Jul 14, 2017 | Explanatory Power, Notable Quotations
In an inversion of the ancient dictum, we might say: “As below, so above.” What we experience of space “out there” will reflect our inner spiritual state. Perhaps this is why, as glorious as the modern discoveries of the heavens are, they often leave us cold. This is not only because they’re mediated to us through images, or because we sense ourselves to be “of the earth.” It’s also because we children of modernity live in the shadow of the world’s disenchantment. The world is no longer “deep.” There is no inherent mystery in things. God’s absence from the world is echoed in the cosmos’s deafening silence. However wondrous the things we discover in space (which can awaken a reverent awe in even the most coldly scientific mind), they can never, in themselves, overcome this spiritual lack. For though we now have even more reasons for marveling at the cosmos than our ancestors, Peter Kreeft’s insightful observation remains true: People formerly looked upward and saw “the heavens”; today they simply call it “space.” Even the greatest exploratory adventures can never make up for this primary lack of spiritual vision.
—Brandon Tucker, “Creatures in the Cosmos”
I don’t normally comment on quotations, but this one is just too perfect, as is the entire article from which it comes. It is an especially good example of the concept of explanatory power. According to Google, explanatory power is “the ability of a hypothesis or theory to effectively explain the subject matter it pertains to.” In apologetics, it shows us how much more powerful and plausible the Christian worldview is compared to any of its competitors, and in this case the explanatory poverty of atheistic materialism. One of the keys to keeping our kids Christian is to consistently show them, to persuade and sell them on, the veracity and plausibility of the Christian Faith and worldview. As this article indicates, it’s rather easy to do.
Jul 12, 2017 | Notable Quotations
In each of these novels—by Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury—books become an enemy because they represent a written record of the past to a dystopian future where the past is something to forget. Books threaten the status quo, undermine the dominant culture, overturn the ascendant social order—and so the powers that be attempt to wean or coerce their subjects away from the written word, with media they control.
—K.E. Columgini, “Books Versus Screens”
Jul 9, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
The Killing of History needs to be read by every Christian who cares about defending our faith in a hostile secular culture. This from the Amazon introduction tells us why:
For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attack from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction.
If truth and knowledge about the past are not possible, then Christianity is not possible. Christianity is rooted in historical claims, but just as important as these claims are is the assumption that underlies them, that we can have real, objective historical knowledge. As Christians we claim we can know what happened in the past, even thousands of years in the past, with a reasonable degree of certainty. While our knowledge of the past is never exhaustive, it is real, and on it we can depend. Not so, claim these theorists.
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Jul 3, 2017 | Plausibility
Peter Berger, a hugely influential Austrian-born American sociologist, died last week at the age of 88:
On June 27, Berger passed away at his home in suburban Boston, concluding a lifetime of scholarly influence and a career that made him one of the most notable scholars of his generation.
The influence of Berger certainly extended to me. In one of the chapters of Keeping Your Kids Christian, on the concept of plausibility in the life of faith, I quote extensively from two early books by Berger, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (with Thomas Luckmann), and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. I first learned the concept of Plausibility Structure from reading The Sacred Canopy back in the mid-1980s, a term most Christians have never heard, let alone are familiar with. They should be, as I argue extensively in the book.
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Jul 1, 2017 | Culture
The title of this post is almost an axiom among modern Americans. We may hear it put in other ways as well, like “as long it makes you happy,” or “you must do what’s in your heart.” I’ve heard it said that we live in the age of “the sovereign self.” In our age, the subjective rules; the only perspective that counts is my perspective, and my perspective is declared valid simply because it is mine. Whether what I think corresponds to reality in any objective sense is beside the point.
We tend to think of it as a relatively recent phenomena, but this idea of being “true to ourselves” is a form of relativism, and it’s been around a lot longer than most of us would think. The phrase actually goes back to a Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote to his fiancee, Caroline Flachsland in 1772:
All our actions should be self-determined, in accordance with our innermost character—we must be true to ourselves.
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