, that is why He became a man to die for every single human being, and it is through that death, resurrection, and through His word that one will get to know Him.

I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.

John 14:6

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12

Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Three

2009-12-13T04:40:00.000-08:00

How Can Heaven Be Paradise If Some Of Our Loved Ones Are In Hell?
This may well be the hardest question in the whole of Christian apologetics, and I think there are bound to be aspects to this that we won’t yet understand (as one would expect). But I think what makes it hard is that it is asked with something vitally important overlooked – after all, nobody who really asks ever considers just how awesome and powerful God is, for in fact, those who usually ask are those who don’t believe in Him in the first place. I think that for the Christian who has experienced the supreme power and Omni-benevolence of God, this question isn’t so difficult. But this is only my opinion, I state with no authority, just as how I see the situation.

As I see things, Heaven would not be Heaven if it were conditioned by our previous earthly imaginations. If we are thinking about Heaven in the right way, there are two things which render this objection unpalatable. In the first place, and, I think, most importantly, God has a greater claim on each individual than we do – and if one thinks of Him not as a static outer-being but as a supreme personality, a vast mind with whom one can have a relationship, then clearly our loved ones are as created by Him as we are, and are therefore far more His than ours. In fact, you are far more God's than you are yours. Everything you have is both God's, and yours because of Him. In your Heavenly status you will be shown that that which was yours on earth now belongs fully to God. And wherever our loved ones end up - whether it is with our Creator or not, their real position in relation to us and Him will be closer to Him than to us In other words, the real relationship between ourselves and our loved ones will be reflected perfectly from Him; we will no longer see things through a mirror darkly, we will see with perfect clarity that our loved ones were God's gift to us on earth, and that, in our Heavenly position, any knowledge of their chosen separation, cannot, in any way, cross into the paradisical realm that we are experiencing with God.

Moreover, and this is not very often congenial to the modern minds, but I doubt whether everyone (including husbands and wives) will continue to know each other in Heaven as they do on earth – you won’t need to – it’ll all be about how awesome God is. In assessing this, we are really looking at a demarcation between love in an earthly sense and love in the eternal sense; for I suspect that any love on earth will have only a pale comparison to that in Heaven. I suppose in comparison, it would be like meeting in adult life the boy or girl you had a crush on in middle school; he or she would now be a total stranger, in your mind, divested of anything that resembled that schoolboy crush. What you’ve moved into far transcends anything once felt, and this must be infinitely truer with the heavenly existence.

And this may not be known by everyone in the earthly realm, but the supreme love of God must be in operation in areas of life that you or I cannot imagine. Central parts that make love truly special are the parts which make room for Christ to do His work; the parts where we are able to appreciate fully, the Christ in our beloved - and they are, by their very nature, the parts that are Him. I should imagine that we cannot see fully what we are loving, either through our beloved or through His presence inside us, until we get to Heaven; that is, in Heaven we shall know fully what we, at present, only know in part.

Moreover, I would also say that with the God we know in Christ (ever seen in the book of Revelation how stupendous His full glory will be?) Heaven will be so awesome (and beyond our current imagination) that our current perception of 'co-existence' will be swept away into something more magical than that which linear concepts currently elicit. So if a consistent answer is attempted one really ought to rephrase it not so much as ‘our’ loved ones in separation, but rather ‘God’s’ loved ones in separation. The very essence of Heaven must, as far as I can see, consist of a perfect harmonisation of our own spirit being and of God's presently indescribable perfection. In which case it will, I presume, be impossible to imagine any other existence outside of the perfect paradise that we are experiencing – yet also we would be in a state that experiences the full (and I mean FULL) nature of God’s awesomeness and therefore would have no reason to worry about the others He loves (which may have once been our earthly loved ones) who have chosen to be separated.

And just as a man cannot appreciate the true delights of literature or poetry until he has learned to read properly, how much more true that if one comes to know God he will realise the answers to the questions that bedevil him (pun intended)

I must say though, even though to be in God's presence will be so awesome that our earthly existence cannot really be recognisable, this does not mean trivialising our earthly existence, for in fact, earth is a wonderful taster and a glorious preparation for an even fuller knowledge of God if one chooses Him.

I believe that in our heart of hearts we have never wished for anything else. It may not always be tangible, but all the things that have ever subliminally affected your soul have been but indications of it - thwarted sightings, promises, expectations never quite reaching fruition, melodies that drift away just as you were beginning to enjoy them. But if the wind were ever to blow into the soul; if there ever came a sound that did not drift away but stayed in your presence, the delight itself, you would certainly know it. Without any reservations, you would excitedly proclaim, 'This is why God created me'. All the things that influence us on earth are merely things which God is using to preserve our soul. Both joy and tribulation are the tools He uses to fix us; for every moment of pain, disobedience, anxiety, laughter, pleasure, and love, He is making us into the creatures that He wants us to be.

Every day of your life a euphoric intangibility has been present within your own recesses; it has lingered just beyond the clutch of your awareness. And this is precisely what our creaturely position is in relation to God. We do not have to earn salvation; our eternal destiny is conditioned by our own attitude towards salvation; by our own efforts to know the One who created us. That is why our final judgement is going to be necessary; for only then will we be fully aware of our eternal destiny and how our decisions in life. Either Heaven will be ours - it will be ours in the sense that we knew all along that we had it - the faint sound will become a melody of paradise; or else, we will see that we never made the effort to know Him, and, similarly, we will know that the Heaven which should have been ours but was lost was never very far from us when we were on earth.

At present, you have experienced only the desire of it. Nothing you have ever witnessed has been anything more than an abstraction of Heaven - a thought or emotion that could connect you to the Spirit inside you. Even if you are a non-believer, you will know exactly what I am talking about; for this starved organism is calling you out of your earthly self. It is not like the feelings a man might have for his earthly beloved - you cannot try to keep it, you cannot try to treasure the feeling; for as soon as you try, it will be gone. Remember, the thing I am talking about is not an experience; it is a brief hint of the relationship between yourself and God.

Just as a city cannot be seen in its entirety unless viewed from above, the earthly desires which are most beneficial to us can only really be known when we know God. And here is another one of those paradoxes in Christianity; the freedom of questioning must continue to grow within the mind, but those who do not know what it is that they are questioning, will be those who plan their lives around transient moments, thus impeding the growth. There is something stifling about the idea of finality, because there is nothing more soul-destroying than being in a state of stagnancy and inertia. And I'm afraid, abstract intelligence will never be enough. For those who intellectually abstract their emotions for the pleasurable purposes of self-denial have really overlooked the true delights of the revelations that follow.

This is a little part of what Christ meant when He said that we must become like children; the instruction is twofold. Firstly we should be reliant on God in the same way a child relies on a parent, and secondly, we should enquire just as children enquire about the world they live in. Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3) - for they are the ones who have best co-ordinated the reliance and the enquiry.

That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. Romans 10:9-10

Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part Two - Talking Oneself Out Of Heaven

2009-12-13T04:37:00.000-08:00

One of the feelings I’ve come across - a feeling which has been explored frequently, is the conviction of a man who says he rejects the Heavenly proposition because the thought of loved ones being in the bad place is too shocking a proposition to contemplate. To this I can only respond with the following: how on earth are we to know what another person’s relationship with God is like deep down? Consider yourself for a second, and then consider the person you think knows you best of all (call that person A). Now consider your own self-knowledge, your awareness of your real self and see how comparably meagre A’s knowledge of you really is. Your most personal and secretive thoughts, your inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, your proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams – who really knows the real you? Nobody but yourself and, of course God, who knows you infinitely better than you know yourself.

If there is on thing that is perfectly clear when contemplating God, it is that one must consider these things only in relation to how this truth affects the self, for you cannot possibly hope to know the truth of another person’s situation. An indignant man could reject God all the way because he can’t bear to think of spending eternity away from his loved ones, and yet never realise that they were going to be with God all along. In other words, he could stay away from the party He was invited to only to find that all those he cares about had accepted their invitations, but not in way that he could realise. The truth is, God's relationship with man (even those who we presume were unbelievers) is, I think, far more alive than our own imagination permits us to recognise. We all know that spark of hope that fires up in us the moment we think we’re onto some deep truth about ourselves and our own destiny – those fleeting moments that suggest this is only the prelude to a much more exciting eternal story, and that maybe, just maybe, there is part for us to play. And like I said, God is not some inert monument or static object out there – He is a personality (albeit a complex one) and if one wants to know Him and have revelation, He must be seen as He desires to be seen –and naturally that view of Him must be in accordance with our own personal journey and our own “..most personal and secretive thoughts, inner emotional layers that just cannot be conveyed into words, proprietary fears, ambitions, desires, insecurities, hopes and dreams” – not anybody else’s. You can only work out God in relation to your proximate distance from Him – there is no other way, for you have no real clue about what exactly (stress EXACTLY) is going on in someone’s else’s mind, and should not dismiss contemplation on these grounds.

Heaven And Hell Revisited: Part One - The Real Truth Explored

2009-12-13T04:28:00.000-08:00

The first two columns I ever published on my page on Network Norwich and Norfolk were about Heaven and Hell, and although my views haven’t changed very much, where they have altered slightly is more in the direction of a better hell than is so often perceived. Of course, I might be wrong, but this is the only way I reconcile it with an all-loving supremely benevolent God – the God we see in Jesus Christ. Couple that with the fact that those who preach the worst kinds of hell are mostly those with the most hellish personality and I can quite happily stick with my view. Moreover I think history clearly shows that the idea of this eternal torment with literal pain and flame-fuelled suffering occurred when pagan religions became mixed into Christian cultures, and clearly draining this swamp has proved pretty difficult, particularly when so many power hungry control freaks try to keep it in for their own horrible personal gain.

But clearly, this is why Christ was so against religion, and His warnings so prescient, because God is love, and it is through a RELATIONSHIP with Him that this love blesses and develops, and it is through RELIGION that this blessing is retarded and disfigured. God is love, He is not the God of man's religion, the scriptures are very clear in speaking about all the apostasy of religion, because religion is modeled after man's disfigured perception of God used for their own ways, whereas relationship is modeled after God’s own heart for His people – those who have seen God in Christ have seen the real nature of the Father, not as some megalomaniac tyrant, but as a God of supreme love and grace – a God who would become what we are so that we could become like Christ.

I think hell, that is, the real reality of hell, will have nothing to do with flames and torture (that’s just a silly interpretation) the real pain of hell will be, I presume, rather like human heartbreak but on the grandest scale of all – a place absent of God, where one has chosen to live away from Him – a state of privation; a place where the true and real absence of God is fully realised, and where a person's creaturely position - that of being created to know God and to enjoy heavenly bliss - is made known. When it comes to fear of hell, I abhor all this scare-talk. I suppose the only thing I could say that would constitute a justification for some kind of warning would be that if God didn’t make it known what awesome potential we have with Him we would have no urgency to come to Him and perhaps even no tangible reason to think about our eternal destination. We do not have a docile Sky-Uncle who one can lock away under the stairs when the Christmas party starts, rather we have a supremely powerful Father God who has great things for us should we choose to accept them.

And presumably, the torment of Hell can only be quantified as a comparison to the glory of Heaven, just as the feeling of not being in love is only felt in its fullness when the absence of that love is most tangible. Only when the heart is broken does the absence of love become unbearable, and I presume the torment of hell will be of that kind.

Although the Bible clearly intimates that Hell will be an awful place, clearly only a foolish Christian would on the one hand think the God he worships is all-loving (as seen in the person of Jesus) and then go on to contradict himself by saying that such a God could subject finite humans to eternal torture. I’m amazed that so few Christians can see the contradiction here, particularly as so many atheists can see it quite clearly.

My view of what hell is like is the only way I believe the two can be reconciled; that is, how a God full of grace can send any of us to an eternal place that is wholly disconnected from Himself. Some ascetic Christians might claim that the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) belies my claim, but I do not think that it does. Firstly, while there are several messages of edification in the parable, a description of Hell is not one of them. In this parable, the NIV translation 'Hell' is a little misleading - 'Hades' is more accurate. That the Rich Man's fate was a fixity of torment, we cannot doubt. But I strongly suspect that this is not the same description of the Hell that men and women will experience after mankind's final judgement, for in this situation, the Rich Man's despair was still, in one sense, a despair which involves the process of forward thinking (V.27). What the parable is saying is that those versed in OT scripture observing God’s activity throughout history leading towards Jesus should have enough to understand how to live in a manner worthy of God, and that those who didn’t act this way (including in this case the rich man who didn’t even know how to treat Lazarus, his fellow human) wouldn’t know God’s truth even if they saw the resurrection.

Look at God’s people from Exodus onwards – the amount of times He performed miracles to rescue them or help them in battle, yet how quickly they forgot about Him and hardened their hearts. The didactic lesson isn’t so much about snapping one’s fingers and hoping to see a miracle, it is how our own hearts are in relation to God, and whether we are humble. This, as we all know, is played out in earthly terms too – for we all know that the biggest hell on earth for us occurs when we’ve behaved contrary to what we know is true or good or decent or charitable or loving, or when we see others behaving that way – that is the closest thing to hell on earth that we perceive, so it’s little wonder that God seems so unclear to those who can’t face this or who have been led astray by horrible men and women.

What’s worse, there are some Christians who seem to take pride in the fact that those who reject God must face up to it with punishment, they quickly become indignant, and I have a suspicion that it is often because they like to think in the back of their minds that those who reject God on earth are fully deserving of their destiny, but needless to say, I hate this kind of viewpoint. Knowing as I do a God of supreme love and grace (that obviously far far far outweighs our own), I freely suspect that the lost are, in one sense, thriving outcasts, somehow content in their own existence; that their eternal fixity will be an adapted condition, just as an incarcerated criminal is able to make some sort of life for himself on the inside while still lamenting the loss of his freedom on the outside - or perhaps even better, in the case of many, just as a man who is consigned to his hospital bed for a lengthy duration adapts to his surroundings yet still longs for his good health and freedom.

