L'Abri 101: The Reality of the Supernatural
(Lecture Syllabus follows the Blurb.)
L'Abri 101: The Reality of the Supernatural
This Summer we are trying something new!
We are beginning our Summer series of lectures with a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of you who have wondered about what makes L'Abri's teaching distinctive or who want to learn more, this will be a good opportunity. Each lecture is stand alone, but if you can attend all five lectures that make up this short course, that would be best. This week we continue with our second theme - what Dr. Schaeffer described as the Reality of the Supernatural.
Greg Jesson's journey from Los Angeles took him to Switzerland, where he studied at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer, back to LA where he earned a BA at UCLA and an MA at USC under Dallas Willard, and finally to the University of Iowa for a Ph.D. in philosophy. Most recently, he was a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Having decided to leave the university, he now spends his time writing, lecturing, restoring an old home, and looking after his dog, Dr. Watson.
Jock McGregor and his wife Alison direct the Rochester L'Abri where they have lived for the past 25 years. They met at Swiss L'Abri and previously worked at English L'Abri for ten years. Jock has a B.Sc. and an M.Div from Regent College in Vancouver. He lectures widely on many topics that bear on the relationship between Christianity and contemporary culture.
Greg Jesson Syllabus as follows:
Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri: #2: The Reality of the Supernatural
Dr. Greg Jesson
gregrjesson@gmail.com
Plan for the Lecture:
1. Opening comments on L’Abri themes
2. Why it’s not a simple matter of evidence. Why? One’s presuppositions and assumptions can greatly determine what one will allow as evidence.
At best, evidence without the true framework produces moderate, and often only temporary, curiosity.
This is why I’m suggesting Following Clues, Signposts, Hints, and Insights
This is Lewis’ point in The Screwtape Letters.
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, Preface
3. Carefully define supernatural
4. Evidence for the supernatural is everywhere. It’s right in front of our faces—we just look right past it. Some examples: our experiences and thoughts, our identity through time, knowledge, abstract realities (truth, logic, math, morality), and finally historical miracles
5. Christianity only makes sense in the context of the supernatural. Demythologizing theologians, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), rejected the miraculous element (“mythical world picture”) in the scriptures, often arguing that they are incompatible with our current scientific understanding of the world, but traditional Christianity has always maintained that the miraculous is only discernable in the context of the common, everyday view of nature. (e.g. when St. Joseph learned Mary was pregnant).
6. L’Abri deliberately attempts to live daily in the reality of the supernatural: prayer, our expectations, our hopes, and our understanding of everything in the context that we each live our lives in the reality of God, Acts 17.28.
The central point in this lecture:
When Ranald Macaulay first heard Francis Schaeffer speak at Cambridge University,
(5 June 1958, Wednesday):
“The supernatural is right here.”
Defining “Supernatural”
The natural and supernatural worlds overlap
Natural world: physical objects and their properties
Supernatural world: minds, experiences, abstract realities (not physical, don’t exist in space)
It appears that some parts of reality are objective while other parts appear to be subjective.
(Logic, mathematics, and the physical objects that make up the subject matter of the various sciences appear to be objective. To conceive of these realms as being subjective, or in some sense mind-dependent, is just to render these realms utterly unintelligible and absurd. However, mathematical and logical objects cannot just be any kind of objective reality. It would be absurd to conceive of mathematical and logical truths as nothing more than mere marks on a sheet of paper.)
The common, everyday world of our experience, consisting primarily of the physical world in space and time is thoroughly intertwined with the supernatural realities including God and human persons, angelic beings, and abstract objects (math, logic, geometry, and universals—Plato’s forms).
The underlying assumption of the entire secular world: everything is physical
Modern connection between empiricism and materialism (naturalism)
Empiricism: All knowledge comes from sense experience, things you can see, touch, taste, hear, and smell. This has to be challenged.
Only three possibilities:
Materialism (Everything is physical)(Weak on the mental)
Dualism (both physical and non-physical, mental things exist) (What is the connection between the two realms?)
Idealism (everything is mental) (weak on the physical)
1926: The Mind and Its Place in the World, by C.D. Broad
The Reality of Minds and Knowledge:
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed:
“If Joy ‘is not’, then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some yet not declared.
