Tag Archives: G. K. Chesterton

Theology

Is Your Church Open-Minded?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Recently my wife and I were in Charleston, SC on a weekend getaway. If you’ve never been to Charleston, it is famous for its horse-drawn carriage rides around the historic downtown area of the city. We took one of these carriage rides and had a great time listening to our guide as we meandered through the sights of Charleston.

One thing the guide said to us, though, provoked me. He was commenting on the various churches in the city, and he mentioned that he preferred the more open-minded churches in the city and he recommended a couple of them to us if we wanted to attend a service Sunday morning.

My wife also caught his comments and we started talking later about what he meant. Given our extended conversations with him, it became clear that he was referring to the liberal Episcopal churches in Charleston as more open-minded, and the conservative Baptist churches as, well, not.

What I found interesting is that the guide assumed that a person’s first criterion for choosing a church is that it should be open-minded. That strikes me as so odd. My first criterion for choosing a church is the following: Are they teaching the truth about God? 

G. K. Chesterton once said, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” I am far more concerned with knowing what a church has shut its mind on than what it has opened it to.

Churches are supposed to teach us about ultimate reality, about God himself. They are supposed to addressed the most serious questions that human beings face in this life and the next. What churches teach have a tremendous impact on our morality, wisdom, and final destinies.

So why in the world would I want to attend a church that is open-minded about all those things? I want answers. I want the truth because I want my life to conform to the way the world really is. An open-minded church is a church that is failing to serve its congregation.

Is your church open-minded about God, sin, the afterlife, morality, and justice? If so, then get out of there as quick as you can. You have chosen badly.

General Apologetics

Before You Throw Out a Tradition, Know Why It Was There in the First Place

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

We’ve been talking recently about how conservatives tend to stand more firmly on tradition, whereas progressives and libertarians tend to be more willing to toss aside tradition. It is obvious that not all traditions should be maintained because the original circumstance for which the tradition was established no longer exists.

For example, if there was a tradition established that all roads should be at least 8 horse widths wide to accommodate horse-driven wagons moving in opposite directions, then we could safely drop this tradition when the time came that very few horse driven wagons were on the roads any more.

For those of us who think that a particular tradition should be undone, G. K. Chesterton has some very sound advice from his book The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Before you advocate the undoing of a long-held tradition, you had better be sure that you understand why the tradition exists. Don’t tear a fence down when you don’t even know why it’s there. I don’t think this is too much to ask. If you can clearly articulate why the tradition is in place, you can make your case for why circumstances have changed and why the tradition is no longer needed.

Human Nature

Is the History of Man Simply the History of Economics?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Karl Marx certainly thought so.  Even today, the idea of economics being the only important driving  force behind all human activities is still fashionable in some circles.  Although economics certainly plays a part in many human decisions, I hardly think it is the primary motive  for human behavior.  I would point to religion, morality, knowledge, power, and other factors as being more important.

Sticking with our G. K. Chesterton theme, below is a quote where he decries Marx’s theory in typical Chesterton-esque style:

The [Marxist] theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed.  It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.  It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

Man cannot live without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne.

But it is such movements that make up the story of mankind and without them there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading.

Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar title.

But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off.  It will be hard to maintain that the Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-grounds.  It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south.

And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic history would not even be history.

Evolution

What Can We Know About Prehistoric Man? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 , we started looking at G. K. Chesterton’s commentary on the zeal of paleontologists of his day.  Chesterton noted that there is a definite and often ignored difference between the science of paleontology and empirical sciences such as aerodynamics.  In part 2, we hear more from Chesterton on the extrapolations he saw in his day:

For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow.

He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful.

But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered.

No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all.

The historical sciences, as we have pointed out many times on this blog, operate very differently than the empirical sciences.  We are far more certain about the laws of aerodynamics than the activities of Homo erectus.  One we can test with live experimentation, and the other we cannot.

Let me be clear that I am not saying that historical sciences give us no knowledge about the past.  Paleontology, as an example, can tell us many interesting things about prehistoric life.  What I and Chesterton are saying is that there are much larger error bars on what paleontology tells us than what the science of aerodynamics tells us.  The interpretation of the data from paleontology is far less sure than the data from aerodynamics.  It behooves the scientific community to make these differences clear.

Evolution

What Can We Know About Prehistoric Man? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

It never ceases to amaze me that a certain breed of skeptic will believe everything presented in an hour-long History Channel program about an alleged prehistoric ancestor of Homo sapiens – all of it based on a couple fossils – and yet believe nothing in the voluminous written historical records contained in the Bible.

I have seen hours of TV programming that presents prehistoric man doing all sorts of things which are virtually impossible to derive with any certainty from fossils.  Entire animation departments render complete anatomical drawings of man’s ancestors with only partial skulls and teeth to go by.  Where does all the skepticism go when these far-fetched fairy tales are aired?