In fact, I do not mean that the spiritually damned may not wish to come out of Hell, in the blurry, nebulous fashion wherein a jealous man 'desires' to be self-secure or an uncaring man desires to be more concerned about his fellow human - but once the world has ended they surely do not desire any form of escape from the position they have chosen for themselves. In that sense, despite being shut out from God, they will, I think, have found a way in which they are able to accept their eternal position with some degree of comfort. They enjoy forever the eternal experiences of being the creature that they themselves had chosen to be while still on earth. But just as those who know Christ will become free in His presence, those who rejected Him will remain self-yoked, forever on the outside of paradise.

One thing I ought to say, there are many people who demand that all this unfair, that in fact, God could wipe everybody's slate clean at the end - that He could have created a situation where all of us have the chance of a fresh beginning. But to this I can only remind you that He has done so already. The moment He carried His cross and died for us was the moment that all this happened. The second chance is here with us already. And others who know about it have the opportunity to have a fresh start - a new beginning where Christ’s spirit comes to live inside them.

St Paul says that we will only be judged on what we know, not that which is unknown to us. There are many people who will live on earth and never hear or read one word about Christ, and the God we see in Christ will not condemn them because of that. But any who have heard the name Christ, know that their sins are wiped out, and therefore know that a second chance is already in their grasp. In that sense, those who object to hell usually look past their own personal obligation to accept the glorious thing which Christ did for them. A corporate objection is not going to be enough to wipe the slate clean, for if our Lord created Heaven in order that we might share in His glory, there must, I presume, also be an eternal place for those who have rejected Him – but I do not think God SENDS anyone to the bad place - I believe those who are there will have freely chosen to be there (see 1 Corinthians 15:22 in Christ ALL will be made alive if they so wish – see also the parable of the Wedding Banquet – all are invited but those that do not make it are the ones that choose to stay away).

No Shame In Repenting

2009-12-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

I was interested to read these words from the very talented polymath Stephen Fry:

"In Genesis, Humanity is in some senses literally finding its feet. God has just made us (essentially as decoration, as we would introduce petunias to a bare patch of garden) and pushed us into Eden; without very much knowledge of our capability. Being so introduced to this new and confusing world, Humans are given very little in the way of direction, other than "Don't eat that fruit over there". I call this direction, but this is misleading, because no sooner are we told not to eat certain types of fruit a snake wanders up and goes "It's cool guys, you can eat the fruit. It's super delicious". Being given such conflicting advice, we err on the side of the adventurous - and of course we eat the fruit. Turns out, not only was it super-delicious, but it gave us knowledge of good and evil, so it was a good thing then.

God, however, has other ideas. Being apparently otherwise occupied whilst all this was going on, he comes back to find us quivering and gleaming in the new sun, now complete with fig-leaf underwear. Long story short: God flips out, original sin is born, child-bearing becomes unbearable, working becomes hard work. Because of this misdemeanour at the beginning of time, every human being is created sick and commanded to be well. For this tiny and meaningless slight, every human being is meant to feel shame. I remember being told this story in Sunday school, and the optimistic God-fearing volunteer teacher would almost scowl at us at this point, willing us to feel guilt for these actions. We are humans, we are dirty, we are unworthy to have the Grace of God thrust upon us.

Well I'm sorry optimistic God-fearing volunteer teacher, but I couldn't then and I won't now. I refuse to be servile to the point of emancipation, and I refuse to feel any mote of emotion for any action I hadn't the slightest bearing on, nor could have. This, then, is original sin - for what we are all ostensibly to go to hell for? I will not take responsibility for what two strangers did six-thousand years ago, no matter how apparently bad it may be. If I am to share responsibility as a human, am I meant to feel shame for the atrocities of Hitler, or the Khmer Rouge? Of course not, judgement can only be given on actions that require some form of participation from the person, be it action or inaction. If neither is possible, then we do not judge. Consider five people dying in a car crash, and then a man who lived five hundred miles away being taken to prison for it. Would we consider this action a correct one? Of course not, it's morally condemnable to punish someone for something they could not have prevented; so why are we to believe that a Benevolent and Omniscient God would take joy in it?"

I think Stephen Fry has got this a little wrong – it is not as though God wants us to walk around feeling thoroughly ashamed of ourselves; the reality is that we are all fallen, in a state of ‘sin’, but that in Christ we have the answer for our salvation.

In actual fact, there is no reason why one’s state of being in sin should have very much bearing on their personalities if they are unaware of their position in relation to God. It is not for the Christian to tell another man to confess his sins to God, for he may have private reasons why he does not want to. But it would be good for himself if he could be aware of his wrongs and seek to put them right, even in his one private thoughts – for there is little worse than a wretched man who remains unaware of what a wretched so and so he is.

Of course, the world is full of people who go about their business being largely unaware of the state of being in sin, yet of course they are able to distill moral truths from their own consciences – but that does not of course mean that observing a world full of sinful people we would expect to see everyone distressed and miserable. So unlike Stephen Fry, I can see a way in which we can be mindful of our sin (and of course our ‘sins’) and yet know that the answer to our situation hardly warrants a world full of misery and pessimism.

For those who can’t observe the distinction I am making, imagine looking in at all the people on the Titanic a few minutes before it hit the iceberg. If you could see the whole picture, you would know that it won’t be very long before the ship crashes and sinks – but you would not look on all the passengers while they were still unaware of this and expect to see them all miserable and pessimistic. Yes they are heading for a nasty surprise, but they are not really sure of their true position in relation to the whole picture, and I suppose that is what much of humanity is like in relation to their own sin.

Their perceived future is only the tip of a much more significant iceberg, which will be seen in full on judgment day when Christ returns. And whether a man finds himself rescued or drowning depends on his own decisions and his own clarity regarding his state of sin.

Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:38

Repent , then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus. Acts 3:19-20

Where Is The Supernatural?

2009-11-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

I'm often bemused when atheists ask where is the evidence for the supernatural, as though it is some arcane substance mixed in with the material effects of the cosmos. The truth, I think, is that we ARE in the supernatural realm - the whole thing is supernatural. Given that there are only two things, God, and creation ex nihilo, there is no room for a third element to be imputed at will and fooled around with promiscuously. Everything that exists is either God or the created order (which includes everything; matter, mass, energy, light, angels, demons, and ghosts.....the whole lot). I would say that when anyone tries to locate the supernatural in daily life, it seems to me that they misunderstand the real quintessence of creation; their mistake is rather like a fish scouring the ocean all its life looking for that thing called 'water'.

God and Proof: Part IV

2009-11-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

I will introduce you to what I consider to be the ‘four cardinal rules of logic’; for we cannot show precisely why those who demand proofs quarantine themselves from good rationale until we look at the four different ways that we construct logic. Once we have looked at the four cardinal rules of logic I can then show why the demands for proof are not only ill-conceived but solecisms against robust enquiry.

Godel’s theorem warns us that the axiomatic method of making logical deductions from given assumptions cannot in general provide a system which is both provably complete and consistent. There will always be truth that lies beyond human scope; truth that cannot be reached from a finite collection of axioms. This also means that no door in the labyrinthe palace of empiricism opens directly onto the ‘Absolute’ - there are hints of the infinite in mathematics (Cantor’s Absolute), but any complete unity must include itself, thus we hit the self-referencing problem of Russell’s paradox. But what we do know from our cognitive set-up is that we are created with a vacancy in our hearts that Christ is waiting to fill. Moreover, that our ‘minds’ can attune themselves into the ‘nature’ of the Absolute gives us the biggest hint that we are truly meant to be here, and that this life is but a shadow of a deeper and more astounding reality.

In the past on Network Norwich and Norfolk we have had two periodic contributors, both called Mike (Mike H and Mike 2), both of which claim to be unbelievers, and both of which set up their framework for objection by continually insisting that there is no proof for God, and until there is, they will remain unfalteringly sceptical. It is here that we must cover something very important – the world isn’t quite like that, and the two Mikes might end up in a perpetual cycle of disappointment because they made demands that were not strictly realistic. The truth of the matter is this; there will always be statements which are true but that one cannot prove are true.

Take the following statement (call it ‘S’)..

S - “Mike cannot prove this statement to be true”

Suppose Mike were to arrive at the conclusion that S is true - this means that the contents of S will have been falsified, because Mike will have just done so. But if S is falsified, S cannot be true. Thus if Mike answers ‘true’ to S, he will have arrived at a false conclusion, contradicting its infallibility. Hence Mike cannot answer ‘true’. That means that S is true; but in arriving at that conclusion we have demonstrated that Mike cannot arrive at that conclusion. This means we know something to be true that cannot be demonstrated to be true.

Now consider something a little different. Let us say that we meet a man for five minutes that we have never met before and will never meet again. Our job is to find out if he can speak English. If he remains silent throughout the five minutes and he disappears never to be seen again, we cannot prove that he cannot speak English but we have no evidence that he can. If, however, he were to say the words ‘My name is Robert and I can speak English’ we would, of course, have the deductive proof that he can speak English, as the English words themselves would be contained within the statement.

This is different from the first example, for the first example is about the axiomatic method of logical proof itself and is not a property of the statements one is trying to prove or disprove. One can always make the truth of a statement that is unprovable in a given axiom system ITSELF an axiom of some extended system. But then there will always be other statements in the self same system that are unprovable.

Now we come to something else that is key - in the first example there is no new predicate that can be added to S (without changes to its intrinsic structure) that can alter the fact that S cannot be shown to be true. Now very obviously that is not the case with the second example - if we were told that Robert was an English lecturer and that there was footage of one of his lectures, we could show that ‘Robert can speak English’ is a fact without having to prove it in those five minutes. Moreover, unless we start flirting with nonsense there are a number of things we could find out about Robert that improve the probability that he could speak English.

S1 - Robert was born and raised in Ghana
S2 - Robert was born and raised in Mozambique

It is very clear which out of S1 ad S2 is more likely to be suffixed with the statement ‘Robert speaks English’ - S1 because Ghana is a former British colony whereas Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony. Of course S1 and S2 might only improve the probability very slightly, but this is what we do in all walks of life. Knowing, as most mathematicians do, that there are some statements of logic that cannot be proved to be true (one can also read about the distinctions between realism and antirealism) we use our perceptive and investigative toolkit to reason our way through these things. If for example Robert lives and works in this country it is much more likely that he speaks English than if he lives and works in Ecuador.

One must also bear in mind that there are many axioms or regularities that only become that way by our adding something to facts. Look at this set of six numbers (all single integers used are under the value of six)

234232 - 344232 - 121232 - 523334 - 552555 - 122311

A Turing machine can show which number sets are computable given a set of rules. If the rule is, say, take the first number of the first set and add 1 (giving us 3), do the same to the second number in the second set (giving us 5), the third in the third (giving us 2) , and so on, we find that with that rule in place we have the number 352462. Unlike the “Mike cannot prove this statement to be true” example, this time we have created a rule or procedure and shown that logical deductions can be reached without messing around with the axioms in logic. For example, given this rule, I know that if I have the answer 352462 then none of the sets will contain the exact sequence 352462.

We are beginning to see why demands for proof of God’s existence are knottier than the sceptics realise, and that greater mental prudence is needed before such demands are made. We certainly do not completely abandon a mechanical procedure for investigating mathematics because of Godel’s theorem and Turing’s halting system. Those unprovables are rare elements of mathematics and can be sifted out allowing us to continue on a logical trajectory, and that is precisely what we do with our enquiries about God; we do not churlishly shout for evidence or make unreasonable empirical demands, we must take the sagacious approach and realise that sense-making is about joining the dots, not demanding the whole picture in front of our eyes. How silly it is to stridently decree ‘Unless there is proof of God’s existence, I’m going to carrying on believing that He doesn’t exist’.

Now we reach the last of the cardinal rules – demonstrated in Chaitin’s theorem. Having shown you with Turing that there are mathematical problems that cannot be proved by any fixed heuristic procedures, we now move on to how we know if what we know (or contend) is right or whether further compressibility is required.

It also ought to be remembered that one can compress something too much into logical nonentity - the biggest example being with self-referencing paradoxes such as ‘This statement is false’ - here we have something that is too compressed to be logical, because if it’s true then it’s false and if it’s false then it’s true. It is nonsensical because there is no subject or predicate pointer extended to ‘false’. The statement “3 + 5 = 9 is false” is true because ‘false’ has mathematical integer subjects extended to it - it has the ideal compressibility for deductive analysis. Now in Chaitin’s theorem, a computer is given this command - “Search for a string of digits that can only be generated by a program longer than this one”. Now obviously if the search succeeds the search program itself will have generated the digit string. But then the digit string cannot be “one that can only be generated by a program longer than this”. This obviously leads to the fact that the search must fail, even if it is an infinite search. The search was intended to find a digit string that needed a generating program at least as big as the search program, which is to say that any shorter program has to be ruled out. But as the search fails, we cannot be sure there is no shorter program, as we do not know whether a given digit string can be encoded in a program shorter than the one we happen to have discovered.

Now here’s the rub - a random sequence is one that cannot be algorithmically compressed - but as I have just shown, you cannot know whether or not a shorter program exists for generating that sequence. The cardinal point in these algorithmic programs is that you never know if you’ve unturned every stone in trying to shorten the description. Therefore you cannot prove that a sequence is random, although you could disprove it by actually finding a compression. If you are paying close attention you will see that this is congruous with the Robert speaking English model - here you have much greater access to empirical evidence (certainly less complex than algorithmic mathematics) but you can find the shortest compression (so to speak) by hearing Robert speaking English.