But this must be nonsense, vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms? I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.” (pp. 25-26)
Lewis’ point: a person can’t be just a series of chemical and electrical events. More to the point: Lewis himself, having knowledge, can’t simply be a series of brain events.
Is the mind identical to (the same thing as) the brain? (mind=brain)
Are mental states (pains, perceptions, and thoughts) identical to brain states? (mental states=brain states?)
Are there two different things (a mind and a brain) or is there just one thing (mind=brain)?
How Is It Possible to Believe in God?
William F. Buckley, Jr.
“I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, “How is it possible to believe in God?” The imperishable answer was, ‘I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop’… Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief—how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration—near infinite—of natural causes? On the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature’s molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?
The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable by the belief that there was merely a physical cause for them. But how can mindless forces be the ultimate cause of Hamlet? Or, of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?
This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature...”
Materialism and Empiricism Eliminate the Mind (the self):
Here is Hume’s account, which is driven by empiricism. The mind or self gets reduced to experiences.
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” A Treatise of Human Nature, Selby-Bigge edition, p. 252.
“When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions.
’Tis’ the composition [the bundle] of these, therefore, which forms the self.” p. 634.
This is just another way of saying that the mind is identical to the brain (brain=mind) and
(mental events = brain events)
But this has to be wrong.
Leibnitz’s factory: the brain is a giant factory that we could walk through; we never could see experiences
We could have a complete description of the human body and not know that mental events and minds even existed.
In summary:
1.
All mental events are known only by introspection, but no physical objects or events
(the objects and events of science) are known by introspection.
2.
All mental events are of or about something (i.e. exhibit intentionality), but no physical objects or events (the objects and events of science) are of or about anything.
3. Mental events can be known with certainty (incorrigibility), but physical objects and events
cannot be known with certainty.
4. Therefore, mental events are not identical to physical objects or events.
If it appears that there are two things that seem to be completely different the best explanation, given that there is no other direct evidence to the contrary, is that they are different. The burden of proof lies with those that deny that there are two things.
But most people, even Christians, hold onto materialism at all costs. Many Christians are just functional materialists.
At another ministry: “As a neuroscientist I think all those things [sense of self, sense of an overriding purpose, our values and ethics, a sense of continuous identity] and more are inextricably linked to the biology of the brain...The thoughts that guide our lives—our purpose, sense of self, values, etc. are also products of organized patterns of activity in the brain. I don’t see the soul as something separate that lives out there in the ether and has found some way to interact with the brain. Dualistic thinking is very common and easy to slip into without even being aware of it.”
In fact, the author is doing some dualistic thinking of his own. He says that conscious states “are inextricably linked to the biology of the brain” and are “products of organized patterns of activity in the brain.” But, if A causes B, than A and B are not identical. If brain activity causes mental states then brain activity and mental states are not the same thing. In fact, the author is simply outlining the position of Property Dualism: mental states, as opposed to physical states, are properties that are caused by brain activity. Many people have tried to avoid this problematic dualistic conclusion, but the only way to do this seems to be either some form of Eliminative Materialism, in which conscious mental states do not exist (a la´ Churchland or Dennett), or the equally improbable view of Panpsychism in which everything is conscious at some level. These are obviously moves of desperation, but those who hold them understand they are the only consistent way to avoid the bothersome realm of the dualism, which involves the interaction of the non-physical mental with the physical brain.
The confusion is further supported by claiming that life after death can be accounted for by means of “some kind of reproduction of that [brain] organization.” Of course, any reproduction just means that the result is not the original. You will not live after your death even if a copy of you is produced by God. That is what reproduction means. A reproduction is not the original.
The author is operating under the confused idea that consciousness requires some kind of physical ground. But, just by considering the brain alone we would never even know that consciousness exists. This is an important point worth contemplating. There is nothing in the mere structure of the brain that would lead us to believe that it is conscious. Aristotle, who was a pretty accomplished observer, thought that the brain might be for cooling the blood. Does the author think that God has a brain? If not, does he believe that God is conscious? To deny that God is conscious is to leave the confines of Biblical Christianity.
