The League of Bearded Catholics

Nature and Nature's God

Long story short: I've been overwhelmed with work the last several weeks and so apologize yet again for the appalling lack of beardful bloggage. All this apologizing is doing wonders for my humilty, though. I'm getting humbler and humbler, and am now probably more humble than most people I know.

I offer, then, this mediatation on our experience of God in nature, and how I think that may be different from natural science. This is lifted from an ongoing thread at the Christian Pipe Smokers forum;

 

Nature moves one toward belief in God and is reasonably used to support belief in God, but seen narrowly as a strictly scientific question, it lacks the kind of certainty that science seeks. The finite things of the world can not adequately prove the existence of an infinite God, as if you could write it down in an equation... "X+YxZ = God"

Philosophically, one can work out that an unmoved mover must exist, but that is more like pure reason, not a matter of testable scientific hypotheses, because there is no scientific proof even that reason means anything. Science is again, too small to address such questions. Science is contingent on reason and on the relaibility of our sense experiences.

Of course, the tragedy of the modern age is that science has been divorced from the kind of philosophical/metaphysical grounding that would make it really fruitful for the happiness and betterment of mankind. We "progress" scientifically, but are no better for it, and no happier.
I think that when St. Paul said "...since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." it's pretty unlikely he was thinking about science . The presence and glory of God are manifest in nature, even for those (perhaps especially for those) with little or no scientific understanding of what they are seeing.

I look at the universe and see it less as a mechanism and much more as a work of art. Science can tell us nothing about the meaning of the Pieta , or of Beethoven's Ode to Joy , or whether The Lord of the Rings movies do justice to the books. These are human experiences that are simply opaque to science.

I think the experience of the presence of God in nature is of this kind of character, and is beyond the (comparatively) narrow, dull certainties of a laboratory or supercomputer.

Discoveries of natural science can certainly multiply these opportunities to see God in nature (look at the photos from the Hubble telescope, or from electron microscopes), but I don't believe a scientist has any advantage in that regard over an aborigine watching the sun set.

Is Jon Stewart Reading Chesterton?

If not... is he ready to?

Here he is talking about Glenn Beck (from a recent NPR interview);

The beautiful thing about what he does is, it's very difficult to argue with his facts. It's the conclusions [that are problematic]. ... It's that slippery slope. ... So what you do is, you just grab together facts and put them together and then do a grab bag of conclusions. Everything is discovered as evidence of secret plots, of secret things that could be occurring.

This reminds me of a classic passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy;

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

Disclaimer; I am not saying Glenn Beck is a lunatic. However, he does have what seem to be some pretty looney ideas, which a disturbing number of people seem to accept as real explanations of the world and the state of our Republic at present. Why is it that, far from tempering the excesses of the other,  the Right and Left so often end up mirroring one another's most ghastly mental traits?

Oh, wait. C.S Lewis nailed that one;

Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate each other.

Or, as he noted regarding his semi-biographical allegory The Pilgrim's Regress;

The attack on the soul from north and south represent, in Lewis's words, "equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other."

So... evil is a two party system, where we are allowed the tormentor of our choice. And that passes for freedom.

Incidentally, The Pilgrim's Regress was my first exposure ever to C.S. Lewis and the first chapter had me howling with laughter, in recognition of my own confused religious upbringing. Not that this was anyone's fault, but so much of my boyhood grasp of the Gospel boiled down to this (from the aforementioned chapter 1);

...it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext.

A Culture Against Culture - Continued Ramblings

This got too long for the combox.

Reader Artaban writes (in response to this post),

"I would argue there was a common religion--insofar as it was Judeo-Christian."

There was certainly a greater commonality of outlook, though I think both Jews and Christians would agree that "Judeo-Christian" is not a religion, but a kind of cultural penumbra. It was the culture that flowed from Christianity with its Jewish roots, but it was not The Thing itself.

There were always those who were agreeable enough with the moral assumptions and outlook of the Faith, but who also did not hold that faith themselves. They coasted, more or less, on the philosophical momentum of Christendom, with little complaint.