The practical conclusion here is twofold. In the first place, one can prove mathematically that almost all digit strings are random, but one cannot know precisely which. But more essentially for everyday purposes, taking the cosmos as an algorithmic whole, events or activities that appear random may not be random at all - even things like the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. The cardinal point here is not that something like, say, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle probably belongs to uniform laws of which we as yet know nothing. The cardinal point is that we might never be able to know - in fact, Chaitin’s theorem ensures that we can never ‘prove’ that quantum mechanical measurement outcomes are random.

Falsification and verification:
Some philosophers, most notably Karl Popper, contended that because science aims at making universally quantified statements (for example, all Xs are Y) the principal issue was not whether such statements are verifiable but whether they are falsifiable. In other words, according to Popper falsifiability has greater meaningfulness than verifiability.

However, as a theist one must remember that the boundaries must be reconstituted to make way for infinite complexity within a God-created reality, and that given our present (finite) limitations, we must also remind ourselves of what we covered in the foregoing sections – that within this theory there will be some things that are axiomatically true yet non-falsifiable (non-contextually - in the Absolute sense) and that the efficacy of a contention is not predicated on its falsifiability. What Popper meant by falsifiability should not be misunderstood as an accusation levelled at reason itself, merely to construct parameters and reconstitute boundaries within the edifice of reasoning and rationale. Furthermore it is difficult, often impossible, to apply falsifiability to psychological, historical, sociological, and emotional aspects of life, as they are rarely amenable to falsifiability and are individual and unique events or facts. Our perceptive qualities and, more importantly, our ability to assess the validity of a theory based upon its appearance in front of our perceptive tools is what we can use.

The greater a theory’s potential for falsification the better and more enduring it can be. We see so often that a theory that could easily be falsified but never is, often endures in a most robust way. For example, the theory 'all plants have DNA' is not as good as the theory 'all life has DNA' because the set of objects 'plants' is a subset of 'life' and hence the 'life' theory has more scope for falsification - it is a more general and robust theory. The Popperian demarcation of ‘probability’ and ‘degree of corroboration’ is reasonable providing the burden of verifiability isn’t too great. The statement ‘It is going to rain somewhere in the world in the next hundred years’ has a much less burden of verifiability than the statement ‘It is going to rain on Buckingham Palace at 1:23pm on Thursday 23 April 2010’. In the sense of our assumptions about the Divinely created order, logical improbability, of course, does not take its place in the predicative inner-context of the sentence alone (as is the case with the second prediction about the rain on Buckingham Palace), for it will have to be admitted that any thoughts of falsification and non-verification add no weight to an argument so grand in scope; it envelops principles higher than those in the purview of ‘logical probability’ and ‘logical improbability’, although with the concept of Aseity one can make a good assessment based on a structural underwritten logical framework, particularly if it exposes the infinite regress problem.

The falsification principle falls down with the realisation that no individual theory is anything other than a constituent part of a ‘chain of validity’ – a chain that we apprehend bit by bit, by the aforementioned method of joining the ontological dots, and thus can even be positively affirmed in a partially-isolated context yet at the same time amount to a discordant cell on one link of the ‘chain of validity’. In other words falsifying something (singularly) might not upset the link in the chain. This a slight reworking of the ‘verisimilitude’ of a theory - that is, its appearance of truth; this is the extent to which a theory corresponds to the totality of reality, rather than just those in the immediate proximity (I would say that any providential being with a priori complexity would need to furnish us with the perceptive qualities necessary for such an understanding, if we are to have a relationship with Him).

Having already shown that there are many tenets to existence that are not amenable to the test/refute procedural analysis and are therefore not disposable in the sense that atheists wish for, I think the Popperian caricature is relevant in their thinking; for the general rule of sense-making must readily include the theistic ventures which Christians say are an essential part of our epistemic framework. This is compounded by the fact that the vast non-testable domains covered by our best efforts for analysis, along with the limitations of human perceptual resources, only allow a very sparse interrelational sampling of life. Formalisation of our best theoretics are in the strictest sense simulations unless they and conflated with experience to provide us with ideas of validity, otherwise the trail would stop dead. In the truest Popperian sense, and given the stakes, I would say that many atheists treat the question of God’s existence far too frivolously and unconscientiously as they attempt to decide which out of theism and atheism makes the more easily refutable claims. All they end up doing is forming an allegiance with the side that makes the best impression on their emotions, but as any who have witnessed the cults ensnaring people at their most vulnerable will tell you, this is a potentially dangerous allegiance.

God and Proof: Part III

2009-11-01T14:40:00.000-08:00

Do Christians deal with Proofs?
I have already said that as Christians we do not deal with proofs – certainly not in the traditional sense – we do not prove God like we prove a mathematical theorem. However, I once wrote a couple of articles (here and here) which speak of a proof by experience; that is, an a priori certainty that one can distil from his or her own relationship with God. Although they are vitally important as one seeks to affirm the really of God through one’s one experience they are tangential to the tenet of ‘proofs’ that we are discussing here.

As a reminder about what we are dealing with here let me make an allusion to what I said last week; one must realise that God is an infinitely complex personality, so the best we can do is sample Him. The Father has revealed Himself to us in Christ Jesus, and although the Bible is the word of God – one can learn lots more about God both from creation around us, and from having a relationship with Him.

The sceptics who say there is absolutely no evidence for God are not living in the same world in which I am living – to me the world doesn’t just hint of God’s existence, it shouts it at the top of its voice. The question is this: given that in the eyes of the sceptic, awareness even of the most elementary facts of God into which all other blessings should percolate is accessible only by a form of contemplative reasoning towards which they have little desire to gravitate, and for which they often lack the inclination, capacity for discernment and quite often the emotional resources, how might they be expected to realise their need for a change of thinking?.

There is a great story often recounted about Elizabeth Anscombe saying to the brilliant Wittgenstein, that she can understand why people thought that the sun revolves around the earth. Wittgenstein asks, “Why?” - Anscombe says, “Well, it looks that way.” - To which Wittgenstein responds, “And how would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?” In other words, the way something looks from a certain standpoint is, from the individual’s perspective, a direct proprietary fact about the person's perception of that 'something'. ‘How it appears from a certain place’ is, nonetheless, also of interest in its own right and belongs to what is sometimes called ‘the reality of the appearance’. In Biblical times the ancient Hebrews referred to it as 'language by appearance' – so, for example, if something 'filled the earth' it did not necessarily, in the literal sense, fill it entirely.

The Christian view of proof
We are now ready to ask the question: Do Christians deal with proofs? In the strictest sense, no we do not. Those that ask for empirical proof seem to overlook the fact that, in one sense, Christians do not believe what they believe because of empirical proof, although empiricism does play a part in the totality of a Christian’s psychological make-up. The Bible talks of certainty, that we can be certain of Christ in us, therefore even a posteriori empirical evidence of some kind would not be as powerful as the relationship with God from within a priori selfhood. What I mean is this; a man can have a much better idea of God by how He works inside him than he can by what he sees in the external world – God’s method of communication is at its strongest when Jesus Christ works inside our minds in ways that show it is Him and not us. The Bible, in fact, confirms that the man that knows God but hasn’t seen empirical evidence has much greater certainty (impregnable certainty) than the man that has been shown a miracle but has no relationship (see Matthew 11:21-24). Absolute Certainty, as the book of Galatians implies, can only occur a priori.

Let us say that a man observes an event which by ordinary definitions of empirical investigation could be construed consensually as a miracle. Let’s say that it happens to some of the biggest sceptics in the public domain - would that be the certainty they are looking for? Perhaps in the sense of satisfying evidential demands, but even the event or, more accurately, their observing the event has connotations which cannot help but diminish slightly the content of certainty. Their observation of this miracle would be a proprietary event occurring personally in first-person selfhood, and as long as they continue to analyse the evidence or certainty, and as long as they attempt to convey it linguistically, they will be in the strictest sense letting go of the a priori certainty, for in the strictest sense a priori certainties involve no adulteration whatsoever - an absence of cognitive or descriptive embellishment. All external realities must be perceived by the self before one can have assessment and knowledge of them, therefore the business of looking for proof or certainty via perception of events in the external world is never as compelling as the knowledge of God that one can acquire from His working inside us. This, I think, is why Jesus placed so much emphasis on our asking God for revelation in ways that can occur inside one’s own personhood directly from God – for He knew that what we perceived externally would never be as compelling evidence as what we receive internally.

So when we talk of certainty, that is, being certain that God exists and that we can have a relationship with Him, the certainty that one searches for is the certainty that need not involve any a posteriori facts. Of course, the fantastic evidence for Christianity being true is overwhelming and a likely catalyst in one’s searching for a relationship with Him, but when folk talk foolishly of ‘no evidence for God’ or they overlook this greater reality of the situation, they are guilty of emphatic errors of thinking. I understand that it is hard to reconcile for those who are sceptical, but the Socratic paradox about a man lacking the courage to venture out upon so perilous a voyage of discovery without God behind him is not far from the truth. That is to say, if the event of man knowing God has to come from God first he must trust that the casting of his net will be fruitful because it is not just his arm doing the casting, but God’s too.

There is another thing to consider regarding proof, and in particular, hasty demands for proof - one might be quite startled to learn that there are mathematical conditions under which the opposite situation is true - there are statements that are true if and only if they are unprovable. Most people have heard of Godel’s incompleteness theorem; well further on there is a sort of meta-theorem in that its truth depends crucially on an object-meta-level distinction, which I will explain briefly. Godel considered a simple formal system containing the basic axioms of the arithmetic of whole numbers (stress, whole numbers). He assigned each object-level statement a unique code number, and then he assigned a code number to each proof of an object-level statement. What this shows is that by means of this encoding, object-level statements about numbers can also be understood as expressing meta-level statements about the system, or about individual object-level statements.

Given the foregoing, a question might well be asked: Doesn’t this mean that an extension of this system can be used to show that if in most cases there are formal systems incapable of proving some truths there must be a self-same system which insists that no formal system can prove all truths? Yes, in principle that is true, but it is a bankrupt enterprise trying to impute this onto the non-mathematical subjects in place, in the ‘God or no God’ debate. I said that in mathematical terms this object-level statement about whole numbers says of itself, via the numerical coding, that it is not provable. If the axioms are all true and the system is consistent, it is possible to conclude that such statements (that are true if and only if they are unprovable) are neither provable nor disprovable from the axioms - that it is independent of them. Therefore I would be cautious about using the word ‘proof’ when using inductive techniques to consider whether or not God exists, particularly bearing in mind that the warrant for the use of the inductive principle of inference is the inductive principle itself.

Of course, as atheism shows, understanding the self does not come without distractions and, again as atheism has shown, some of the distractions are strong enough to turn a man into trouble - nature’s digressions and distractions lead folk away from the truth. There is a better chance of a man realising this if he remembers that Christ does not just claim to have access to the truth, or that He is able to lead a man to the truth, in fact, He claims to BE the truth. That is why, if Christ is the truth, it is impossible to hold on to satisfaction, fulfilment, blessedness, and wisdom without Him – He is the vine, we are the branches connected to Him. By definition every act that recedes from the Truth must be arbitrary or pernicious, for you can be sure that all the very best things on earth will be from Him. Even the caprice that lurks in the hearts of those that follow false religions is entirely knowable the moment one steps outside looking for the truth. The only other gods that really exist are the false gods that have been created by the self, usually as a result of some arbitrary thinking process or pattern; that is, the falsity attaches itself to human reasoning like a leech to skin and confounds the reasoning process so that even clear thinking can be transposed into some muddled perceptivity, all the time not affecting the proprietary convictions and supposed certainty felt from within.

The sensible man knows how important the truth is, but equally he knows how dangerous falsehood is, and that if Christ is the Truth, falsehood must underpin every instance of badness that we see in the world. If one searches for the Truth then things like moral goodness, wisdom, good judgement, character development, greater vision, tangible life goals and awareness of reality in a wider and more glorious framework will follow.

I have said from day one, and I will continue to say it - we do not deal with proofs on here, not in the way that atheists are demanding. Of course some Christians maintain that no proof is a good thing because it helps define for them what ‘faith’ really is all about, but I do not think this view is always helpful, particularly for the atheists who frequently misunderstand what faith really is. ‘Proof’ of complex activity such as, say, macroevolution just isn’t humanly possible (although that is no reason to disbelieve it - we have overwhelming ‘evidence’ that macro-evolutionary theory is true) - all we ever do is perceive samples emanating from the subject in question, samples that provide us with palpable indication of the efficacy of that which is being sampled. ‘Proof’ is an impossible demand to fulfill - either for evolution or for God (but there is great ‘evidence’ for both). Given that no set of finite samples is as big as the source object; the best we can get is ‘evidence’, and from evidence we can use our rationale to make logical inferences. It is by doing this that we shall get closer to the truth about the awesome majesty of God and we will see Him in places that we could not have previously anticipated. And here is the most important point:

No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known. John 1:18

God has made Himself known, but not by some emphatic exhibition for all to see, but through the person of Jesus Christ - that is how He chose to make Himself known. Any that have seen and understood who He really is would be able to recognise the Father in Him (John 14:7). God is not a static object like a huge table or chair or planet, He is a tri-aspectual personality (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and can only ever be sampled bit by bit. We sample Him by getting to know His personality through the express revelation of Christ and the Holy Spirit that lives in us. It ought to be quite clear really, after all, in human terms we only ever sample personalities bit by bit; the quintessence of relationships is that they are cumulative, expressive, gradual, productive, and their true qualities all come about by development and growth. When sceptics ask to see God as some evidential ‘whole’ their demand is as silly as a man saying to another man’s wife – ‘show me everything she is, the whole person in totality’ or saying to his friend ‘you say there is a society out there, go and get it and bring it to me so I can see it’.