Of course—a thousand times over—everyone is correct to claim that brain activity can change the nature of conscious experience, but a causal connection between one thing and another does not show that they are the same thing. Trying to transform mental realities into physical ones has historically resulted in the mental being eliminated. The author certainly has explored how changes in the brain affect experience, but that work is incapable of showing that experience itself and the one having the experiences are just products of brain activity.
See: John Searle Rediscovery of the Mind, chapter 1, for the same confusion.
Colin McGinn: The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, pp. 11-13
“Some people like to harp on the complexity of the brain, as if this gave a clue to its mental productivity. But sheer complexity is irrelevant: merely adding more neurons with more synaptic connections doesn’t explain our problem a bit. The problem is how any collection of cells, no matter how large and intricately related, could generate consciousness…How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?” According to McGinn we have not the slightest idea, and we will never have the slightest idea, even in 10 billion years if humans live that long.
The Universal Fact of Objective Moral Truths: (The law written in the heart.)
This is what the first 5 chapters of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis are about. Moral truths, like logic, mathematics, and geometry are abstract, therefore, they cannot be physical. (prescriptive vs. descriptive facts)
“Everyone is indignant when he hears the Germans define justice as that which is to the interest of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will. Unless there is some objective standard of good, over-arching Germans, Japanese and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or not, then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours...Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring.” C.S. Lewis “The Poison of Subjectivism,” Christian Reflections, p. 73
Miracles, which are interruptions to the natural physical order, are evidence that God is involved in human affairs. This kind of supernatural occurrence must be rare, because it is always against the backdrop of the natural. Jesus’ resurrection was in the highest possible contrast to the universal reign of death in biological life.
Here is the Bottom Line: People often first approach the question of God through the perspective of a thorough-going naturalism with a little Sunday School thrown in: “We just know that everything is physical, but we have a few pesky, recalcitrant conundrums such as consciousness, logic, math, and this irksome guy Jesus that don’t easily fit in. These issues will probably be solved in a few months.”
This presupposition will be crucial in next week’s theme: Living in the Shadow of the Fall
The L’Abri Theme of Living in the Reality of the Supernatural
Francis and Edith Schaeffer founded L’Abri to demonstrate the possibility of living in the reality of the supernatural; a universe governed by God to bring about His plans; all the good and the bad, “all things work together for good for those who love God” Romans 8.28.
1. Live as if the supernatural is real and that people are not just physical objects that get in my way.
2. Live as if every person is of infinite and wondrously irreducible value.
3. Live as if we can have true-truth about the physical world, the abstract world, and God’s revelation.
4. Live as if the context of life is an objective moral order: a real battle between good and evil.
5. Live as if God is ever-present to redeem our lives and to enable us bring about concrete goods to His glory.
6. Live as if evidence always matters and how we follow it reveals the state of our epistemological humility.
7. Live as if God is never further away than one uttering a simple and sincere prayer in faith.
8. Live as if our lives, and all we do, have eternal significance.
9. Live as if God has given us astonishing co-laborers so we can toil together in His redemptive work.
10. Live as if Jesus showed us how to live an objectively successful life. (“Well done, good and faithful servants.”)
11. Live as if nothing in this world can give so much joy and meaning as living for God who gave His life for us.
12. Live as if we’ve been given the chance of a lifetime.
For Further Study:
1. Dick Keyes: “Five Themes of L’Abri” at L’Abri Ideas Library
2. Benjamin Keyes: “Five Themes at L’Abri Revisited” at L’Abri Ideas Library
3. C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason by Victor Reppert, 2003
4. The Freedom of the Will by J.R. Lucas, esp. chapter 21, “The Presupposition of Thought”
5. C.S. Lewis: A Life by Alistair McGrath, esp. chapter 10
6. Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Willard
7. Body & Soul: Human Nature & the Crisis in Ethics by J.P. Moreland and Scott Rae
8. Miracles: A Preliminary Study by C.S. Lewis. For those who want a shorter treatment see Lewis’ God in the Dock, chapter 1 “Miracles”, chapter 9 “The Grand Miracle,” chapter 16 “Religion without Dogma?,” and chapter 4 “Answers to Questions on Christianity”:
Question 6: “Materialists and some astronomers suggest that the solar planetary system and life as we know it was brought about by an accidental stellar collision. What is the Christian view of this theory?”
Lewis: If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts – i.e., of materialism and astronomy – are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
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