John C. Wright's Journal

This is a revised and expanded version of a prior column

I am haunted by a sense that the End Times are nigh.

It is as if the battle lines are being drawn, and the No Man’s Land between Heaven and Hell is shrinking day by day, hour by hour. There will be no Switzerland in the next world war. Every soul is being forced to take a side.

I am shocked at how open Uncle Screwtape is being: we have apparently given the forces of evil reason to be confident enough, insolent enough, to drop all pretense. Meanwhile the hatred and contempt toward all that is normal and wholesome and healthy grows and grows.

The room for compromise, for mutual toleration, the possibility of ambiguity, all are narrowing, shrinking, vanishing. Everyone not for Christ is against Him.

Sanity vanishes. Now madness reigns.

I am old enough to remember a time when one could have a rational conversation with a Liberal. There were people who had rejected God, but who had not rejected love of truth or thirst for justice.

They had some sort of argument to make based on some sort of facts, framed in a shared moral view.

Those days are gone.

I have recently read an essay by an activist affirming that aborticide, the slaying of one’s one child in the womb, was always justified as an act of self defense, on the grounds that the growing child took nutriment from the mother, and offered risks to health and wellbeing akin to a mortal threat. The right of self defense ergo always justifies the slaying of any inconvenient dependent. So the argument ran.

Anyone who defines being a mammal as being a victim of violence in order to justify a mom murdering her innocent baby is beyond the reach of rational conversation.

Now they have nothing. They believe in nothing.

The reject the notion of truth: all is narrative.

They reject logic: reasoning is patriarchy.

They reject morality: only vice is virtuous.

They reject love, preferring adultery and homosex.

They reject life, preferring aborticide, euthanasia.

They reject beauty: see any modern art museum.

They reject liberty, preferring totalitarianism.

They reject civilization, preferring barbarism.

They reject happiness.

They reject God.

What is left?

Nothing.

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From a remark in the comments. I thought it worthy of emphasis, so I repost it here as a guest post.

This is something I used to point out. Every belief system has to have an answer for the question “If I’m right, why doesn’t everyone else agree with me?”

For atheists this is especially pertinent, because the overwhelming majority of humanity from all other belief systems disagrees with them on the existence of the transcendent and supernatural.

There’s only one answer to this question that’s available to the atheist, namely “Because I’m more intelligent/rational/intellectually brave than everyone else.”

The problem is, this answer is completely nonsensical given the anti-teleological premises of atheism. From a Christian standpoint, God made man in His Image, and this entails man being a rational animal endowed by God with a faculty of reason, which has a natural end of ascertaining truth and distinguishing it from falsehood by perceiving and employing universal and inviolable laws of logic.

Since human reason has a real, objective, God-given function of ascertaining truth according to Christian theology, it makes sense that certain people who have been gifted with a more powerful rational faculty than the average would be especially adept at penetrating deep mysteries of reality than others, a gift that they could employ to great good or great ill, to honest seeking of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or to construction of elaborate sophistries to deceive and spiritually wound themselves and others.

But from an atheistic point of view, human beings are nothing more than purposeless meat robots, mere bundles of atoms cobbled together purely by accident. Our rational faculties were not made for discerning objective truth, nor for anything at all. At most one might argue that meat robots with larger amounts of squishy grey stuff inside their skulls ended up capturing prey or evading predators more successfully on average than meat robots with less of it, but it does not follow (and does not make sense) that the amount of squishy gray stuff inside a meat robot’s head somehow magically gives that meat robot greater access (or any access) to universal and inviolable abstract laws of logic, nor to truthful propositions about the origin of the cosmos or the ultimate nature of reality or really anything.

In short, atheism relies on the idea that atheists are more intelligent and rational than everyone else, but at the same time it fatally undermines any basis by which intelligence and rationality might be said to correlate with knowledge of objective truth about reality.

The prejudice claiming atheists are smarter than monotheists is one I used to hold. A very easy temptation to fall into, since one needs an explanation for why, if the truth of atheism is so obvious, only a small number of like-minded people happen to know it.
It plays into the old Gnostic idea that a few enlightened folk have the secret knowledge of the cosmos, and everyone else is a lesser being. The ego then becomes wedded to the ideology, and ideology becomes immune to question — humility is the only defense against this insidious psychological bit of self-brainwashing, and humility is in short supply among atheists.

I saw a list of short testimonies by souls who had converted or reverted to Catholicism. This one stood out to me, by a man named Michael:

I came from Buddhism family. Buddhism is almost entirely individualistic. For example, I’m deaf. In Buddhistic thinking, my deafness’ the result of my punishment from my bad karma. I must have done evil things in my previous life to become deaf in this current life.

But in Catholicism, my deafness’ not the result of the sin (John 9:1-3). God made me deaf so that the works of God’s power might be displayed through me. So I realize that it’s the gift of my cross that Jesus gave me in my birth, and called me to follow Him. So the world knows that I’m His disciple.

