Secularism is the religion of the 21st century West, and all the most powerful messaging cultural machinery indoctrinates us into its view of reality. At the top of that list has to be our entertainment mediums, especially movies and television. Stories on screens are reality shapers, that is, they build into our imaginations ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Sociologically speaking, they are plausibility generating mechanisms in that they, without our knowing it, paint a picture of reality that we accept as real, or what seems real to us. Over time, if we take in entertainment uncritically, our plausibility structure (the building in our minds that determines how we see reality, the seemingness of it) becomes thoroughly secular, regardless of what we “believe.” (And for a short definition, what I mean by secular is that the material world, this world, is all that matters, and the here and the now is what is most important about life.)
Which brings me to a cute and enjoyable movie my wife and I watched the other night, The Beautiful Fantastic. Here is the synopsis of the movie from Amazon:
Set against the backdrop of a beautiful London garden, this contemporary fairy tale centers on the unlikely friendship between a reclusive young woman who dreams of writing children’s books and a cranky widower. Facing eviction over her neglected garden, Bella (Jessica Brown Findlay) meets her grumpy, loveless, next-door neighbor (Tom Wilkinson), who happens to be an amazing horticulturalist.
When the movie finished, as my wife can attest, I was annoyed, and not a little angry. God was completely, totally, invisible (to those without eyes to see), even in the midst of beauty and death, loyalty, sacrifice, love, and family. I first wanted to start throwing things at the screen early in the movie when the grumpy neighbor takes Bella through his opulent garden, describing the seemingly infinite variety of flowers and plants. The scene is portrayed as if the stunning beauty just . . . . is. That it doesn’t point to anything beyond it’s own beauty! As if it is not a reflection of the glory of an almighty imaginative Creator God. The reason the scene, and movie, play out this way is because the writers, immersed in the secular plausibility structure of the 21st century secular West, see no reason to get all religious and bring God into the story.
The problem with this secular view of reality (in addition to it being a lie) is that it is utterly counter intuitive. Whenever we are confronted with any human creation in its beauty (music, art, literature), majesty (buildings, bridges, airplanes), practicality (cars, houses, tools), whatever, we are always driven to think of the creators or designers of those things. We know without having to be told that these things don’t happen by accident, don’t just appear for no reason at all. Yet secularists insist that nature just . . . . is, no Creator needed. As this movie shows, though, that never needs to be stated, just assumed. It is, in fact, more insidious when it’s assumed. So on their walk through the garden bursting with beauty, Bella and the curmudgeon would never think to say, what must the God who created such beauty be like!
For 160 years now Darwin and his progeny have been trying to convince us that all the beauty, complexity, and functionality in nature is purely a product of time and matter. They argue that a blind, unguided process using what they call random mutation and natural selection is responsible for all of it, including every species of flower we saw in the movie. When was the last time anything random “created” anything useful? Nope, random leads to chaos and creates nothing. And the more scientists in every branch of science discover how ridiculously complex nature is, the less plausible does Darwin become. Secularists, by contrast, insist we believe that everything came from nothing for no reason at all. I never had a problem persuading my kids that this was, to use a technical term, poppycock! We, and everything we encounter in life, in all its beauty, complexity, and functionality is not a cosmic accident, but the creation of our great, almighty, gracious and glorious God!
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