Vulcan's Mercy

WHERE HAVE ALL THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS GONE?

A few days ago I pulled an interesting fossil from my library, Leo Rosten’s Religions of America.  It is an early Seventies almanac of the most significant religions practiced in the United States.  As such it preserves the era’s zeitgeist of religious belief, like an ancient insect in amber.  Rosten’s almanac captures the zenith of that giddiness of liberation from what every thinking man or woman understood to be the musty dogma, mean-spirited morality, and docile faith of that dank, cramped, fearful religion of yesteryear.

It was a cocksure giddiness blind to the re-awakening of orthodoxy, evangelicalism, and pentecostalism in Christianity, the resurgence of traditionalism and mysticism in Judaism, and, darkly, the jihadism in Islam that would envelope the world only a few years later.  It was a short-lived giddiness of the sudden lightness of being born of cutting loose from the ground that had frustrated flights of fancy but also rooted one in the nourishing earth of reality, and so once deracinated soon shriveled.  Indeed, it was a misbegotten giddiness as the subsequent decline of the now rootless mainline Protestant denominations and their liberal Catholic fellow-travelers in the wake of the revitalization of traditional religious beliefs attests.

The vanguard of this liberation from old-time religion is best exemplified in Rosten’s almanac by the Unitarian Universalists.  Here are some of the responses by a Unitarian Universalist representative to Rosten’s survey:

On faith:  “[We] are agnostics, humanists, even atheists, as well as nature worshipers, pantheists, and those who affirm a personal God.”

On hope:  “For Unitarian Universalists, prayer is less a matter of who is listening and more a concern with the aspirations expressed.”

On social justice (i.e., charity):  “Unitarian Universalists have pioneered in movements to eliminate restrictive laws regarding abortion.”

On sin:  “Unitarian Universalists reject the traditional Christian idea [of] original sin … They believe in the importance of virtue and virtuous living and doing for its own sake, and not out of some hypothetical ‘salvation’ or ‘reward’ in the future or the ‘hereafter’.”

On divine judgment:  “Heaven and hell are states of mind, created by human beings.”

On authority:  “Many Unitarian Universalists have a concept of a ‘loose-leaf’ Bible, that is, they find inspiration in many writings, the scriptures of many religions, the philosophers of many times, the literature of many cultures.”

On creed:  “A Unitarian Universalist is one of a community of religious persons whose beliefs and ethics are freely chosen … They rely upon their own reason and personal understanding.  … All know there is no special virtue in being able to declare, ‘I believe in God.’”

As to that declaration, perhaps not by itself.  But then it is religion that brings meaning to that declaration and so makes possible virtue in the belief in God.  So why would a person who feels no need to make that declaration feel any need for a religion that affirms that feeling?  Absent that foundational belief, what can a religion meaningfully affirm?  As the expressions of Unitarian Universalist sentiment above show, not much but the endorsement of antinomian willfulness, which is the mark of the appetite-appeasing clever beast in us and not the purpose-seeking spiritual being.  Religion nourishes the latter and frustrates the former.  Hence, the vapidity of Unitarian Universalism and its near-extinction today.

Unfortunately, too many Protestant denominations and Catholic bishops over the past three decades have not heeded the cautionary tale of the Unitarian Universalists.  They have lost many in their flocks as they have drained religion of its meaning, all too often to put into the service of secular agendas.  For some once-prominent Christian communities, especially Anglican and Reformed denominations, this has become a clear and present danger.  They are riven between the liberals who are marching head-long, like the Unitarian Universalists before them, toward nihilism and the traditionalists who are resisting the destruction of their churches in a black hole of meaninglessness.  Yet other denominations have become de-spirited carcasses for vultures to feast upon and twist individual congregations to their own perverted ends – as recently exemplified by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, who has transmogrified the faith of the Puritans into an orgy of hatred against all, even God, opposed to his plan for Heaven on Earth.