God and Proof: Part II

2009-11-01T14:38:00.001-08:00

Who has the burden of proof, the theists or the atheists?
The first thing I ought to say on this matter is that the term ‘burden of proof’ should really be supplanted for ‘burden of evidence’, for as Bertrand Russell showed with his celestial teapot illustration, it is impossible to prove a negative existential claim (that is, a claim that a thing does not exist), and it is impossible on these terms to prove the positive to that negative. As Christians we do not offer proof that God exists or that Christ was God incarnate – we supply evidence and testimony which assist people in building their epistemological framework. Unless the theist and atheist admit this from the outset there will probably be a stalemate. Before we get on to the theistic situation, let me recount a famous story from the Hellenistic period:

There was a Sophist philosopher Protagoras who agreed to instruct Euathlus in rhetoric so the latter could practice law. Euathlus in turn agreed to pay Protagoras his fee only after winning his first case. However, Euathlus chose not to practice law upon completing his training, and so Protagoras sued him for his fee. Protagoras maintained that he should be paid no matter what; he argued that if he won the case he should be paid by order of the court; while if he lost he should be paid by the terms of his agreement with Euathlus. Euathlus, who had learned something from his study with Protagoras, maintained that he should not pay no matter what; he argued that if he won the case he should not pay by order of the court; while if he lost he should not pay by the terms of his agreement with Protagoras

This describes a stalemate much like the stalemate often reached when theists and atheists argue about the burden of proof and with whom it should lay. Just like the case above, burdens of proof are often dilemmas that invariably lead to counter-dilemmas – one must define exactly what the belief is before any talk of burden of proof – after all, most of the atheists I have met do not disbelieve in the actual God of the Bible, they disbelieve in a God that they have created or imagined in their own heads. Let’s have a look at how the situation with Protagoras and Euathlus created a stalemate and how it is synonymous with position of the theist and atheist. Protagoras had a rather disingenuous scheme in bringing the suit in the first place, but the situation really boils down to Euathlus wanting to show off his mental dexterity. Had Euathlus hired another lawyer he could have escaped the paradoxical situation in which he found himself; if he won with a lawyer, his victory would be non-paradoxical, and if he lost with a lawyer, he would have not yet won his first case. But even if he appeared in a stalemate, one might suggest that equity favours Protagoras, and that if he’d have sued in a second case he would have won.

Yet equally a judge could put paid to this by ordering a reconstitution of the contractual boundaries, or he could decree that this case will not count as Euathlus's first case. Without bringing in policies or principles of this kind, in fact, it is difficult to see how the case could be decided, since the only positive argument favouring both Protagoras and Euathlus relies on a contradiction in the alternative position. Here we see that if the two arguments are truly equal in weight, the one with the burden of proof must find himself in the more precarious position out of the two (in this case this works against the plaintiff Protagoras). The only way this can be resolved outside of the demarcation lines is if one of the two men relents and offers the hand of grace to the other, or if the contract is positively reformed in equity by an external agent.

It is often thought that because the theists are claiming a positive (that there is a God) to the atheists’ negative (that there is no God) this means that the burden lies with the theists, but I have never been happy with this conclusion, and it is for this reason. However far back we search philosophically in trying to ascertain why we exist at all we will not find a good epistemological trail by simply going back further and further expecting the answer to lie in something elementally simple. In naturalistic terms, whatever we ascribe to the meaning of existence we will have to omit the thing itself – nature cannot contain her own explanation unless she is self-evident, and that is impossible. In other words, how the universe came about cannot be explained by the laws of nature – however far back you go looking for an explanation, the last initial explanation still needs explaining if one is a naturalist. However far back you go, you still need an initial explanation of causation – otherwise you are faced with an infinite regress and thus the burden is too great to reconcile with the truth.

As I said, if we keep going back further we eventually reach a point where we have to admit that existence cannot contain its own explanation - there must be something that is self-evident, and such a Being would be infinitely complex. The Christian has a positive answer to this dilemma; he contends that the source of all human activity, that is, the power behind human decision making, is from a Being that exists outside of nature itself. The Christian cannot reconcile the whole complex nexus of choice, free will, moral conscience, emotions and, most importantly, existence itself with an impersonal and uncaring nature – much less settle for an infinite regress as his best explanation; for he knows that in order to avoid the infinite regress problem he must contend that there is something of a priori infinite complexity that bootstraps existence - a fact that is self-evident, a fact that has no cause - a fact that contains its own explanation. The Christian has found the explanation that contradicts the logical hiatus that sullies the infinite regress problem.

Given the foregoing analysis – a logical truth that I cannot get beyond – the burden lies with the atheist not the theist, for the atheist has the infinite regress problem to surmount before he can discharge any burden.

What I have described thus far is the cardinal difficulty for the atheist – a difficulty which removes the manacles from the theist. But in truth this is an area of analysis that is scarcely reached, after all, most sceptics really want to bemoan a lack of evidence for any supernatural God, so now the discussion between the theist and atheist becomes a bit like a case in a court of law (as per above). In an ordinary court of law case, the burden of proof (as much as proof can ever be obtained) is on the prosecution counsel; the prosecuting lawyer must convince the jury that the defendant is guilty – hence the term ‘innocent until proven guilty’. If the prosecution counsel fails to present enough convincing evidence, the jury will ordinarily acquit the defendant.

With Christian apologetics and other forms of justification for the existence of God, we are like the defendant being cross-examined by a prosecuting atheism – unless we can be shown to be guilty of fallacy we should be acquitted. There will, however, be times when this scenario is not played out – the atheist will probably not think it worth his while trying to prosecute and he will probably insist that as he has been given no reason to believe, he can be justified with his atheism. In effect, what he’s saying is "I don't believe in God because no one has provided me with any credible evidence that God exists". And this, of course, is a duty we must take up in convincing the atheist that God is ready to reveal Himself to all who ask.

Here in admitting this we have uncovered something very important when it comes to burdens of evidence. The atheist when he adopts a rather arbitrary form of atheism actually impels the theist to shoulder the burden. In other words, the one who says there is probably no God impels the theist to say why he thinks there is a God, but the one who says there is almost certainly no God stigmatises himself with the burden of demonstrating why he is so convinced. So we see that burdens of evidence depend on the claim being made, but they are also conditioned by the strength of the convictions of those debating the issue in the first place.

I have shown why the burden of proof or burden of evidence is epistemologically intractable, but I have also shown why, if it lays anywhere first off, it lays with the atheist – he must explain what if not God can contain its own explanation. But as we know, when it comes to this problem the atheists choose to disregard the problem and choose to live in denial; roughly, “If I don’t think about it, it no longer remains a problem”. Instead they hope to justify their position by claiming that if such an awesome God exists He would ‘prove His existence’, or that there would at least be better evidence of His existence, and this is what I will tackle in next week’s article.

God and Proof: Part I

2009-11-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

Why isn’t God more obvious? The easy answer is ‘He is obvious’. The vast amounts of people who can testify to miraculous salvation (as well as the many other miracles experienced) and the vast historical and archaeological evidence that the Bible is the word of God belie the claim that evidence is scarce. All atheists really mean when they say there has been no evidence for the existence of God is that they do not really wish to look for any. They say ‘Show me the evidence now!’ knowing full well that their demand is impossible, and they walk away smugly, feeling vindicated – but the truth, as we shall see, is that they are behaving injudiciously and setting themselves up for an ill-conceived position.

Obviously an experience of God can only ever be a sample, just as my experience of centripetal acceleration or, much better, gravity, is only a sample of a far greater complex reality, most of which is background activity behind the scenes of this earthly drama. Therefore it is foolish to expect that such a complex entity as God can be experienced by anyone demanding evidence; for even Christians who have a relationship with Him are only experiencing parts of His fullness – a relationship through which He reveals more and more of Himself as we progress on our journey. Thus one must realise that God is an infinitely complex personality and is not necessarily going to deign Himself to everyday human test/refute sampling; nor will proof of His existence necessarily arrive on the doorstep with bells hanging and trumpets playing. What one must remember is that no set of finite moments in which we capture and comprehend a little part of Him are as big as the source object in the Divine realm, and therefore it is unreasonable to demand ‘proof’ in this way; the best we can get is ‘evidence’ of God working in nature and in people’s lives, and from that evidence we can use our rationale to make logical inferences, which will hopefully lead to our receiving revelation and beginning a relationship with Christ.

Having established that an intuitive knowledge of God is evidence relevant to the existence and will of God, and that such ‘evidence’ is a mere sample of God’s work in creation not of God Himself, it seems perfectly obvious that God cannot be presented to a person empirically, like a precious stone or an ancient fossil or a newly discovered mountain. Therefore we must look at the matter of receiving evidence for Him in a different way, by focusing on what God requires of an individual, not what the individual thinks they require of God. This adds weight to the silliness of the insistence that God shows us the evidence at the behest of the stridently assertive atheist, for Christians have said from the beginning that that is not how God does His business with creation, therefore how foolish of them to reject Christianity based not on its true realities but on their own faulty perception of the thing they are assessing. If it seems that God’s presence is too unfamiliar or unnoticeable, it may well be true, as Kierkegaard one remarked, that it His way of giving us the freedom to be ourselves:

Omnipotence which can lay its hand so heavily upon the world can also make its touch so light that the creature receives independence.

When assessing the nature of a personal, interested, willing and loving God, and His apparent absence or intractability, one must bear in mind that God has given us an opportunity for salvation; in fact, it is easier than that which the atheist has demanded – God doesn’t need to show Himself with trumpets playing and bells ringing, appearing in front of us like a genie popping out of a lamp, He will do much more than that – if we ask He will transform our whole personhood; that is the primary evidence beyond all other kinds of evidence, for then He really will be unmistakable, as millions of Christians all over the world will testify.

The Christian says God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ, yet the atheists deny this, claiming it to be false. So what we have here is a chasm - roughly as follows:

A) The Christian claims that God’s call to ‘seek and you will find’ is a promise fully kept by Christ.

B) The atheist says that a personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious.

Believing as I do that A is correct, it seems that the perceived lack of obviousness contained in B involves a misunderstanding, and I think I can show that this is the case by telling you why my own experience of God indicates to me that this is a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding on a par with ‘What is the point of asking God to do things in prayer when He could have done them anyway if He’d wanted to?’

Let me offer you what I consider to be a better way of viewing the situation. Let us say that God is represented by ‘3’, and let us say that man is represented by ‘1’ - we can then call a man that becomes a Christian ‘2’, that is, not God but not a normal man either - what St Paul refers to in Galatians as a ‘new creation’ – a man who has found God. Please note, this is nothing to do with any Christian/non-Christian superiority, I am simply talking about a position in relation to knowing God.

So for the purposes here we have:

3 = God
2 = Christian
1= Non-Christian

Now those that claim A is true might refer to position 2 as an inner revelatory experience, yet this is rightly problematic for those in position 1 because in one sense every conscious experience classifies as the mind’s experience of the self and its surroundings, from sense data, through to perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. In actual fact, a broad and deep gamut of experience is actually implicated as the agent of any sensation, revelation or new perceptual position or conviction. The intuitive moment of epiphany from 1 to 2 is vogue in many Christian cultures that place greater emphasis on right-brain intuition over left-brain analyticity (particularly the Pentecostal, Evangelical and Charismatic styles of worship), but that depiction probably denies those in 1 from properly apprehending the everyday trail of experience that makes up sense data, perception, intuition, and to the deeper cogitations in life. Please do not misunderstand me, I do not wish to gainsay this approach or cast aspersions over such experiences, for in fact my own style of worship is underlain by a strong affiliation with a very charismatic style of praise for our Lord, so one must accept that the point at which one receives the Holy Spirit can send one’s trail of experience onto a rather ebullient new pathway – eureka moments and sudden bursts of ‘hallelujah’ do happen.

But here we find something very important - the atheist who ‘expects’ such an epiphany or who second guesses precisely how the moment of knowing God might occur could well be weakening the bridge over which he will at some point wish he could cross; that is, he might wait around for the hallelujah moment and always stay waiting because he fails to realise that experience and daily samplings in life play a key part in realising who God is and how He is speaking to us. To make this point clearer with an illustration, let’s call this “Human Potentiality” (HP) – how might God be speaking to the atheist through his own HP?

Bearing 1, 2 and 3 in mind, we must remember that if we were created by God, we are, of course dependent beings that would be nothing without His input in the first place. In other words, without 3, there would be no 2 and 1. Now if we have a quantum of human potentiality (emotional intelligence) represented by HP then clearly for humans HP > 1. God clearly has the choice of granting us a grace impartation whereby knowledge and awareness of the Divine occurs, but it is very obvious that this depends on our abilities for recognition, our willingness to make the transition from 1 > 2 and our readiness in accepting the changes in HP that accompany the blessing that accompanies the 1 to 2 transition.

Now if the command is for those in 1 to seek (S) in the way that God intends then clearly this has a value S3 in Divine terms and S1 in human terms. Thus it seems pretty clear that 1 has a value too low for Divine satisfaction but S1 has a value too high for many that are stuck in a 1 comfort zone – in other words the process of getting to grips with their own desires for salvation is for some a pathway too dark and hazy to contemplate, keeping them rooted in 1. But once one casts aside his own fears and doubts and hands them over to God, even by an outrageous and (what would be to him) a quite irrational dispensation and indulgence of blind trust, the human mind can construct a positive ingress into S1 - a sort of gravitation towards progression by willingness to do all that is asked of Him - by innovating a series of precursors that can be modified according to his truest and most lucid experiences. What this really amounts to is facing up to the fact that it is rather silly rejecting or dismissing the demands of God based on one’s own terms – much more sensible to embrace the situation on His terms – after all, if Christianity is the truth we are only likely to realise it if we accept what Christ has to say.