Although G. K. Chesterton is not a paleontologist, I appreciated his description of this same issue from the early twentieth century.  He was seeing the same kinds of wild extrapolations that I am seeing today.  Here are his thoughts on this issue, from the book The Everlasting Man:

Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make.

An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree.

He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones.

In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.

But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

More from Chesterton in part 2, and some closing remarks about the whole issue of historical sciences.

Human Nature

How Is Man Exceptional?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

G. K. Chesterton, in one of his masterpieces, The Everlasting Man, writes a powerful defense of something which should not need a defender.  That man is truly exceptional seems exceptionally obvious to all but the most unexceptional.  Here is Chesterton summing up his case in a way that only he can:

It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things.  But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry.  The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.  In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. 

He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage.  He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts.  He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple.  He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture.  His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations.  Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.  Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. 

Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique. . . . It is not natural to see man as a natural product.  It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore.  It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal.  It is not sane.  It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality.

I agree with Chesterton.  To see man as a purely natural product of blind nature is insanity.

Human Nature

Why Is Man Unique?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the chief answers that Christianity provides is the answer to the question: “Why is man unique?”  The Bible answers this question right at the start in the Book of Genesis.  Man is unique because man is the only earthly creature made in the image of the Creator himself.  No other creature can make this claim, or make any claim at all.

Among most anti-theists, there is the notion that the appearance of  man in history was merely a fluke of random mutation and natural selection, and that man is not actually that unique.  He is just slightly further along the evolutionary expressway than the rest of the animal kingdom.  Give the other animals time and they will catch up or even surpass man.  In fact, if we roll back the process of evolution and try it again, the results would have been quite different.  We can imagine other animals taking man’s place in the hierarchy of life. 

G. K. Chesterton, in his book Everlasting Man, runs the thought experiment of what it might have been like for other animals to ascend.

If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can, if we choose, make a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal.  An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus.  A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers.  We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet.

We can certainly imagine a great many diverse evolutionary paths, but what actually happened is far more fascinating.  Chesterton reminds us:

Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must face an exception and a prodigy. . . . [If] we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light.

The arrival of man on the scene is surely one of the greatest mysteries that faces us.  Most everyone, according to Chesterton, grants that there is a great mystery in the origin of the universe and another great mystery in the origin of life.  But Chesterton points to a third mystery:

Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself.  In other words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will.  Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.  That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact.  But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than if he were standing on his head.

Human Nature

The Distance Between Man and Everything Else

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most striking evidences for the Christian God is the uniqueness of man among all of the animals.  God exalts in The Book of Genesis, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  The Bible dramatically lifts man over the remainder of creation.

G. K. Chesterton, in his book  The Everlasting Man, wonders what the world would be like if other animals reached the heights of man in this passage:

If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus. A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light.

Nobody says things quite like Chesterton does.

Evolution, Human Nature

G. K. Chesterton: Monkeys, Dogs, and Horses Don’t Draw Pictures

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the opening pages of G. K. Chesterton’s classic The Everlasting Man , he explores the implications of prehistoric cave paintings discovered by modern-day humans.  What do these paintings tell us about primitive man?  Is he merely an advanced ape (as in the evolutionary account) or is there a real difference in kind between man and the rest of the animal kingdom?  Below is an excerpt:

But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces.  It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree.  For in the plain matter like the [cave paintings] there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree.

Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.  The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race horse a Post-Impressionist.

All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature.  In other words every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone.

Chesterton published this book in 1925 in order to counter the influence of men like H. G. Wells who were increasingly characterizing man as merely different in degree from the rest of the animal kingdom.  This battle is still raging today, 85 years later.

Atheism, General Apologetics, Theology

Does the Size of the Cosmos Render Man Insignificant?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

That is the popular view among materialists (those who deny the existence of anything but the material world).  They beg us look at the sheer immensity of the universe and then look at the tininess of the human race in contrast.  The idea that man is special, that man holds a privileged seat in the cosmos is simply ridiculous, they claim.

The arch-materialist Carl Sagan (as quoted from The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by William Dembski) had these thoughts on the matter:

Because of the reflection of sunlight . . . the earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world.  But it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. . . . Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Does the size of the universe relative to man render him insignificant?  Maybe if you’re a materialist, but not if you’re a Christian.  Scripture declares that God has created man in his image, that man indeed has a special seat of honor in the universe.  Theologically, Christians recognize that the materialist argument fails.  Scientifically, works like The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery demonstrate that the earth is unique in its ability to support advanced life and to enable scientific discovery.

As Dembski points out, G. K. Chesterton wrote one of the most memorable responses to the materialist claim of man’s insignificance in his classic work Orthodoxy.  Here is Chesterton speaking of the materialist Herbert Spencer:

He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God. . . . It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.

What the size of the universe tells us is how awesome God is, not how insignificant man is, for man has always been spatially smaller than what surrounds him (e.g., whales and trees).  As Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.  Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.”