Fortunately, Catholics have the Magisterium, which has maintained the integrity of Church doctrine in the face of assaults as vile as that of “liberation theology”.  (Although lesser threats from liberals who would “liberate” the Church from orthodoxy remain insidious.)  In addition to the renewal of orthodoxy among large segments of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, there has been a great flowering of religious enthusiasm over the past few decades, especially in the form of evangelicalism and pentecostalism.  Without making light of the profound theological differences in these various re-awakenings, their common vigor resides in a full-throated institutional commitment to articles of faith.  Unlike the Unitarian Universalists and the liberals following their dead-end path, the re-awakened are not scandalized by certitudes in religious belief.  This is because in that certitude they have embraced a transcendent meaning for their lives that the liberals have traded away for a mess of hedonist pottage at best and nihilist at worst.

So where have all the Unitarian Universalists gone?  Nowhere.

THE NEW ATHEISTS: SO NINETEENTH CENTURY

Recently I ran across this excellent article by Mark Shea, Padding the Case for New Atheism.  He skewers the so-called New Atheists -- namely, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens -- who, despite their pretensions as rational freethinking "Brights" unfettered by the dusty dogmas of oppressive churchmen, are so benighted as to not even know that all their allegedly devastating arguments against religious belief have been resoundingly countered by theists for centuries.  Worse yet, they can't even recycle in modern garb the arguments of their atheist predecessors to good effect, because they barely understand, if at all, those religious beliefs they so vociferously damn.  Indeed, they have made the New Atheism an embarrassing hash of contradictions, question-begging, and stolen concepts.  All of this I came to understand about today's militant atheists in my own plodding way back to the Church, but Shea boils it down to a fine polemic against the fellas who are better described as the New Fundamentalists.

MY "MISSION" TO THE DEEPEST, DARK CORNER OF BRIGHT-LAND

Once again, Linz Perigo, host of the Objectivist web forum SOLOPassion, invited me to write an article on Christianity.  And so I did.  I thought I would begin at the beginning with a definition of the God Christians believe in, rather than the God atheists are fond of knocking down with their long discredited arguments.  Below is my article in its entirety, and here is the link to the comments it received at SOLOPassion.  (I'll leave it to you to judge from their comments how bright the Brights are.)

THE GOD WHO ISN'T

In another thread James Valliant posed to me, a one-time Randian and non-believer who is now a practicing Catholic, some issues he had with Christian doctrine. I declined to give James a direct response. My primary reason was that James’s challenge was mired in misconceptions of what Christian religious beliefs and their relationship to Scripture actually are. I suggested to James that he needed to address the best and strongest arguments for Christianity instead of knocking down straw men. Furthermore, James was off-topic and I did not want to hijack the thread.

Linz, the magnanimous host he is, stepped in with some comments of his own and invited me to hijack the thread with a response to James. I told Linz I would give it some thought, and so I have. With this new thread I put forth a preliminary response to James (and Linz also) as to what are the best and strongest arguments for Christianity. I think any reasonable person will agree that it would be fruitless to raise those arguments absent the modest common ground that God’s existence is logically possible. So that’s where I will start.

I understand the arguments Objectivists generally make to deny God’s existence. They have certain quaintness to them, brimming with the certitude of the late 19th-century atheists who first made them to declare science triumphant and religion a relic. Of course, these atheists were oblivious to the centuries of Catholic and Calvinist philosophy that had refuted their arguments before they even made them, and today’s Objectivists are similarly oblivious to the thorough dismantling of those arguments over the past century by theists. But that only adds to the charm of these arguments because of the faith by which an Objectivist must hold them.

Now I know some here will take that last sentence as an insult. It’s not, even though by “faith” I mean it in the Randian sense of fideism or superstition as opposed to the Catholic sense of intellectual assent. I admire this conviction in an age dominated by bien pensant postmodernists who sneer at any belief in absolute truth. Moreover, the Objectivist arguments are correct: The God they deny doesn’t exist.

However, that God isn’t the God Christians know. Objectivists have been busy knocking down a straw man. It is a measure of the obtuseness many of them have regarding religion, and Christianity in particular, that they do not have the least inkling that they are doing so. While an Objectivist may sometimes succeed in befuddling unknowledgeable believers with challenges like who created God, can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, and why not believe in a flying spaghetti monster, the very posing of these questions reveals the Objectivist’s befuddlement as to who God is.