This really amounts to a person saying with all honesty - ‘God, if you are up there, I really want to know you’. Thus the instruction to seek will be a rewarding and fruitful instruction if one progresses towards greater and more expansive growth with the desire to make the changes that are necessary. That is why the final step is often the hardest, and why I have known many people that were able to believe that Christianity is the truth, yet still take incommensurably longer going forward from 1.9 to 2. What you have to remember is that upon seeking, when God says ‘you will find’ He means with respect to S1 not with respect to 1. It is no use bemoaning the fact that a supposedly personal, interested, willing and loving God would be more obvious, because we are bound to leave a residue of unfulfilment and dissatisfaction when we approach God on our terms and not His – because we fail to consider what is wrong in our own hearts and what it is that is stopping a genuine search.

And here we have identified the central problem with demanding evidence with bells ringing - it won’t work. Many have asked God to reveal Himself with 1 rather than S1 – they have enquired on the wrong terms – not His but their own. If the truth be known each man that does this is a recusant in supplicatory clothing - in other words, in his heart he might kid himself that he tried his best to make a genuine search, but in his head he knows that he never really offered himself up to God.

But the great news is that for those that do search with all their hearts and without artifice, their prayer will be answered. God will only reveal Himself when He knows we’re ready, and when we say that it is only possible when He shows Himself, we mean with respect to HP - that is, it is incremental growth where the increments are consistent with S1 not 1. Thus, failure to meet the standards should be seen in terms of the absence of contour stability given that by itself, if one always holds back, HP = 1. Bearing in mind that even those that have no initial belief in Him whatsoever can still pray for wisdom and clarity, my guess is that most atheists who ask on their own terms instead of on God’s find it difficult to get a determinable purchase on S1 - and in seeing the failure connotations as insuperable they lower their standards so they can be catered for in ‘earthly’ experiences instead of acceding to God’s desire that we look to God for the gift of S1. And with a complex personality like God, presumably the anthropomorphisms are applicable in as far as God has traits that closely parallel our concept of personality (love, grace, justice, intelligence, thought, consciousness, anger, yes - even anger) and can thus be useful in our coming to Him on His terms instead of our own. But the key to receiving His revelation has always been in searching out the terms on which Christ Himself says we will ‘find’ – for only then will those demanding evidence with bells on it be in a strong position to search successfully.

The Neurological Problem

2009-09-15T05:15:00.001-07:00

As science has progressed we have come to know more about the nervous system than ever before. There is still a lot more we do not yet understand about the brain (and perhaps never will), but now we can zoom in at a neurological level and observe brain states and how they relate to certain beliefs, behaviours, and our inherent psychological make-up. Religious belief is often assessed by atheists not as something rational but as an unfortunate product of neurological activity over which we have no control. They say that certain people are simply unfortunate enough to be susceptible to it, depending on their brain states and neurogenic disposition.

My first objection would be this: if the atheists are right then every brain must be susceptible to states of this kind, be they religious or some other cognitive state. Why, then, single out faith-based belief as one of the cerebral aberrations? Apart from a bias against faith-based belief (presumably on their terms an inevitable product of neurological activity over which they have no control) there is nothing about brain states that tells them axiomatically whether faith-based beliefs are based on truth or whether they are cerebral anomalies that a person happens to be unfortunate enough to be affected by*. If the functioning brain is a coordinating centre of informational cells functioning entirely because of the universe’s vast stellar, chemical and biological history, the entire process from receiving sensory signals to cognitive configurations is all just nature playing out a realisation of the second law of thermodynamics. But if free will, rational thinking and neurological sense-making precepts entail scepticism about how reliable our minds really are, then the atheists are in the same sort of trouble that they claim the theists are in.

* Given that most people in the world believe in God or gods, and that most others claim a sense of the transcendent, I would say that they are not really ‘anomalous’ states at all.

It should be stated that in the strictest sense those who claim the agent is not wholly responsible for certain beliefs and feelings are not entirely wrong, and in many cases psychiatrists would concur. But when this claim is used against Christianity we see that it is problematic. If a man has a neurological problem and it conditions him to act in a certain way, one could say that good or bad actions are not actions for which their agents are responsible; the agents are passive not active - they are simply victims of a neurosis or inner-conflict. Their activity is determined by what goes on in their unconscious. Some would therefore contend that it is the neuroses that are responsible and not the agents.

There was a very well publicised case of a man who was in a loving relationship with his wife and children – this man was a good husband and a good father. However, after a few years, he started making s*xual moves towards his children, which quickly escalated into something even more serious. For their own safety his wife understandably left him and took the children with her, and her husband was left alone, hating himself for what he had done (he claimed such crimes were ‘abhorrent’). Later it was revealed that he had a tumour in his brain. After removal of this tumour, his p*edophilic instincts disappeared. He even managed to convince his wife to reunite the family and give their relationship another try. Then, after another couple of years of the family being together again his p*edophilic behaviour came back. He went for a brain scan and found that the tumour had reappeared. This story, and stories like it, have caused some controversy across the world as some argue that people don't make choices, their brains do. Whether this man could and should have had the moral wherewithal to resist his temptations has been a big debating point between atheists and Christians ever since (the former very often say ‘no’, the latter mostly ‘yes’), but given that in some cases but the brain can be distorted into making choices which the conscious mind, the person, otherwise finds ‘abhorrent’, the issue of brain states, and how reliable our beliefs are, is certainly a talking point.

So, as Christians who claim to have a relationship with the risen Christ, how can we be sure that ‘knowing God’ is not simply our brains being the catalyst for religious delusion? If personality is mediated by the brain and things like tumors in the brain, stroke damage, carbon monoxide poisoning, neurodegenerative diseases et al show that any conceivable aspect of our personality requires structures in the brain; memory (hippocampus), desire (hypothalamus), decision making (orbitofrontal cortex), emotions (the limbic system), temperament (amygdala), isn’t there is a good prima face case that the same is true of religious belief (usually ascribed to things like temporal lobe epilepsy, left/right hemisphere synthetic activity, or some other neuronal aberration)?

In actual fact, the atheists also contend that further weight can be added to their case by the fact that additional stimulant, treatment, or synthetic neuronal activity can bring about strange phenomenal effects, not least the inducement of religious beliefs and epiphantic instances that can be caused by our interfering with the various parts of the brain. The upshot is the implication behind the atheists’ statement seems to be that religious fervour/conviction/revelation is amenable to neuronal analysis and that chemical activity in both hemispheres of the brain can explain why we ascribe and wrongly elicit supernaturalism in a non-supernatural existence, and thus in their eyes rejection of the supernatural on these grounds is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

The Christian, to the contrary, claims that each first person ontology can be transformed in such a way that selfhood will experience a miracle - a transmutation, without any of the foregoing interference; for we claim that when this happens one can know it is unmistakably God at work in us. Naturally, being a Christian, I agree with this; my own view on neuronal manipulation is that those who have experienced the risen Christ experience something that is not synonymous with everyday neurological caricatures of science - a ‘thief on the cross’ type shift in awareness - the point at which Christ becomes a transforming part of the cognisance. Activities like the ones mentioned above (interfering with people brains) constitute a theoretical attempt at making sense of perception through a very unnatural process. They are therefore part of a more general empiricism but in a much more circumscribed framework than metaphysics (although, in my view, science and metaphysics blend together).
Compound

Although human behaviour has a ‘mind-collective’ interpretative component (a commonality of ‘mind’ where we all know what it is like to be a mind), our perception of God is inextricably linked to our perception of the world and as such is more loosely tied to uncompounded protocols than comparatively tractable neurogenic observations. Therefore, these examples of miraculous salvation exhibit a much greater ability to discharge apparent contra evidence because they are not readily amenable to simple test/refute procedural analysis - they are far more internalized - a central part of what defines mind in the first place. The vastly complex reality of a God created world and our perceptual overload in trying to apprehend it makes it less amenable to assessing such a reality with elementary observational and experimental protocols. This is probably why, when it comes to salvation, Jesus focuses less on the external realities of God’s work and more on our own cognitive dispositions – after all, His assured method for our coming to know Him (‘knock and the door will be opened to you’) involves simply the mind in which such a search is occurring, and God Himself, who chooses the right time for revelation based on numerous interconnecting factors, and on how such revelation will interrelate with the rest of His grand plan for creation. Once the mind of the supplicating man has received Christ as his Lord and Saviour his identify will be defined by his relationship with the living God, and he will see that his initial faith will be reward with the ‘certainty’ that the writer of Hebrews spoke about – that a certainty that only his fellow Christians could apprehend.

This is the certainty that Jesus Christ offers to all those that claim a relationship with Him is simply an unfortunate neurological state from which people need to be cured, but naturally the only method that can remove such doubt is if the doubter asks for revelation himself. That is the covenant God hasmade with man, and, for the sceptics, knowledge of God oneself is the only way that one can remove these doubts. Moreover, the fact that the many miracles experienced are congruent with a particular point in time at which God was asked to them perform (the same is true of healings) shows that the miraculous is not an arbitrary set of occurrences, but very much consonant with the temporal perceptions of those believing in God and the miraculous (an example of which is when I saw a man pray that the Holy Spirit would heal a blind lady, and straight away she was given her sight).

Although I said a few moments ago that examples of miraculous salvation are not readily amenable to simple test/refute procedural analysis and that they exhibit a greater ability to discharge apparent contra evidence, I do not mean that Divine impartations are unempirical - rather that their a priori complexity constitutes an ontology which makes them less amenable to examination, as elemental experimental protocols are bound up with a vastly complex psychological nexus, which have a bearing in the formation of our own perception. As I said a moment ago, I certainly think with science and metaphysics one blends into the other, but at the level of analysis that we are describing it is very probably impalpable. Moreover, when observing any man that seems to alter his perception of supernaturalism when his brain is manipulated by external interference (such as in surgery or neuroscientific testing), you would have to consider a great many factors inextricably linked to his state of mind - personality, education, religious background, personal traits, insecurities, allegiances, human propensity to identify with social groups, etc - all of which feed into the evidence in a more general process than institutionalised science often countenances.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am all for scientific endeavour and improved neurological understanding through advanced science, but I think with the cases mentioned and other similar cases, scientists attempting to assemble observational protocols in test/refute circumstances must be aware that Divine activity would not necessarily be a quantity that would encapsulate the notion of the organised complexity we find in organisms.

Let’s assume for a second that there is Divine activity and ordinary human physiology - certainly their dialectic will be a conflated dialectic. I do agree that the engines of neuronal activity create useful work throughout the various scientific gradients, but I see no conflict or contradiction between any of the foregoing and Christianity. If you had a Ford Escort in your driveway and woke up to find a Rolls Royce you would naturally assume someone has switched cars in the night. But if you were standing in front of your Ford Escort and it suddenly morphed into a Rolls Royce you would think it was a miracle.

When one grapples with the subject of Divine activity, you will find that the conceptual complexity cannot be trivialised by comparison with even a well thought out atheism, much less an arbitrary agnostic comfort zone. God is a complex personality forever interacting with those that know Him; He has a psychological, sociological and historical lineage which gives rise to continual cognitive sustenance and revelation. I think atheists are all too aware of the weaknesses that penetrate when their shaky convictions are exposed to a little fire. And if they brush aside any residual doubt as inconsequential, then they are claiming de facto certainty; that is, they are axiomatically conferring upon the self a degree of certainty which is anathema to the self’s own inherent make-up. . And therein lies the problem for atheists - the temptation to attack the theist with their own weapon of certainty should, if they are not quarantined from cognitive reality, leave greater residues of doubt in the mind of the attacker. In my experiences, their confidence and stridency ends up being a lipstick on the ugly face of self-doubt, and to the discerning eye, gives the impression that they are merely covering up for incompetence.