But there was no *official* provision made to maintain this Judeo-Christian cultural prominence. I think the founders assumed that it would continue, but they made no real provision to assure that it would. For instance, though the Ten Commandments are enshrined in stone on the great frieze atop the steps of the Supreme Court, they are nowhere in our founding documents.

This is not to say that a Christian basis for law and government would require that any individual profess the Christian faith. It is just a matter of stating plainly, "The laws of our land are based on the Ten Commandments and on Christian principles of natural law. You need not believe or practice any religion, but you will follow the law." I don't think any reasonable person could have much of a problem with that, just as any reasonable person would abide by the laws and customs of a foreign country when visiting (unless they flat-out contradicted one's own fundamental morals, or positively compelled one to do evil).

The founders were so skittish, so anxious about the effects of organized religion (most especially anything like the Catholic Church) on the state, that they insulated the Republic from any such direct religious influence. I don't think they could have imagined the full-frontal assault on religion that has taken place in the last century. The primacy of Christian thought was so secure, in their minds, that they believed they could get by without explicitly favoring it. They were counting on its continued influence. George Washington said, "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

But no official measures were taken to preserve religious principle. It was assumed. The elephant in our national living room.

It was Sola Scriptura, Enlightenment thinking. Every man his own magisterium. What could go wrong?

So... now we are reduced to battling it out among our various tribes, seeing who can get the upper hand politically from season to season, seeing who can sway the masses a little one way or the other. Morality by referendum, and principles that change with the weather.

Hail, Hail, Squirrelandia!

...Land of the Brave and Free-e-e-e-e-e!

 
Squirrel sejant erect, courtesy of the Hesburgh Libraries at The University fo Notre Dame

Considering that we have been a sovereign nation for some time now, it is a national embarrassment that we, as yet, have no flag. The idea had been delegated to a native artist of renown, but she has apparently been busily occupied with schoolwork and some ongoing Manga projects, and the banner of our homeland has languished in neglect.

In an effort to move things along and perhaps inspire some fresh thought, I have been conducting intense research into the noble tradition of heraldry, with a mind to establish some basic design for the flag. Clearly, a squirrel must figure prominently, but how best to present it?

I should have guessed that the idea of a heraldric squirrel was nothing new. A number of examples can be found on this newfangled interwebs, and already the concept begins to take shape.

In fairness to the population, I think they should have some input as to the precise character of the sciurus carolinensis represented forever on our glorious flag, and so several styles will be presented for consideration... but the example at the top of this post finds favor with the current regent. I like that it's showing its claws...it looks like it might be rabid. After all, we Squirrelandians may be a small, cuddly sort of people, but don't underestimate our ferocity when cornered... or before we've had our coffee of a morning.

Every family ought to have a coat of arms, and every home ought to be a sovereign homeland. What kind of flag would come nearest to truly representing your family? Well, get to work, man!

Backing into Father Brown

Most people, I believe, come to the writing of G.K. Chesterton through his Father Brown mysteries. I have done G.K.C. all backwards, only lately having read much of the exploits of his sagacious little priest/detective.

I remain a greater fan of Chesterton's non-fiction and poetry, but in the Father Brown stories have enjoyed Chesterton more just for his brilliant prose.

Chesterton sets the stage for The Sign of the Broken Sword;

The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of the heartless Scandinavian hell, a hell of incalculable cold.

The story is worth reading for the first paragraph alone.

Another example reminds us that Chesterton is thought to have suffered bouts of depression now and then. From the opening scene of The Perishing of the Pendragons;

He heard the most trivial things and the most important with the same tasteless absorption... All these trivialities Brown heard and saw; but heard them as a tired man hears a tune in the railway wheels or saw them as a sick man sees the pattern of his wall-paper.

I think we've all been there at some point.

Reading these tales intended for a broad, secular audience helps me to appreciate a little more how many who would reject his philosophy might still cherish him simply as a writer.