Again I know many here will find insult in what I have just written. But none of us are all-knowing. All of us are ignorant in some manner. I am merely suggesting that one exercise care in what he claims as certainly true. Therefore, if you are going to deny the God Christians believe exists, might it not be prudent to know who Christians believe that God is? After all, it does little good to argue that [1] God is X , [2] X is logically impossible, and so [3] God is logically impossible, when Christians know God as Y. Even worse is the foolishness of some Objectivists, when confronted with this response, to then insist that Christians do not know God as Y but as X in a futile attempt to salvage a straw man argument. Now if this sounds harsh, let me acknowledge that Objectivists share some illustrious company in their theological ignorance, including atheist fellow-travelers George Smith, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and, someone who really should know better, Daniel Dennett.

But that should be small comfort, because God is Y and not X. So it matters not how bright the fellas and how brilliant their arguments are in disproving X. All that sparkles is not gold. Nothing is accomplished. You may as well spend time knocking down the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, the flat-earthers, and Bigfoot. Therefore, if you want to point your arguments against God in the right direction, let me give you a crib sheet as to who He really is and how the present arguments against Him go awry.

To that end this is the God who Christians know. He is the creator of the universe, Who like all creators did so for a purpose. He is a purely spiritual being Who, as the creator of spacetime and so external to it, requires no extension as matter would provide. He is a fully and perfectly realized being and as such is pure act, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. With this in mind, let us review those qualities of God that atheists most frequently cite as making Him logically impossible (or at least extremely unlikely): Creator, pure spirit, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

God is the Creator. God is the person Who created the universe and everything within it. God’s relationship to the universe is analogous to that of a contractor to a house he has built. Just as the contractor is not a part of the house he has built, God is not a part of the universe He has created. Like the contractor, God is external to, superior to, and independent of His work. So, like the contractor, God is unconstrained by what He has fashioned. That lack of constraint means that, like the contractor, God can carry on without regard to His creation or return to alter it as He pleases.

It should be evident why the common Objectivist objection that the universe means everything that exists and so it must include God if He exists (and so must be subject to the constraints of causation within it) doesn’t wash with the Christian. The word “universe” can be used like that, but to rest an argument upon that idiosyncratic meaning to deny the existence of God is to substitute semantics for logic. By “universe” Christians mean that finite astronomical structure of expanding spacetime we inhabit, and whatever Objectivists want to call that, that is what they must address in a refutation of God as the creator of it.

Because God, as its creator, is external to, superior to, and independent of spacetime, there can be no issue as to what caused God. The infinite regression of causes commonly argued by atheists to deny God has no traction, because causation exists only in relation to spacetime. As a being beyond spacetime, God is eternal and the ground (either directly or indirectly) of all causation in the universe. This includes the physical order of the universe upon which all laws of nature are predicated, but no law of nature can explain because any such explanation must presume the very thing – i.e., order – to be explained. It also includes the mental phenomena which we all experience – e.g., consciousness, rationality, knowledge, free will – but cannot physically identify and reduce in terms of that order just noted. Yet that phenomena, in particular free will, does cause physical effects. This is explicable only if the mental is fundamental to (or independent of) the physical, as God, a purely spiritual being, is to the universe, a construct of matter.

God is pure spirit. Objectivists often cite the impossibility of the primacy of consciousness to deny the existence of God as a spiritual being. They argue that consciousness can only exist once there exists something to be conscious of. Implicit in this argument is that first “something” must be physical and not mental. If asked why a consciousness cannot be conscious of itself, the Objectivist response is that consciousness cannot exist independent of a physical entity. Again, as above, this argument rests upon a definition of the universe that Christians do not accept and begs the question so long as Objectivists fail to address what Christians do mean by the universe as God’s creation.

It is reasonable to argue that which exists within spacetime must have some manner of physical existence, because existence within spacetime means extension – i.e., temporally and spatially identifiable. Matter provides that extension, and so even though human consciousness is not physical, to the extent that it exists within spacetime, it must exist in conjunction with a material body. Thomists have always understood this through their philosophical doctrine of hylomorphism and have not been troubled by the fact that in this world consciousness does not manifest itself separately of the body. So the Objectivist claim that science has never identified such a separation is uncontroversial. (As an aside: Even if such separations do occur, science dependent upon spatial and temporal measurements could not in any case identify that which lacks such extension.)