Logic and Christianity

2009-07-03T05:54:00.000-07:00

A recent thread on Network Norwich & Norfolk has been created here in which some of the contributors have been wrestling with the science and Christianity problem (a problem only in the sense that they make it one, I hasten to add). I am going to submit a few weekly articles on Christianity and science soon (mostly biological science and evolutionary theory) so I won’t comment on that particular issue here – but the welcome return of non-believers Mike H and Mike 2 has seen the re-emergence of the evidence/proof of God’s existence debate.As I have said from day one, we do not deal with proofs on here. One must realise that God is an infinitely complex personality, so the best we can do is sample Him. The Father has revealed Himself to us in Christ Jesus, and although the Bible is the word of God – one can learn lots more about God both from creation around us, and from having a relationship with Him. I think what the two Mikes (and any sceptics for that matter) should ask themselves is whether the world they see around them does in fact scream out that God exists, and how they might be expected to realise this.There’s a great story often recounted about Elizabeth Anscombe saying to the brilliant Wittgenstein, that she can “understand why people thought that the sun revolves around the earth.” Wittgenstein asks, “why?” - Anscombe says, “Well, it looks that way.” - to which Wittgenstein responds, “and how would it look if the earth revolved around the sun?”In other words, the way something looks from a certain standpoint is, from the individual’s perspective, a direct proprietary fact about the person's perception of that 'something'. ‘How it appears from a certain place’ is, nonetheless, also of interest in its own right and belongs to what is sometimes called ‘the reality of the appearance’. In Biblical times the ancient Hebrews referred to it as 'language by appearance' – so, for example, if something 'filled the earth' it did not necessarily, in the literal sense, fill it entirely.Using my ‘four principle rules of logic’ I can show why the proof arguments are wrong. Godel’s theorem warns us that the axiomatic method of making logical deductions from given assumptions cannot in general provide a system which is both provably complete and consistent. There will always be truth that lies beyond, that cannot be reached from a finite collection of axioms. This also means that no door in the labyrinthe palace of empiricism opens directly onto the ‘Absolute’ - there are hints of the infinite in mathematics (Cantor’s Absolute), but any complete unity must include itself, thus we hit the self-referencing problem of Russell’s paradox. But the way ‘minds’ can attune themselves into the nature of the Absolute gives us the biggest hint that we are truly meant to be here, and that this life is but a shadow of a deeper and more astounding reality.Moreover, there will always be statements which are true but that one cannot prove are true. Take the following statement (call it ‘S’)..S - “Mike cannot prove this statement to be true”Suppose Mike were to arrive at the conclusion that S is true - this means that the contents of S will have been falsified, because Mike will have just done it. But if S is falsified, S cannot be true. Thus if Mike answers ‘true’ to S, he will have arrived at a false conclusion, contradicting its infallibility. Hence Mike cannot answer ‘true’. That means that S is true; but in arriving at that conclusion we have demonstrated that Mike cannot arrive at that conclusion. This means we know something to be true that can’t be demonstrated to be true. Now consider something a little different. Let us say that we meet a man for five minutes that we have never met before and will never meet again. Our job is to find out if he can speak English. If he remains silent throughout the five minutes and he disappears never to be seen again, we cannot prove that he cannot speak English but we have no evidence that he can. If, however, he were to say the words ‘My name is Robert and I can speak English’ we would, of course, have the deductive proof that he can speak English, as the English words themselves would be contained within the statement. This is different from the first example, for the first example is about the axiomatic method of logical proof itself and is not a property of the statements one is trying to prove or disprove. One can always make the truth of a statement that is unprovable in a given axiom system ITSELF an axiom of some extended system. But then there will always be others statements in the self same system that are unprovable. Now we come to something else that is key - in the first example there is no new predicate that can be added to S (without changes to its intrinsic structure) that can alter the fact that S cannot be shown to be true. Now very obviously with the second example that is not the case - if we were told that Robert was an English lecturer and that there was footage of one of his lectures, we could show that ‘Robert can speak English’ is a fact without having to prove it in those five minutes. Moreover, unless we start flirting with nonsense there are a number of things we could find out about Robert that improve the probability that he could speak English.S1 - Robert was born and raised in GhanaS2 - Robert was born and raised in MozambiqueIt is very clear which out of S1 ad S2 is more likely to be suffixed with the statement ‘Robert speaks English’ - S1 because Ghana is a former British colony whereas Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony. Of course S1 and S2 might only improve the probability very slightly, but this is what we do in all walks of life. Knowing, as most mathematicians do, that there are some statements of logic that cannot be proved to be true (also read about the distinctions between realism and antirealism) we use our perceptive and investigative toolkit to reason our way through these things. If Robert lives and works in this country it is much more likely that he speaks English than if he lives and works in Ecuador. Do we completely abandon a mechanical procedure for investigating mathematics because of Godel’s theorem and Turing’s halting system? Of course not!! Those unprovables are rare elements of mathematics and can be sifted out allowing us to continue on a logical trajectory. That’s just one example of how silly it is to stridently decree ‘Unless there is proof of God’s existence, I’m going to carrying on believing that He doesn’t exist’.

One must also bear in mind that there are many axioms or regularities that only become that way by our adding something to facts. Look at this set of six numbers (all single integers used are under the value of six) 234232 - 344232 - 121232 - 523334 - 552555 - 122311. A Turing machine can show which number sets are computable given a set of rules. If the rule is, say, take the first number of the first set and add 1 (giving us 3), do the same to the second number in the second set (giving us 5), the third in the third (giving us 2) , and so on, we find that with that rule in place we have the number 352462. Unlike the “Mike cannot prove this statement to be true” example, this time we have created a rule or procedure and shown that logical deductions can be reached without messing around with the axioms in logic. For example, given this rule, I know that if I have the answer 352462 then none of the sets will contain the exact sequence 352462. Last one….Chaitin’s theorem. Having shown you with Turing that there are mathematical problems that cannot be proved by any fixed heuristic procedures, we now move on to how we know if what we know (or contend) is right or whether further compressibility is required. You also ought to remember that one can compress something too much into logical nonentity - the biggest example being with self-referencing paradoxes such as ‘This statement false’ - here we have something that is too compressed to be logical, because if it’s true then it’s false and if it’s false then it’s true. It is nonsensical because there is no subject or predicate pointer extended to ‘false’. The statement “3 + 5 = 9 is false” is true because ‘false’ has mathematical integer subjects extended to it - it has the ideal compressibility for deductive analysis. Now in Chaitin’s theorem, a computer is given this command - “Search for a string of digits that can only be generated by a program longer than this one”. Now obviously if the search succeeds the search program itself will have generated the digit string. But then the digit string cannot be “one that can only be generated by a program longer than this”. This obviously leads to the fact that the search must fail, even if it is an infinite search. The search was intended to find a digit string that needed a generating program at least as big as the search program, which is to say that any shorter program has to be ruled out. But as the search fails, we cannot be sure there is no shorter program, as we do not know whether a given digit string can be encoded in a program shorter than the one we happen to have discovered. Now here’s the rub - a random sequence is one that cannot be algorithmically compressed - but as I have just shown, you cannot know whether or not a shorter program exists for generating that sequence. The cardinal point in these algorithmic programs is that you never know if you’ve unturned every stone in trying to shorten the description. Therefore you cannot prove that a sequence is random, although you could disprove it by actually finding a compression. If you are paying close attention you will see that this is isomorphic with the Robert speaking English model - here you have much greater access to empirical evidence (certainly less complex than algorithmic mathematics) but you can find the shortest compression (so to speak) by hearing him speaking English. The practical conclusion here is twofold. In the first place, one can prove mathematically that almost all digit strings are random, but one cannot know precisely which. But more essentially for everyday purposes, taking the cosmos as an algorithmic whole, events or activities that appear random may not be random at all - even things like the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. The cardinal point here is not that something like, say, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle might belong to uniform laws of which we as yet know nothing, because I am sure that that is the case. The cardinal point is that we might never be able to know - in fact, Chaitin’s theorem ensures that we can never PROVE that quantum mechanical measurement outcomes are random.

But how does that work for the theist - after all, how does God load the quantum dice to have a random yet uniform world as well as having the difficulty of human minds that can affect things in the cosmos with God kindled free will? A stochastic system can produce the ‘random yet uniform’ cosmos, but what about free-thinking minds? Think about it like this; regarding an electron in quantum mechanics a position measurement is indeterministic because it is free to choose among a limited range of possibilities. On the other hand the measuring itself is contingent on whether one is measuring ‘position’ or ‘momentum’ - that is to say, the nature of the alternatives is fixed by an external agent - the one doing the measuring. To make this clearer, imagine a game in which you have to guess which whole number I am thinking of between 1 and 250 - you only have 20 questions or guesses and I can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. imagine your questions begin as follows - Q1 - Is it bigger than 125? A - Yes; Q2 - Is it even?A YesQ3 - Is it divisible by 7?A -Yes Q4 - Is it 232?A - Yes. Now here’s the trick; let us say that I hadn’t chosen any number in advance - I had agreed to answer purely at random subject to consistency only with the previous questions. The answer was not determined in advance, but it was not arbitrary either - its nature was decided particularly by the questions asked but partly by chance (depending on what was being asked, and when the final guess was offered and the final answer given). After question 1, my answer was limited to 126-250, after the second question my answer was limited to all even numbers between 126 and 250, after the third question the range was lessened to those divisible by seven, thus preventing me from answering, say, 233 but giving me several other options. If the fifth question to which I randomly answered ‘yes’ was ‘Is it greater than 230?’ - then the only remaining number that would fit the five ‘yes’ criteria would be 238. In the same way, the reality of quantum mechanics is decided in part by the question - whether one is asking about the position of the electron or its momentum and in part by the uncertain nature of the values obtained for these quantities. The Divine analogue here is that God determines certain uniform facts about creation and what other options are available in any given system, but a variety of subsystems in which randomness plays a part too in choosing among several alternatives. The freedom of the individuals’ choices is much the same, it is freedom within a set of ordinances that are statistically part of a uniform plan - an end result that has already been predetermined by God outside of creation. Just because God already knows which way the coin will land before I throw it, it doesn’t alter the fact that for a free-thinking mind like my own the result is an unpredictable 50-50. So, regarding this subject, these are the four basic principles of logical analysis - and one must be mindful of the above when contemplating the big question of whether God exists or not.

The Harmony Between Christianity and Science

2009-07-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

The harmony between Christianity and science progresses on the basis that when we discover new information about our world and our universe we embrace it and alter our perception of the cosmic blueprint to accord with fresh knowledge and innovation – a bit like completing a jigsaw piece by piece. It is when the opposite happens that problems begin; that is, when Christians think they already know the blueprint and reject new innovations and fresh knowledge, willfully keeping themselves fixed in the dark ages. Equally many atheists take a very myopic view of what the Christian faith is, and resort to straw man caricatures as they attempt to justify their unbelief. It is much to hope that this false dichotomy will be exposed with greater ubiquity than is presently the case.