Another one is individuality. In Buddhism, I’m Michael here in this life. If I die, I may be reborn as another person with different name, or animal or even bug (imagine being reborn as dung beetle that eats feces). In short, I don’t have individuality and buddha can’t save or help me. He just left his teachings and said, “It’s your problem. But it’s just temporary. Just meditate on my teachings, and it will go away.”

But in Catholicism, God made me who I am. I’m still Michael after death. I’m still Michael when I go to Heaven and unite with God. I’m still Michael after resurrection.

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‘Nothing comes from nothing’ is an axiom without which scientific reasoning, or any reasoning, is impossible.

If entropy is irreversible, the cosmos has an origin point: the Big Bang.

The options are:

1. Creation came from nothing for no cause.
   or
2. Creation was created by the Creator.

Option one violates the axiom of all reason.

The only counterargument I know is from Stephen Hawking, who speculates that time and space both come into existence at the Big Bang, and therefore there is no “before” before creation, any more than there is “further north” from the North Pole. This argument, however, merely produces the same problem at one remove.

If no natural event can “cause” time to begin on the grounds that cause and effect only exist within time, the only options are:

1. Creation came from nothing for no cause.
   or
2. Creation came from nothing for no natural cause; therefore the cause was supernatural.

And this all men know to be God.

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“Prove God exists”

To prove a proposition means to provide evidence in logical sequence sufficient to convince a rational judge freely to assent to the truth of the proposition.

This is impossible in a cosmos without free will. All things in nature are determined by necessity. Therefore free will is supernatural.

All natural biological process are determined by mechanical molecular motions, including brain processes. Therefore rational thought is supernatural.

Rational thought operates by laws of logic, which are purely formal, and exist without duration, location or extension. All things in nature have duration, location, extension. Therefore the laws of logic are supernatural.

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from HEGEL AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION from Glenn Alexander Magee (2001)

“The Enlightenment quest for universal knowledge and power over nature led to a revival of mysticism and occultism, for these had always promised to deliver just those boons…”

CS Lewis, in hid famous tract THE ABOLITION OF MAN,  also notes the kinship between the Enlightenment sage at the altar of science and the Esoteric mage in the alchemists’ cave.

“The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.”

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The “God of the Gaps” idea is fundamentally wrong and absurd. Men did not invent God as a scientific theory to explain the motions of stars or the source of lightning.

Men had mechanical explanations for nature since Anaxagoras. Nor does any evidence for or against God increase or decrease if any scientific theory is more complete or less complete in codifying these mechanical explanations.

Ptolemy and Galileo, Brahe and Copernicus all believed divine forces made the heavens, but thought they were made in an orderly fashion, and could be described mathematically. Newton’s breakthrough was to show the local motions on earth were governed by the same three laws, from which Kepler’s could be deduced.

Then Newton wrote on Biblical prophecy.

The “God of the Gaps” exists nowhere but in the imagination of crackpots like Voltaire, who cannot argue against religion as it actually is, and so must stuff a silly strawman version of religion to act as a whipping dummy, one with no power to fight back.

Darwin proposed a farfetched (and unscientific) theory to explain that man arise by unintentional natural process out of apes, and apes out of earlier, simpler mammals, who arose from simpler forms yet. But even those who claim an amoeba is the father of all life cannot explain how elements in the sea leaped together to form the genetic machinery more complex than a space shuttle.

Nor can they explain how one species gives rise to another while keeping all the changed genes and organs in coherent harmony with all the unchanged genes and organs, without any directing plan, process, or rational scheme. Merely saying it takes a long time means nothing.

The idea that “God in the Gaps” only exists before people read Darwin is silly — only those who flee the Church and read the Bible with leaden literalness insist that Adam rose from the dust on a Friday, rather than over aeons with many intermediate steps.

The miracle and wonder is not one whit less, whether one says Adam rose from the dust directly, or indirectly.

The point of the passage is that we return to dust when we die. On that point, science has nothing to say.

Or is this whole argument an argument that some passages of the Bible are to be read literally, and others figuratively? We always knew that. Unless you think God is a physical person who sits atop the sky-dome and has nostrils, wings, hand and ear, and so on, you know passages of the scripture are sacramental, visible signs of invisible reality.

Oh, indeed, there are people who might lose their faith if they discover God is more mysterious and complex in His craftsmanship than He said to Moses, and His world more filled with wonders.

They are people who are too easily deceived, and too lazy to study the catechism. It is not as if the Church has not answered questions like this since the reign of Augustus.

Are we astonished God did not put the periodic table of elements into the Ten Commandments, or the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem? Truly, I tell you, that if He had done so, the atheist would dismiss it as a manmade writing, just as the dismiss the Ten Commandments as manmade.

When things that no human could possibly know are in fact revealed in the scripture, such as a the council of divine beings reported in the Book of Job, and the answer, or at least the questions, no merely human mind can comprehend unaided, these they likewise dismiss as manmade, and, worse, call them fictions, or say such things are written for sinister purposes: the Golden Rule is the Opiate of the masses , or somesuch nonsense.