However, it is unpersuasive to argue that the only possible universe is one that is an infinite expanse of spacetime so that all that exists must be extended – i.e., composed of or directly related to matter. Setting aside that astronomical observations do not support this belief, there is no sound logical basis for believing that the only possible universe is an infinite one. To argue that the universe is what it is and so the only possible universe is this one, as Objectivists commonly do, is not only logically deficient – to wit, a confusion of the necessary with the actual – but brings us back to the empirical evidence of what the universe is – and so far that evidence indicates a universe that is finite in spacetime. So the premise that is impossible for the universe to be anything other than an infinite expanse of spacetime is nothing but unfounded assertion.

Absent that premise, we can conceive of an eternal realm beyond the spacetime of the universe in which God exists as a purely spiritual being. Indeed, outside of spacetime, extension is meaningless. In that realm, with no need for extension and so no need of matter to provide it, only the mental and not the physical exists. There a being unknowable to our senses, although not completely alien to our experience (of our own consciousness and free will), can exist in non-physical form. For example, the purely spiritual being of God. The logical possibility of this appears to elude Objectivists and many other atheists, such as Dawkins with his flying spaghetti monster. They insist upon anthropomorphizing God, a natural human tendency, but to the extreme extent of finding any being but a physical one inconceivable. But the nonsense of equating God to a flying spaghetti monster is only logically consistent with a thorough and unrelenting materialism, and that logic is at the expense of any objective foundation for human morality, happiness, and purpose while doing riot to our experience of mental phenomena like consciousness and free will as something other than illusions.

That is the price an Objectivist must pay to deny God because a purely spiritual being is impossible.

God is omnipotent. Christians know God as all-powerful. Atheists, including Objectivists, frequently counter that is impossible because omnipotence creates logical contradictions as demonstrated by the trite question: “Can God create a rock so heavy He cannot lift it?” Yes, of course, that poses a contradiction, but then omnipotence is the power to do anything that is logically possible. God’s being defines what is logically possible. This is because He is a fully and perfectly realized being and so is pure act. As such He encompasses the Truth in its entirety, which brooks no contradiction. Therefore, for God to do what is logically impossible is to violate His own identity.

God is omniscient. Christians also know God as all-knowing. Objectivists and other atheists often object that God’s omniscience violates human free will, but this would be true only if knowledge of an event is synonymous with the cause of an event. As the bedrock of Objectivism is that what is true is objectively true and so independent of anyone’s knowledge of that truth, it is odd that Objectivists should make this argument against God’s omniscience. Your knowledge that I will take a particular action simply does not entail that you are the cause of that action. Nor does this entailment arise if that knowledge is understood as foreknowledge, as God is often presumed to have of human actions. Knowledge is not causation.

Furthermore, God’s knowledge of all human actions is not necessarily foreknowledge. Once again, Christians know God to exist beyond the constraints of spacetime. What human beings comprehend as the past, present, and future is an eternal present to God. He knows what occurs at all points in spacetime at the same moment. Therefore, if one is insistent upon arguing that foreknowledge of future human actions constitutes causation of those actions, and so God’s omniscience violates free will, God’s existence outside of spacetime does not require that He possess foreknowledge to possess omniscience.

Moreover, the atheist argument here rests upon the premise that free will is genuine and libertarian, as opposed to an illusion propagated by the physical processes of a deterministic universe, lest there be no violation of it by God’s omniscience. And once the atheist concedes the existence of libertarian free will, then he undercuts any arguments against the logical possibility of God as a purely spiritual being Who is the uncaused cause of the universe.

God is omnibenevolent. Finally Christians know God as all-good. He neither embodies nor causes any evil. Evil is entirely the product of human will. Objectivists and other atheists almost always object that omnibenevolence is contradictory to omnipotence, and so God cannot be both. They argue that if God is all-powerful then He cannot be all-good, because He allows evil to occur despite His power to prevent it; or conversely if He is all-good then He is not all-powerful because He cannot prevent evil despite His desire to do so. What this argument fails to do is account for God’s omniscience.

God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent, because in His omniscience He knows that the human exercise of free will, despite the evil that can cause, makes possible the greatest good. If God prevented all our evil acts, He would extinguish free will. Absent free will no human act can be said to be good for there is no choice in doing so. We would not be moral agents, just automatons. We would not add to the good in the universe. We would just be so many cogs in its machinery robotically functioning according to divine specification. In short, without free will human beings can do no good. Only with free will, even with the risk of evil that permits, human beings can add to God’s goodness to bring about greatest good possible in His creation.