Coteries by James Knight - October 2002

2009-05-06T06:31:00.000-07:00

I must start with a confession; I sometimes see social circles and peer groups as lots of small bubbles in one piece of foam, with myself in and amongst every small bubble but not really belonging in any of them. I do not mean 'belonging' as one might feel he does not belong in the sense of being excluded. No what I mean (and what this essay is about) is the small circles that we all see and know about but never talk about. These circles, or coteries, have very practical consequences when it comes to our overall outlook on life, and, furthermore, a good understanding of them can help us in a multitude of ways. A failure to understand them properly can, and often does, lead to a stumbling block regarding a person's positive outlook and, at its worst, their spiritual salvation as well. I work in the public sector - the quagmire that is Local Government; and these past few years I have been noticing something rather interesting. There exists a hierarchical system, a system which divides people in a very unsettling way, and it is not the kind of hierarchy that you perhaps think I mean. Of course, this is not the first time I have experienced such a system - the first place I ever noticed this was in school. There exists in this Local Government two different systems or hierarchies. The first one is printed in official papers, such as LGA minutes, which anyone can read. It also remains (more or less) a constant. A manager scale 1 is always superior to a manager scale 2, and a manager scale 2 to an admin officer and so on. But the other kind is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even an officially organised society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never officially and explicitly accepted by anyone. You discover progressively, in almost inexpressible ways, that it exists and that its numbers fluctuate on a regular basis. Some have been in it for as long as they can remember, and some step in and out of it like a ballroom dancer.There are things which correspond to 'words from the inside', but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular colloquialism, the abbreviating of names, an allusive manner of dialogue, are how you will recognise them. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same team or department after a sustained period away you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.Such an arrangement is not necessarily ineffective, because the 'central coterie' may, in fact, be more productive than the usual vehicles would have been. In fact, there are many instances where the usual vehicles are so ineffective that the only way anything can get done is if you are 'in the know'. Such an arrangement, however, is dishonest, because all who must interact with, and within, the organisation are deceived. You can, for example, play by the rules, follow established protocol, and still be left out in the wilderness by someone who knows the person who knows the right person. We see this all the time in the job vacancies page at County Hall. Every job vacancy tells the reader that, no matter how polished his curriculum vitae, the surest way to gain employment is through what is euphemistically called 'networking'. In other words, it is not what you know, but who you have known. This is called your 'previous experience', but it is easy to see that experience is of little use in most situations, as almost all jobs require basic training of the job remit itself. They are simply telling you what kind of personality they want. Therefore, in an extremely elliptical sense, the 'authority' of one candidate's credentials can be superseded by the 'power' of another candidate's surreptitious affiliation with the central coterie. Perhaps one of the reasons that the need for peer-recognition is so strong is that it is indoctrinated; it is moulded into the sector in order that the employer may be able to climb the greasy pole that much quicker. The very fact that we isolate children into stratified groups during their schooling may be at least one contributor to the phenomena, but of course, there are many other contributory factors. For in my experiences, children taught in strict faith schools, or children taken out of society by their parents, are not afflicted by the 'need to belong' to the same degree as the great majority of children in comprehensive schools, and that can be a bad thing. So we can see, it is quite easy to pinpoint the foundational problem, and it is equally easy to see where and why coteries occur. Wealthier parents monopolise higher-performing state or private schools, leaving local schools over-burdened with more difficult pupils. Governments struggle to make state schools more attractive, and consequently their education policy lacks vision because they are designed to deliver the choice and diversity supposedly desired by the middle classes, not the more equal life chances needed by the working classes. In comprehensive schools, and in fact, in most walks of life, a two-tier system will usually favour the middle class. And naturally, top schools attract brighter children; whereas the poorer classes are left to their own devices in "sink" comprehensive schools. Everyone who thinks about coteries will surely realise that coteries in comprehensive schools will be very different to coteries in public schools.Within these coteries to which I have been referring, there are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been moved out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be determined, in elementary cases, by mere calculation: it may be called 'You, Me, Bridget and Derek'. When it is very assured and comparatively established in membership it calls itself 'We'. When it has to be augmented to meet a particular Norfolk County Council demand that is made upon it, it calls itself 'All the shrewd and judicious people in the building'. From outside, if you have felt cold emotions towards it, you call it 'Those in the know' or 'them' or 'So-and-so and his enclave' or 'The circle'. But If you are an aspirant member you probably attach no name to it. To discuss it with others who are outside the circle would compound your place outside of the circle too. The other outsiders would make you feel that you were outside yourself. And of course, it would be very unwise to mention the circle to the people inside it, for there can be no such admission that such a circle exists.I hope by now you can recognise the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the same Local Government building that I am in, but you have certainly experienced the same thing in school. You have experienced a coterie. When you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your first year in secondary school, perhaps you discovered that within the coterie there was a coterie yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school coterie to which the peripheral coteries were only satellites. It is even probable that the central coterie was almost in touch with a teachers' ring. You were beginning, in fact, to drill through several layers of material. And now, wherever you are situated; University, The Private Sector, Burger King - I would certainly find the same system if I were to come down to where you are now - there would exist, several independent systems or concentric circles - present in most departments. And I can also assure you that in whatever hospital, leisure club, school, business, or constituency, you will find the coteries - they are the principal, tacit system of any place. This is why I often find night-clubs so intriguing. Of course, most people in night-clubs are intoxicated, so, with inhibitions being left in their place of residence, people can make a greater effort to penetrate circles to which they do not really belong. In the Waterfront it is particularly interesting because circles are so often conditioned by dress codes - the rock chicks, the punk gals, the Goth contingent. In Chicagos, the divide is between old people and young people. In other clubs around Norwich it varies more multitudinously.And now we must address the main danger of these circles or coteries. I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between childhood and old age, one of the most governing elements is the desire to be inside the main coterie and the fear of being precluded from it. But even those who think they have escaped such a weakness, are faced with a different problem. People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from insolence, or disdain, or megalomania, or narcissism, and who think their serenity is a supercession, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very perturbation of their desire to enter some quite different coterie which renders them impervious to most of the allurements of the exalted circles. An invitation to go to lunch from a canteen worker would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some chief officers' lunchtime gathering. But alas - it is not large meetings in halls, or smoked salmon sandwiches or even white wine with executives that he wants: it is the sacred little symposium, the chief officers standing together, the sense of the privileged positions, and the delicious knowledge that we - we six or seven chief officers - are the people who know; the people who matter; the people who can enforce changes; the people who can be heard.Often the desire conceals itself so well that we scarcely identify the benefits of fruition. Colleagues stridently assert that they have been called into certain types of 'Important Council Business' because they and two or three others are the only people left in the department who are really 'in the know'. But it is not quite true. Of course, it is a terribly insipid thing, when old Deirdre Fowler draws you aside and whispers, 'We've got to get you in on this one' or "Colin and I saw at once that you've got the requisite skills to be on this committee'. A terrible insipidity - ah, but how much more horrendous if you were left at your desk typing up spreadsheets. I imagine it is tiring doing spreadsheets, but much worse to be out of the circle altogether.Psychologists would point to latent weaknesses; that the whole thing is a subterfuge of a dormant impulse that was 'in you all along'. But perhaps the shoe is sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, to use a different example, in this prurient age, many a girl's body has been casually given to a man, less in obedience to her physical impulse than in obedience to the lure of the cultural zeitgeist. For of course, when promiscuity is seen as a 'cool thing', chastity is seen as very 'uncool'. They are ignorant of something that other people know. The same can be said of schoolboys and the desire to drink and smoke for the first time. Boys are more demanding than girls, and that is the principal reason why fewer schoolgirls smoke and drink at that age.I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of coteries is vastly injurious. Their existence is, to a large extent, inevitable. There must be executive meetings and confidential discussions: and it is not always a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that friends who work together should grow to like each other, and feel close to one another. And it is perhaps impossible that the chief officers and managers of any organisation should coincide with its overall functioning. If the shrewdest and most diligent people held the highest positions, it might coincide; since this is not often the case, that there must be people in high positions who are really ineffectual, or superfluous, or both, and people in lower positions who are more important than their company position would lead you to suppose. It is necessary; but the desire which draws us into coteries is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be detrimental.Let coteries be unavoidable and even a fairly innocuous feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in? I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be self-conscious. I must not assume that you have ever ostracised friends whom you really cared about in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more propitious, or those whose cachet was greater than your own. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from an outsider courting you because you belonged to a coterie that he or she wished to be in; whether you have talked to fellow members of the coterie in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might be full of admiration; whether the means whereby, in your inaugural days, you placated the coterie and exhibited much admiration yourself was wholly admirable. Has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to behave in a way which, in the cold light of day, you can look back with regret? You are not alone in doing this. This desire causes much dissatisfaction and discomfort. It is one of the factors which makes up the world as we know it - this whole domain of strife, rivalry, bewilderment, graft, frustration and distress. Unless you take giant strides to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the predominant motives of your life, from the first day on which you start your occupation until the day when you are too old for this desire to matter much. That will be the natural thing - the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of much effort. If you do nothing about it, if you move along with the breeze, you will in fact be a member of a coterie. I do not mean that you will necessarily be a successful one; what will be will be. But whether you languish outside coteries that you can never enter, or whether you steadfastly delight in being in a coterie, the result will be the same.I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of person. But you may, as yet, not be wholly convinced. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do. And the prediction I make is this. To the vast majority of you, the choice which could lead to contemptuousness will come, and when it does come, it will be quite dull. None will seem particularly bad - a drink, a cup of tea, disguised as triviality and stuck between two who are looking for your approval as they criticise someone else, from the mouth of a man or woman whom you have recently been getting to know quite well and whom you hope to know better still - but just at the moment when you are most fearful of appearing servile or naïve or uncooperative - the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the outsiders, the momentarily abstract people, the fools, the impressionable lovelies, would not for one second understand: something which even those who you assume think like you do would feel uncomfortable if they were in your shoes: but your new friend says this is something 'to which we are quite impervious' - you try not to blush with discomfort and ill-ease - but it is not something you endorse in any way, shape or form. And you will be drawn in. You are drawn in, not by any desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the stage door was so near to you, you could not bear to be thrust back again into the drama once again. Now it would be equally awful to see the other person's face - that well-disposed, delightfully sophisticated face - turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been auditioned for the coterie and told the part had gone to someone else. But you also know full well that had you got in, you would be drawn in further and further, next week it will be something a bit more audacious, and later still, something quite horrendous that goes against your own sensibilities. Of course, they will keep reminding you (not with words, but with facial expressions) that it is all done in the best spirit. It may be quite benign in a government building, but in the outer world it can lead to a scandal, to bankruptcy, to a custodial sentence. And here is where others should not be fooled, for it may also end in a peerage, a knighthood, or in great wealth - but you know, as they do, that they will still be reprehensible. That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the coterie is most proficient in making a person do things that they feel uncomfortable doing; things that they themselves disapprove of in others.My second reason is this. You are attempting to build sandcastles with a garden fork. It is the symbol not of one blemish, but of all blemishes. It is the very mark of a stubborn desire that it seeks what cannot really be attained. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as your thoughts are predominated by that desire you will never get what you want. As I said earlier, you are trying to drill through several materials: if you succeed there will be nothing but bits of material left. Until you subdue the fear of being on the outside, on the outside you will remain.This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of certain circles for some wholesome reason - if, say, you want to join a Sunday league football team because you really like football - then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself part of a competitive team on Sundays and you may really enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in a team known for its admiration, known for its appeal with the ladies, known because it is the 'team to be associated with', your pleasure, if you have no desire for football itself (only the desire to be part of a coterie), will be short lived. The coterie will never be as good once you are inside it. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its appeal, because you could only see the qualities it possessed from not being in it. You could only see the qualities it possessed because you felt that having them would aggrandise you in a way that, in truth, it never really could.This happens in all walks of life. Once the first novelty has worn off (if you joined for the wrong reasons), the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or competitiveness or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be 'in'. And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have become over-familiar (and custom does this), you will be looking for another coterie. The horizon will still be miles away. The old coterie will now be only the dreary background for your endeavour to enter the new one. Before I am misunderstood, I should make it clear that I am not saying it is bad to be involved in groups, nor that friendship is a negative thing. I am saying that both groups and friendships should be desired for the qualities of their constituent parts; they should not be desired to make any individual more exalted, for disappointment will follow.And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. The coterie we are discussing takes pleasure in the fact that those themselves, once they are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in often made it hard for you. Naturally, in any good group of people which holds together for a positive purpose, the exclusions could not be construed as deliberate. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others cannot do it. A football team limits its numbers because there is only a limited number of men of which a football squad can consist. But most coteries are different - they exist primarily for exclusion, not because there is no room for others. There would be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Preclusion is no accident; it is the essence. But you, aware of your own rectitude, do not wish to be associated with such a coterie. A team would take no pleasure in being top of the league if there were no teams below them, and equally, those who are 'in the know' would take no pleasure if there were not those who were 'on the outside'. Now this point may have slipped past many people, but when it comes to belonging somewhere; being in a group of some sort, Christianity is quite unique. It is unique because it takes no pleasure in seeing people outside of the circle - in fact, it fervently and passionately wishes that all people, even people who are not well liked, should enter the circle, become saved, and come to know the Creator of the universe.This is precisely why many people are so dissatisfied, because they are pursuing something that really has no ultimate end - to be in one, or several coteries. It is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that man has, and it is so inextricably linked to that other big stumbling block 'pride' that the two are always having mutual contact. The quest for the coterie will emasculate you unless you can conquer it. But if you conquer it, a surprising result will follow. If, say, in your daily hours you make compassion your end, you will presently find yourself inside the primary coterie for which compassion is its principle source. And the same goes for diligence, wit, intelligence, fortitude and many others. You will be inside the only coteries that matter, for they attract their own kind. Now of course, these coteries will by no means coincide with the coteries of the executives or the self-titled 'important people' or the people 'in the know'. It will not shape any sway or influence amongst the bigwigs, but equally it will not lead to all those bad things that I described earlier. Its main achievement will be to do those things which benefit humanity most, and with which God Himself is most pleased.Now if you decide that you would very much like to spend time in a pub with a particularly pleasant drinking crowd, you will feel that you have become part of something very much like a coterie. But the difference is that the intimacy is unintentional, the privacy is only a particular definition of group friendship; that those who do not know the people cannot know the details. Its exclusiveness is a by-product, and no one is being led by the lure of the coterie; no one has fixed their minds on the enigmatic or the abstruse, for it is simply a few people who happen to enjoy each other's company. Aristotle quite rightly placed friendship as one of the main virtues. It causes so much happiness in the world - but no coterie can really have it; not friendship in its wonderful sense; for coteries exist to make the people inside them feel better, by claiming others are worse than themselves. We are told in the Bible that those who ask shall receive (Matthew 21:22). That is true, in senses that I, as a mere man, do not have the capacity to explore. But in another sense there is much truth in what our parents used to say to us - 'Those who ask do not get'. To a mind that lacks maturity, to the mind that is about to enter into the big wide world, it seems full of 'discretions' full of intimacies and exclusiveness. But if the young man follows that desire to enter them, he will reach no 'coterie' that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. Many of us journey into the abyss, only to discover that everything there is artificial, just a debased preoccupation with the same social impulse that drives us all. Coteries lure us, but the 'digging' effect chains us to a cold hard post of perennial jealousy, distress, and disappointment. When our motivation is tainted with the wrong desire, membership of any coterie has no real content. Coteries are essentially a negating form of social intercourse. There is no sense of belonging when you are trapped in a coterie; only a sense of disillusionment. Remember when you were experiencing this at school? You found ways to avoid it, but it placed you in a difficult position. You thought the loneliness you felt at school was unique within yourself. You thought that the other children were not spending their time whittling and dreaming. Do you remember the 'in crowd'? In my school it was the football team. Those who had high energy and ball juggling prowess were the ones who created for themselves a coterie; one that most of the impressionable lads wanted to get into and many of the girls wanted to be associated with. This coterie worked very much in their favour, for to so many, they were adored athletes, they were an embodiment of all worldly power and glory. Many girls wanted to know them (or know girls who knew them) and many boys wanted to step inside the coterie. This coterie had other privileges too; the boys could be less bright than most, yet still they could escape from such vacuity because they were firmly ingratiated in the coterie. But it was quite easy to observe its drawbacks. Firstly, by entering this coterie, or desiring to enter, the boys had largely forgotten where true pleasure lies. It was an obscure, almost mystical pleasure for a short while, but like all coteries, it left one quite disconsolate. And of course, the female attention, as alluring as it seemed at the time, was really nothing more than a burnt sausage left on the barbecue for too long. Those who purged themselves of any self-respect just to be on the periphery of the coterie were not really worth knowing in the first place. The joke no longer remains funny if you badger someone so much into telling it that he ends up indignant and annoyed. Yes, the true members of the school aristocracy, were the temperate, educated, empathetic, compassionate boys and girls; they were the ones worth knowing; but of course, the over-abundant consciousness of image usually permits such friendships to occur, particularly for those in quasi-prestigious coteries. And you will see, if you look further, that such things hugely influence the social position of the boys and girls in the outer world. As adults, you will probably see them trying desperately to wear the right clothes, use the right slang, admire the right things, laugh at the right jokes; there are endless machinations of boys positioning themselves against each other, whether it is in Local Government, in mercantile activities, or in a total existence devoid of any noticeable qualities - you will see men's willingness to give bodies as cheap labour, or women's willingness to give men their bodies as an apparatus for his lust. But another point should be made, before it seems that I am castigating these people. It is not that they are inherently bad, just misguided. What they really wanted was to find the good graces of a coterie member - and this searching process, no more detached (in a cognitive sense) from any other form of searching, was always a central component of this system. In many ways this is hardly surprising, for the game they were playing has left them ill-prepared for proper functioning, whereas the school aristocracy had learnt more of the 'game of life' through their own cognitive resources and introspection. The whole structure of the football boys would collapse if they had ever played in the spirit of play For boys who were not yet football boys but who had some athletic promise, went to partake in athletics or gymnastics - many of which were forever racked with dazzling hopes and sickening fears, never in peace of mind until they had won some notice which would set their feet on the first rung of the coterie ladder. But even for them, there was no peace either, for to stay still or recede is to fall back. Spiritually speaking, the disquieting thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. And from it, at school and in the world, all sorts of meanness flows; the sycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those with whom it is prestigious to be associated, the rapid abandonment of friends that will not assist them on the ladder; the readiness to ridicule the 'uncool' or 'unpopular'; and the ulterior motive in almost every action.But even if the current position of the school aristocracy is now enviable to those covetous boys and girls, they need to know that the ground they are drilling into has many layers, that the garden fork can never hold enough sand, that the distant beauty always recedes. There are as many forms of this yearning as there are coteries. At County Hall for example, invitations to lunch from Heads of Departments might mean nothing to those who have been excluded from the coterie in which they really wanted to be included; but they are devoured by the desire to join some group of twentysomethings for a drink at the social club; or to play tennis with that Thursday lunchtime crew; or get with that group of people who sit on the grass outside. They long for that sacred social club coterie, or tennis group, or the grass recliners, and indeed, the desire diabolically conceals itself. Perhaps this contemporary age has come to accept it as normal that human affairs are assembled out of the incessant quest for prestige or a dim sense of belonging. Perhaps it is quite unrealistic to expect anything else, so that to function according to insecure suggestion is always the best way to decipher human affairs. Once again, before I am misunderstood, my target is not the people, or even the coteries themselves. If it were, then all we would be left with is an inter-comparable collective, or thousands of lost souls wandering around alone. But I never really liked mankind's tendency to eradicate solitude and bring people together for the sake of being together, for very often the mismatching of individuals leaves them in no better position, in fact, often much worse. But although my own natural inclination has been towards non-assimilation, detached individualism is not at all that appealing to me either.To this day the Christian vision where we stand together and encourage others to try their hardest to make sense of the world has come most naturally to me, and has been most appealing to me. It is certainly true that every one of us needs human company. But the great immutable foundation (created by men and women alike) which directs a person to another person is a disordering of our correct desire for human relationships, asserted as the 'longing' to attain it, the distress when we are precluded, the negative side of that 'gorgeous sense of belonging' that inclusion gives us, and the pleasure of excluding others on a daily basis - these are the things which cause the damage.This desire for coteries is the kind of desire which does not often pass from an individual. Can it ever be eradicated in this life? It is a desire that is feared or loved by other people, simply because of the pleasure it gives to those who are in it, or those who created it. But as I have said previously, the pleasure gives no real ultimate delight; it is too short-lived. No true fulfilment can result from abandoning ourselves to this drive; we cannot find respite by joining a coterie, whether large or small. We all know that various large groupings, just like friendships, are essential, but they are transitory and are limited to transient goals. Our longing to belong will not be met by 'being inside'. And what interested me most about this observation is not so much the intense longing that exists in everybody, but how, if not by others, could it be appeased? How could that hunger be satisfied? And of course, all along it was patently obvious to me. It was obvious because every time I looked towards God to satisfy my desire, I found that my desire had not only been fully realised, but it had actually been satisfied in a unexpectedly exciting and illuminating way.And I also saw why so many people do not recognise it. It is often because many people, when their desire cannot be satisfied, seek solace in other areas - family, close friends, lovers, to name but three. Now I am not for one second denying the true qualities of all three, but the problem with the supposed solace of, say, family is that we pretend that we can relax and say that we have found the secret road on which we were created to be. But in truth, it is not so, it is just that we are able to truly 'be ourselves' around our close family, and 'being ourselves' is the closest thing (outside of Christ) we have to the truthfulness of our existence. But Christ took great steps to warn us that this is not so. He even used hyperbolic language to assert that He would set families at variance if necessary, and that following Him was the most important thing. And this is why seeking solace in the family, or with a lover will not be enough. It will never be beneficial simply to 'be ourselves' until 'ourselves' have been united with Christ. Home life, close friendships, loving relationships - all three have their own rule of civility; a code that is quite subtle, quite sensorial, and, therefore, in some ways more difficult than that of the outer world. The family home has its pitfalls, and the problem of the coterie can be at its most acute in a family. So if these things cannot do all the work, what can?All of our desires are dim anticipations of what was always finally intended for us by God. Those transient moments of pleasure which keep pointing beyond themselves to something greater. They are hands pointing us in the direction of Christ. Something similar is at work in our insatiable and unrequited desire to belong. Whether we realise it or not, our primary desire is to be united with God. If the desire for the coterie is a precursory glance towards Heaven, the spectre of exclusion is equally a precursory glance towards Hell. Right now, the life to which we are beckoned is a way of life far beyond the desire for human belonging, and also far beyond solitude. I am speaking here of a way of life that begins to show us the way to be untied with Christ. We are called from the very beginning to combine as creatures with our God who created us. The Bible does of course contain the perfect antidote for those who are subsumed by coterie-ism. St Paul explored this very thing in Romans 1-8. And the final conclusion was this:If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ... neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:31-39.The force of St Paul's argument obviously calls upon us to look for Christ and accept that the reason we were created was, all along, to know God. Similarly, in the letter to the Colossians, St Paul addresses himself to a situation where those who have a perennial desire to be 'on the inside' perpetuate the fruitless desires for coteries. The Colossians were doing many things that were hindering their relationship with God. But St Paul helps them to get back on track by reminding them that 'God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ'. Colossians 1:19. And that 'All the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form' in this Christ. Colossians 2:9 - and startlingly, St Paul declared that those on the outside of coteries are no worse off because of that. In fact, your position is solely dependent on something far greater; 'You have been given fullness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority'. Colossians 2:10. To be with Christ in this way is to be at the centre; in fact, those who are in a coterie for all the wrong reasons have 'lost connection with the Head" (2:19). Their languorous approach to the Christian gospel has excluded them from life itself.One final point is this. Those who refuse to accept that Christianity is the only way forward are often those who think they can vanquish their desire for coteries through their own 'self-belief' and 'inner strength'. But of course, all good folks know this is not the case. No human efforts, by themselves, will end this longing. It is only through God that we can find our true sense of belonging; after all, it is in Him that we belong. Virtually all the things that God does for us, He does within us. And with this recognition, we can truly come to know ourselves as God knows us.

