Battle of the Narratives

"The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion." Proverbs 28:1 

I have this "book club" thing with my man children where they designate a novel for us to read and then we discuss it together once we're finished, usually at the next family gathering since we all live miles apart. 

Last year it was Steinbeck's East of Eden which was thoroughly engaging because of all of the spiritual questions tracing back to creation, original sin, and the human will. I love digging into that stuff. We've read Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood," Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes," and on deck is Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." 

Dear Parents, read to your kids daily and take them to the library often; in an economy full of inflation, it is an activity that is still free, but yields precious dividends. However, don't be surprised if they grow up to be smarter than you. Just go with it. 

Both man children along with my nephew Joey who is a well-read English major and always thick in the literary discussions on my front porch, say Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel of all time. And believe me it's a hill they're all willing to die on. 

I have to admit that in the last five years, I've heard many teachers, professors, and podcasters say the same thing; however, after a couple of false starts with the massive Russian novel and the consideration of my learning curve, I was granted permission to work my way into The Brothers K. by beginning first with Crime and Punishment. 

I'm half way into the book and already I'm seeing an apologetic argument for the biblical narrative. It's intriguing to me how much of life reflects God's story and speaks into ours when we have eyes to see and ears to hear although I'm sure Dostoevsky planned it this way. But again, why? 

I'm not sure how the novel ends so there's no spoiler alert here. If you've read it you know that the reader is plunged into the mind of a convoluted killer, the protagonist Raskolnikov, an impoverished law school student who thinks himself something of a superman above the law. Even before he goes through with the murder of a cantankerous pawnbroker, he's overcome by a fever and all kinds of fits and creepy dreams just in the devising stage; the madness, which continues in intensity after the crime, is more of a spiritual variety than medical. 

I'm seeing that the "punishment" in "Crime and Punishment" is not the kind carried out so much by a criminal justice system, but the sentence handed down by one's own conscience and self-deceptions. So I have to stop and ask: Where does all of this guilt, shame, and remorse come from?  Can naturalism produce such things? 

I've established in past blogs that no one can make an airtight argument for whether God exists or not; neither set of beliefs can be proven empirically. So it begs the question: "Can I believe in something that I can't prove?" 

"Yes."

"How so?" 

We can look at the biblical narrative,  namely "Christianity" and naturalism or what is usually referred to as "secularism" and compare them. ( You may do this with any religion or set of beliefs. Since I'm arguing for Christianity, I'll stick with it. Historically, especially since Darwinism came on the scene, these two faiths are the most debated and pitted against each other. ) 

Yes, secularism is a "faith." Because you can't prove that matter just spontaneously occurred without contingency, and that God doesn't exist, this belief must be taken on faith. You have faith that God doesn't exist and the material world is all there is. 

You are not subtracting God out of the equation and so left with no belief, but instead, you're just swapping one belief for another. ( Charles Taylor is a secular philosopher and takes an honest approach to this issue in his book "A Secular Age" if you are curious and want to learn more. ) 

So even though we don't have an airtight argument on either side, we can compare faiths by asking ourselves a series of questions: First, I can ask if my human experience fits my faith. In other words, is my faith livable? Can I live out my faith? 

Humans are born with certain needs. We need a strong identity, one that can support the weight of our selfhood, not dependent on our merits, achievements, and goodness. We need meaning and a way to deal with suffering. We need satisfaction, purpose, and hope. 

Inside of our hearts we know that we have a sense of morality and justice, and when we go against it, as if secularism is true, saying that there's no right or wrong, so I can make up my own truths, like the murderer Raskoinkov in Crime and Punishment, the results are disastrous because ideas do have consequences. 

We know the world is not as it should be, and that for all our social programs, education, and government systems, utopia has never come and never will. Not here. Inside we know this. 

We see glimpses of goodness, of what the world could be, of what we could be, and we know it must be transcendent. We long for all of creation to be set right. We experience it whenever we watch a movie or read a novel in a "happy ending itch" that longs to be scratched.  

Why would evolution, a process where the strong eats the weak, that randomly moves along without rhyme or reason or intelligent motive, cause us to eventually love each other and experience guilt, shame, and remorse when we didn't? If there's no transcendent being that has set a moral order into creation and I can simply decide what is right or wrong for myself, why do I feel this guilt when I don't obey the moral code?  I'm not baking my conclusion into the premise; this is simply what evolution states. 

And if you listen carefully to the secular argument, you'll find often times that atheists borrow from the Christian faith to explain things in their faith, especially our sense of morality and justice. That's not playing by the rules, is it? If you have to borrow from another set of beliefs to explain your own set of beliefs, well, your faith isn't very consistent or sustainable. It's not livable. It's not going to hold you up. 

The biblical narrative offers answers that fit these needs and can be lived out. 

While it's a huge stretch to believe that evolutionary processes could cause love to develop after cannibalism and then guilt and shame when we don't love or worse, the Christian narrative explains not only where this guilt and shame originates in the doctrine of original sin, but gives us a way to be rid of it in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. 

These are clues. Don't ignore them. 

They are also fair questions, I believe, and ones that help us to sort through and make sense of the existential fear that thrusts us into the depths of despair when we allow ourselves to think that we have no purpose and that nothing we do here matters, or there is no right or wrong, or the love I feel for my family and friends and my precious grandchildren is just an illusion my brain creates to help me survive.

I'm sorry, but everything inside of me screams against this nonsense, and I believe it does in you as well. Why? Why do you think our heart pushes back against this argumentation? Our rebellion against naturalism is another clue we mustn't ignore. 

I have read accounts where atheists, including Thomas Nagel, a well-known philosopher and professor at New York University, instruct their readers struggling with this despair to "just not think about it." This doesn't match the story inside of me that clawed in the darkness to break out into the light. In fact C.S. Lewis said that if we are experiencing this kind of despair, we're not thinking enough. 

I fear if we keep ignoring the yearnings and clues inside of us, either quelling the pain or refusing to investigate the philosophical evidence for Christianity as well as the physical, we will suppress the truth for so long and so hard, in the final analysis, we will convince ourselves the false narrative is the truthful one. What happens if we never have the intellectual integrity to look at the data and listen? 

Self-deception. 

One reality is that some of us simply don't want it to be true. 

If there's a God, that implies that I'm not the one in the driver's seat, the one who gets to call the shots. At least have the integrity to admit this. That makes more sense than believing evolution which now more than a century after Darwin hasn't unfolded the evidence that Darwin himself said should be uncovered in time to prove the theory. It hasn't. 

However many universities unlike back in the day are no longer requiring science majors to take ethics or philosophy classes, so the students are never forced to examine the big questions of life like meaning, purpose or morality. Naturalism is taught from the get-go, and that is a conclusion baked into the premise like a casserole. 

If you're a Christian, I encourage you to embrace the apologetic aspects of our faith as well. It can strengthen our faith, equip us to better defend it, and reveal delightful surprises along the journey. 

All of us have to investigate the clues and decide for ourselves. 

Listen to the story inside of you - does secularism or the biblical narrative better fit what your heart knows is true? That you were created for something more; you were created for something this world can not supply. You were created by and for God, to live with him forever. 

Listen. 

💜