Also, as noted in the previous passage on God’s omniscience, the extent that atheist argument on this score has any strength is based upon his belief that libertarian free will exists. Therefore, pushing hard here necessarily undercuts the atheist argument elsewhere.

While I don’t think the logic of this will escape Objectivists, who acknowledge human free will (volition) as an essential property of human nature, I think the force of it may be elusive. This is because most Objectivists do not understand what Christians believe to be the root of God’s goodness and ours. It is love. Sadly Objectivists routinely pervert the Christian concept of love to mean destructive self-abnegation. That of course is hatred, hatred of the self, hatred of the world, ultimately hatred of God Himself. None of the components of Christian love – eros, philia, and agape – embrace such evil. Indeed, by accepting God’s love for him, a Christian returns it through these forms of love to God, himself, his fellow man, and the world. Through this love the Christian rids himself of falsehoods to see truth and beauty more clearly. Thus, he becomes just, productive, and happy and attains self-respect and self-reliance. He becomes his own man unburdened by false pride and vanity.

I know this is true from my own experience, but I will go no further along this line for the moment. This gets us into the “best and strongest” arguments for Christianity when the task at hand is the modest one of establishing the logical possibility of God’s existence.

GOD EXISTS: THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER

When it comes right down to it, there are only two metaphysical accounts for the universe and our presence within it.  The first is that God created the universe.  The second is that nature is fundamental.  The first account, theism, explains the existence, order, and purpose of the universe.  The second account, naturalism, takes the existence of the universe and its primary order as axiomatic and denies any purpose to it.  The theist attempts to answer why our world came to be, whereas the naturalist objects to the validity of the question.

However, for that objection to have merit, the naturalist must have a basis for it.  It is not enough for the naturalist to declare that the existence of the universe is a brute fact.  The theist does not dispute that it exists.  An unadorned assertion that it does, period, is a proclamation of ignorance as to why it does.  Ignorance permits the naturalist to be agnostic as to theism, but offers no basis for invalidating it.  So he must go further.  Regarding the existence of the universe, he must go to where the dispute lies with the theist.  What is fundamental to the universe?  God or nature?  What comes first, mind or matter?  In other words, is the universe created, a work of intelligence?  Or are the undirected matter and mechanisms of nature the foundation of the universe?

By arguing that nature, not God, is fundamental to the existence of the universe, the naturalist begins to raise a legitimate objection to the validity of the question the theist wants to answer:  Why does the universe exist?  To wit, if nature is fundamental to the universe, and nature by definition is undirected and purposeless, then the question of why the universe exists is meaningless.  And so, the naturalist dispenses with the need to explain either the existence or the purpose of the universe.  But that still leaves him on the hook to explain the order of the universe.  If he doesn’t, then he cannot close the door on the theist’s contention that the existence of the universe requires an explanation and that explanation entails a purpose for the universe.  Thus, the naturalist’s objection to the validity of theist’s question of “why” would fail absent a hypothesis for order.

To say that the universe has order is to say that it is not a cauldron of unstructured chaos like the quantum flux.  Matter is organized into atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and organisms like us.  Of course, the naturalist can point to the discoveries of science to describe the order exhibited by these things.  Physics, chemistry, and biology describe their structure and their interactions – i.e., causality.  Indeed, we have boiled this knowledge down to laws of nature to mathematically describe the uniformity of causality.  Yet none of this addresses the primary order of the universe.  How is it that nature gives rise to the order that makes laws of nature possible in the first place?  It cannot be yet another law of nature, because that begs the question by presuming order.  While the naturalist can consign primary order to brute fact, that at best – as discussed above – permits him to be an agnostic.  It does not provide a basis to object to the validity of the question that the theist seeks to answer.

It would appear that the naturalist has a serious problem if nature cannot explain order.  But is the failure of nature to explain the primary order of the universe epistemological or metaphysical?  Do we fail to understand how nature gives rise to order because of our ignorance, whether passing or permanent?  Or do we fail to understand because nature cannot, in fact, give rise to order?  If it is the former, then belief in naturalism is not unreasonable, but it is not possible to refute theism as unreasonable.  If it is the latter, can we know that?  If we can, then naturalism is refuted.  To examine this further, we need to take a closer look at how the universe is ordered.