Mere Repentance

2009-03-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

Mere Christianity is the book that all new Christian seem to find themselves reading, and I was no exception. Although I agree with the consensual view that much of this book is terrific, I think Lewis's chapter The Perfect Penitent shows one of his main weaknesses (along with The Obstinate Toy Soldiers) in not being able to shake off that which used to apply to secularity but now, through an understanding of the Spirit, can be understood quite clearly. I think the weakest part of Mere Christianity (MC) is, for me, his treatment of God, and especially of Jesus. I get the feeling Lewis thought that the resurrection was one step too far for the readers to digest. CS Lewis is great, but someone who became a Christian through reading Mere Christianity, and who never moved on or grew up philosophically or theologically or even perhaps historically, would be in a dangerous position when faced even with proper intelligent scrutiny. For those obtuse, inane objections that you get from your detractors - MC will hold you in good stead - but the best ammunition you can have is the Bible verses.
One of Lewis's problems is that there is no attempt to place Jesus in his historical or theological context. (One of the 'Screwtape Letters' contains a scornful castigation of all such attempts, and lays CS Lewis wide open to the charge of overlooking or disregarding the historical context of the writings he is using). If one doesn’t put Jesus in His proper context, you will inevitably put Him in a different one, where He, and what He did for us, will be considerably diluted.
This is one of my issues with 'The Perfect Penitent'. Lewis is right to stress that Christians are not committed to one single way of understanding the meaning of the cross, and that as long as one somehow looks at the death of Jesus and understands it in terms of God's love and forgiveness, that is sufficient to start with. But his idea that (a) God requires humans to be penitent, that (b) we can't because of our pride, but that (c) Jesus does it in and for us, places in my view too high a value on repentance (vital though it is). If one is not careful it can imply that the doctrine of salvation through Christ is about God doing something in us rather than for us.
I remember him saying that only a bad person needs to repent and only a good person can repent perfectly. This is blatantly untrue. He also says "The worse you are the more you need it (which is not true of salvation - and I think that will lead some people thinking wrong thoughts) and the less you can do it (which is definitely not true - see Jeremiah 32, for example). He also says something like the perfect man is the only one who can repent perfectly. I think some of the time he confuses God's ability to resist sin with fallen man's necessity to repent of sin. In doing so he has diminished the true character of God. In that chapter Lewis has confused God's 'resistance' to sin with 'repentance' from sin.
Galatians 2:20,21 is, in my view, a good way to think of Christ's death, and its effect on us. Grace is the only way we should see Christ's death. If we start to smuggle legalism into the equation we dilute the perfect nature of God's love. In the preceding verse; St Paul is mindful of the fact that Christ came under the curse of the law at the cross (though he did not need to repent!) and that we, as Christians, have died with Him. If you look closely, Paul is anticipating the imminent argument in Galatians 3:19-25. It is true in one sense that the law can lead us to Christ, but we should not confuse that with grace above the law. We don't want to lose the value of Christ's death, because we would then lose the principle of grace that is at stake. Any attempt we make to live for God should be done because we have been united and crucified with Christ (see also Galatians 6:14). If we could receive anything by the law, then grace would not be necessary and Christ died for nothing (2:21). The only way any perception of Christ's death can be 'inadequate' is in this way.
Below is a brief discussion I had with a new Christian (Paul) on the issue of repentance.

Paul you say "Only a bad person needs to repent" - this is true, only by definition of anyone who has done something that falls short of Gods ideal being "bad", although they may not be "bad" in the colloquial sense of the word.
There seems to me to be some confusion here. You say it's true that only a bad person needs to repent, and then you go on to say anyone who has fallen short of God's ideal. Yet I'm almost sure that you must know this verse in Romans 3:22-24 -
This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
It's not the case of 'anyone who has done something bad', it is that 'all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God' (see also Romans 5:19 and 1 Corinthians 15:22). I presume that both you and C.S Lewis understand this as well as I do, so I'm not sure why you think otherwise. Anyway I think Lewis is on dangerous ground saying things like "Only a bad person needs to repent" - even if he does not mean what he suggests, it is a statement that can so often be taken wrongly, and used to favour those who have no interest in God, but think that they'll be ok if He does exist due to their well-meaning lifestyles.
Next you say, people struggle here with Lewis's term” repent perfectly" i.e. - does that mean someone who is able to repent for everything they have done and no longer fall short of Gods ideal again? Or is it flawed in that a bad person can sincerely repent for everything they have done one day and yet still go and do it again through neglect, weakness or circumstance the next? If it’s the first instance then I cant say its false, if its the second I can...
It is neither of the above. Both contentions are unsound. In fact, Lewis's statement that "Only a good person can repent perfectly" is a non sequiter. In the first place, only a perfect person can repent perfectly, and the only perfect person who ever lived was Christ who did not need to repent. Lewis draws a conclusion that does not follow from the premises.
"The worse you are the more you need it (which is not true of salvation-)" -
Paul says “Hadn’t thought of it that way but I think I know what you mean, do you mean its irrelevant how bad you are, if you are a murderer or a pick pocket you are equally in need of Gods grace and equally welcome in his eyes to be saved through Christ?
Yes I do mean that Paul, but there is also slightly more to it. What I'm now going to say also relates to your previous question too. Fundamentally, when Scripture talks of repentance it means returning to one's obedience, like a philandering wife coming back to her husband. It represents a central reorientation of our composite personalities. You will see in the Old Testament that Israel was constantly being told to turn from their ways unto the Lord, and therefore the covenant (or part of it) is God's promise to accept penitence. Try not to think too much of God forgiving the penitent man because of any restitution he makes. The very nature of God is one of forgiveness (Isaiah 43:25).
Some people wrongly presume that a man can come to know God if he tries hard enough to become righteous, but this is a glaring error. Being more righteous may certainly help a man to come closer to finding God, but the man's relationship with God depends upon penitence (Psalm 51:17). And after that, God creates, in us, a new creation (Jeremiah 31:31-34, 2 Corinthians 5:17). The prophecy in Jeremiah 31 is fulfilled in the gospels. Is this perhaps where you are not understanding it fully Paul? It is God's kindness that leads towards repentance (Romans 2:4) not the level of man's goodness or badness. And this is what C.S Lewis has missed in his chapter 'The Perfect Penitent'. Only by recognising the need for salvation will man truly repent. The Bible says that a veil is covering their hearts (2 Corinthians 3:15,16).
Why don’t you put Jeremiah 32 on your reading list Paul and really tried to think about it?
(next day)
You are right when you say ere are people in Judah who have very much turned away, who are completely unrepentant and on the face of it unable to repent (despite his efforts to teach and his warnings) but God promises (personally, in His own words) that He will take them away (to exile in Babylon where they will suffer) and let their city be destroyed so He can then bring them back (along with people He has banished from all the lands) when he will restore their land and fortunes through their hearts, and do joyfully by His unrelenting and love. >
We see that no difficulty is insuperable. With God's mighty strength and wisdom, all opposition, including that of insurmountability can be overcome. But there is perhaps something you may have overlooked - I'm not sure. Jeremiah didn't realise that judgment and mercy can co-exist with God, in fact, all is possible with God. Our God is boundless and merciful, with immutable justice. If, in His mercy, He spares some who then go on to repent, He does not need to attenuate His hatred for sin - but I think, to some extent we do. That is the fallibility of man. We cannot really hate a sin with the full fervency we once did if we are to attempt repentance. That is one way in which it can truly help us reconstitute our thoughts of sin - and at its best it brings about our ability to love someone whose sins we detest. C.S Lewis talks about this in his chapter called 'Forgiveness', and it is one of the best chapters in the book.