The universe has order because of the sameness of the properties of its basic building blocks, sub-atomic particles.  Although these particles come in different classes, particles of the same class have identical properties.  Furthermore, without regard to their class, these particles have the same properties of interaction; for example, two particles may not have identical masses, but the effect of their masses when they interact will be proportionately the same.  In this way, we can speak of the sameness of the properties of all sub-atomic particles in the universe.  Upon this primary order the universe has been built.

It might be said that this sameness of sub-atomic particles can be attributed to the laws of physics.  However, that puts the cart before the horse.  These particles are not the same because of the laws of physics.  We have laws of physics because these particles are the same.  In other words, the sameness of sub-atomic particles is a metaphysical fact.  In contrast, the laws of physics describing their sameness are epistemological constructs we use to reduce that sameness to a method of knowledge, usually mathematics.  This is akin to the difference between:  [1] An apple and a stop sign both having the property of red color (a metaphysical fact), and [2] abstracting from particular instances of red color a concept of redness (an epistemological construct).  The former exists as discrete and particular physical instantiations and the latter as mental generalizations of those instantiations.

So we are faced with a marvel:  The trillions upon trillions upon trillions of sub-atomic particles in the universe all having the same properties.  Because no law of nature can account for this extraordinary sameness, we are left with two possibilities for the existence of this primary order in the universe.  It was either accident or intention.  While the naturalist can claim it was an accident, the coincidence of this sameness is so improbable as to be impossible.  Therefore, it is not unreasonable to look to an intentional act having caused this sameness in each and every sub-atomic particle of the universe.  If so, that would be an act of God in the creation of the universe.  Just as a manufacturer makes every widget coming out of his factory the same, God made the individual building blocks of the universe the same.  He did so by imposing form, His principle of organization, upon the prime matter of the universe to create each and every sub-atomic particle, thus providing the universe with its primary order.

Because we know that this primary order exists, we can know God exists.  If God did not exist, then we would have to explain the order of the universe either in terms of a law of nature or as an accident.  Because a law of nature presumes order, it explains nothing.  Because an accident that all of the countless sub-atomic particles of the universe have the same properties is nigh impossible, it is profoundly deficient as an explanation even if it does not logically close out nature as fundamental to the universe.  For these reasons, we can reasonably conclude God exists because order exists.

[Note:  Click here for an extended discussion I have had with Regi Firehammer, The Automonist, and his comrades on this subject. - 5/31/07]

LIGHTING A LAMP

A fellow under the monicker of "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz" is shining a light in one of the dingy corners of the Internet.  At Joe Rowland's intellectually anemic "Rebirth of Reason" Objectivist website, Mr. Leibniz has, with great patience, been discussing Catholic theology with the village atheists there.  His expositions of the Faith are models of clarity.  Anyone with only a bit a familiarity with philosophy can follow what he has to say.  Let us hope that Mr. Leibniz has opened the minds of some of the denizens of Rowland's site to ideas that they had carelessly excluded from consideration in the past.

THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION

Over the past few days I have been participating in an interesting conversation with Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, and others about God's incarnation as Jesus Christ.  Specifically, the Maverick raised the issue of whether or not there is a contradiction in Christ being a person who is both mortal and immortal.

Christian, in particular Catholic, teaching is that the Incarnation is a mystery.  In other words, full knowledge of the Incarnation is beyond human reason, so belief in its truth ultimately requires faith.  However, for a mystery to theologically pass muster, it cannot be refuted by reason.  Hence, the Maverick's query as to whether the mystery of the Incarnation embodies a logical contradiction.

Your humble correspondent has argued that Christ is a divine person -- i.e., God -- who had appeared on Earth in human substance -- i.e., with a human body and soul.  So long as it is possible for God to manifest Himself with human substance, there is no contradiction with that substance being mortal while his divine person remains immortal.

Check out both the Maverick's articles on this topic and the comments following them here, here, and here.

PRAYER OF THE CONFIRMED

God our Father, You have marked us with Your sign.

Christ our Lord, You have confirmed us
Infusing our hearts with the Holy Spirit
To witness the faith in word and in deed.

Let us guard the gift of confirmation
With the power to confess the name of Christ boldly
And the love to never be ashamed of the Cross.

Jesus has told us, “Have good heart; be not afraid.”

Faith can be hard, because we fear our doubts,
We fear rejection, and we fear the spite of others,
So we sometimes lack the courage to profess our faith.

Lord, renew our hearts where the Holy Spirit dwells
To embolden us, to conquer our fears, and to free us
To live in faith as the Father has created us to do.

THE NATURALIST'S ALCHEMY OF THE SOUL

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, posted a short piece yesterday about the folly of substituting a belief in Man for a belief in God.  As the pithy one put it, "[T]he conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid."

I always understood the evil of oppression, but it wasn't until after the fall of the Berlin Wall I began to grasp the horror of utopian projects.  Not just the communist and fascist projects of the collectivists, but also the anarcho-capitalist and secularist projects of the individualists.  They are all predicated upon an impossibility, the perfectibility of human nature.  They all pursue the same delusion, heaven on Earth.  And they all come to the same wretched end as the believers in Man gain the power to hammer the square pegs of humanity into the round holes of a false paradise.

It was at this point I got a glimpse of the wisdom of the Scriptures.  The grace of God touched my reason.  Slowly I saw more and more of the wonder of His creation as I tore away at the blinkers of naturalism that I had firmly affixed to myself.  As a creature who is in part flesh and blood, I understand that I will not ever be completely free of those blinkers in this life.  But I do know that a belief in Man shackles a person to his sins and blinds him to the hope of release that is knowable only through a belief in God.

To escape the despair of his shackles, the believer in Man begins to rationalize his sins away.  He practices an alchemy of the soul to transmute his vices into virtues.  He persuades himself that the transmutation has succeeded by clutching ever more tightly to the philosopher's stone of naturalism.  His faith in Man will not be shaken despite the plain evidence all around him refuting it.  Thus, he keeps his mind behind the wall of a false paradise lest the reality of his shackles intrudes into his awareness.

The irony, of which the believer in Man is oblivious, is that his false paradise is in fact the weight of his shackles grown even heavier.  Their burden will destroy him, unless he finally sees them for what they are.  Only then can he grasp that the philosopher's stone of naturalism, like the mercury used by the alchemists of matter, is a poison that weakens him under the weight of his shackles.  Abstaining from the poison perhaps his mind clears a bit, and he considers what he refused to consider before.  Maybe he allows God's grace to touch his reason.  Then, for the first time in his life, he tastes the freedom that comes of knowing that God alone can and will unshackle him -- if he asks to be released.

This, as a believer in God who was once a believer in Man, I know to be true.

THE HOUSE THAT GOD BUILT

Recently I encountered a curious argument made by some atheists to deny the existence of God.  Christians (as do Jews and Muslims) state that God is the creator of the universe.  They argue that this belief is supported by the evidence that:  [1] The universe is a finite entity that had a beginning, thus it had a cause (i.e., it was created), and [2] the universe has characteristics conducive to our existence that pure chance cannot account for, thus it was designed (i.e., its creator was intelligent).  The atheist argument counters this by denying that the universe was caused, or created, and that which is not created does not require a creator.

The Christian argument is easy enough to understand.  Picture the universe as a house.  A house has a purpose.  It provides shelter and comfort.  To fulfill that purpose, the house needs to be planned to that end, and then built according to the plan.  Now picture God as the architect and builder of the house.  As such God is external to, independent of, and superior to His work.  There exists God and distinct from Him exists His creation, the universe:  The house that God built for us.  A Christian no more confuses God with the universe than he would confuse a builder with a house.  The builder exists prior to and outside of the house.  He is not part of the house.  He is not dependent upon it.  The same goes for God’s relationship with the universe.

Yet, the curious atheist argument against this denies that the universe was created, because the universe is everything that ever existed.  Because a creator must exist apart from his creation, and because the universe is everything, nothing exists apart from the universe, and so there is no place for a creator of the universe to exist.  Thus, by definition, the universe can have no creator.  In short, the atheist equates the universe to reality.  The Christian demurs.  While the word universe can be loosely used to mean reality, when he uses the word in relationship to God, he means that bubble of space-time we live within and its contents, namely man and nature.  So, the Christian does not use the word universe metaphorically like the atheist.  He uses it concretely to identify that astronomical structure called the cosmos and all that dwells within it.  He means something definite by it, which has a beginning and boundaries.  That is to say, the universe is caused.  It is created.

The difference between the atheist and Christian on this score can be boiled down to this:  The atheist says R = U, where reality is R and the universe is U.  The Christian says R = G + U, where God is G.  The Christian justifies his statement by observation of the universe, which:  [1] Indicates that it is not eternal and so caused, and [2] reveals the marks of craftsmanship and so was caused by an intelligent agent.  Therefore, both creator and creation exist.  Now let’s turn to the curious thing about the atheist’s statement.  He does not premise it upon observation of the universe.  It arises from a philosophical maxim, the primacy of existence.  At face value this maxim declares that to be real, a part of reality, a thing must exist.  That’s true but trivial.  God and His creation both exist; they are both parts of reality.  So how does the atheist’s invocation of the primacy of existence refute R = G + U in favor of R = U?

He does so by making the maxim non-trivial.  He imports substance into it by making an assumption about the relationship between matter and consciousness.  When an atheist states that existence is primary, he is stating that matter exists prior to consciousness.  He supports this statement by arguing that consciousness cannot exist unless there already exists something else to be conscious of.  According to him that “something else” must be matter, because a consciousness conscious of only itself is conscious of nothing.  (Briefly, this is begging the question.  The atheist is excluding from argument what the Christian states is necessary to God:  A realm beyond the universe in which the requirements for the existence of consciousness may differ from that within the universe.)  Thus, the primacy of existence means the primacy of matter.  Because our universe of matter plainly exists, we need no other explanation of why it exists or how it came to exist.  The brute fact that it does suffices.  Consciousness exists as a derivative of matter.  Consequently, the atheist argues that to believe that a consciousness, such as God, exists prior to or apart from the universe is to put the cart before the horse.

All of which is a roundabout way of making the case for materialism – and a rationalistic case at that.  Facts do matter, and the Christian argument that God is the creator of the universe has the virtue of accounting for the facts established by science and commonsense.  Of course, in doing so, the Christian opens the door to a realm beyond the universe, the supernatural, God.  Situated as we are here within the universe, we cannot obtain direct knowledge of God without revelation.  However, we can draw conclusions about Him from those marks of craftsmanship He left upon the universe in the same manner as we may learn about the builder of a house from examining his work.  Thus, starting empirically from a foundation of fact about the universe, a Christian can use his reason to get a glimpse as to the nature of God.

In contrast, the atheist offers no explanation for the facts of the universe and justifies this failure to do so by rationalizing a primacy of matter.  This will not do.  For instance, the existence of life within the universe is a profound fact, for which the primacy of matter provides no account.  Nor does it shine even the dimmest light upon other facts such as the existence of consciousness, reason, and free will within the universe.  Finally, it is silent regarding the highly peculiar characteristics of the universe that have made it habitable for conscious, rational, volitional creatures such as human beings.  The primacy of matter comes down to nothing more than an assertion by the atheist that matter must be the cause of it all, because if a consciousness superior to the universe were, then that consciousness must be God.

As I said at the outset, this atheist argument is a curious one.  This is because the ones who make it pride themselves as hard-headed realists and men of science who will have no truck with the superstition that is religion.  Yet they take it as an article of faith that matter and not God is the cause of all that there is and blissfully ignore how their materialism negates as nonsense free will, morality, beauty, and transcendence of our mortal coil.  Moreover, they possess a stubborn lack of interest in how the wonders of life, consciousness, reason, and free will came about and thrive in, at least, our little corner of the universe.  Their mantra is that science will somehow explain all this, if not now, eventually.  Their most unscientific faith in the revelatory powers of science would be charming if it were not for the accompanying lack of gratitude for the house God built for them.

HOW AYN RAND TAUGHT ME TO BE A CHRISTIAN

The proprietor of SOLO Passion, New Zealand radio and t.v. host Lindsay Perigo, invited me to post an article on his web forum for Objectivists about why I am a Catholic.  I accepted and wrote this personal narrative about how, as it happened, that the writings of the founder of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, had influenced me in an important way to become a Christian.  You can see from the comments section that quite a firestorm ensued and is still raging.   If you have the fortitude to wade through the nonsense and the insane hatred of some of my respondents, I think you'll find some worthwhile discussion in response to my article.