Dear Jordan,
I was listening to your conversation with Jonathan Pageau recently and in the middle of the conversation was inspired to write to you. I actually shut off the podcast midway and began voice texting in my first thoughts. There were so many things that were being discussed that reminded me of some of my blog posts (http://roadtonarnia.blogspot.com/) - particularly The Ark: Part 1 and Part 2. At the time that I wrote these I did not even know you existed, which is something that perhaps those that read them will find hard to believe. I am not very active on YouTube and actually came to your podcast by way of the intellectual dark web which was in turn by way of Eric Weinstein who was in turn by way of a recommendation from a friend. I began listening back in the biblical interpretation years and made my way forward through lectures & various interviews. It has been wonderful to discover your voice, which could be described as the voice of reason in a world gone insane; or perhaps the voice of someone who actually seems to think reality is real and as such must be handled with care and gratitude as the gift that it is.
As I began to look into how to contact you I quickly realized that this was an impossibility. Though you do not seem to be a standoffish person in yourself I suppose it is a necessary function of the way fame works nowadays that all such hopes should be extinguished. One reads of C.S. Lewis painstakingly replying to each and every one who wrote to him - handwritten letters and often posted back on the same day! Such things seen miraculous in today's atmosphere.
I did find the "Open Letter to J.P." subreddit: glancing through it reminded me of picking through driftwood on the ocean's edge. Trash & treasure piled together - it matters not what, there is a definite lack of communication going on. Each quiet splash of a new [letter] taking its place in the vast multitude may every so often evince some response from the community that has grown up along the edge of this fixed gulf, or at least a line or two from a lonely bot. It became quickly apparent that this group is to whom any such endeavor should be addressed (rather than to you), and at this realization my resolve failed me - "abandon hope, all ye who enter here".
Thus, knowing myself to be one speck in the immense ocean of humanity, my voice but one of these countless millions, doubtless better in some measurable way than some but equally doubtless worse than others, I content myself with "posting" this open letter here on my blog. If, by some miracle, you should stumble upon it this will be no greater magic than it being noticed amidst the flotsam & jetsam of the subreddit. I will also print this and send it with a copy of "The Place of the Lion" by Charles Williams - a personal favorite and one I think you will enjoy - on the off chance that this old fashioned method might win through!
I wonder if you have read the book "Ion" by Plato. If not, I would recommend it: it is very short and quite apropos, in that it deals largely with resonance and I notice so much of this taking place in the world: harmonics and overtones - yours being one of the clearer voices (most strident?!). In fact, perhaps the reason that I was thinking along some of the lines I also hear from you is because a) you had already changed the world by what you've been teaching, and I was experiencing some of the ripples, and / or b) we both are reacting to either the muse itself or other more fundamental resonators. These effects are of course exacerbated by the advent of the Internet.
(Strangely enough, having written this much I stopped writing to fog my garden for mosquitoes, and began to listen further to your conversation with Jonathan P. When you began to recommend a book called Ion I couldn't believe my ears. Then a few minutes later it turned out that you were talking about Aion, by Carl Jung. Ah well, there are limits...)
From the moment I began to understand the enormity of what you and your family have been through physically together with the enormity of what you are attempting to represent to the world, I have been very much reminded of the character Job in the Bible. As I listened to your interview with Jonathan Pageau this verse came back to me: "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.". This is a paradigm shift of immense proportions, and from some of the things I have heard you say, it appears that you recognize this shape looming ahead in the mist.
In one of your Bible lectures you said of the Abrahamic Covenant something like: "it is the decision to live in the world as if it were constructed so that if you do the right thing the best possible outcome will occur." And you can see that Job took exactly the same tack: "And this man was blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning evil.", "...when the days of feasting were over, Job would send for his children to purify them, rising early in the morning to offer burnt offerings for all of them. For Job thought, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular practice.", and the repeated "In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.". What is interesting here is that although this was in some sense enough - enough to live well, to prosper, to have the best possible outcome, enough for the time being - it was not at all the same thing as seeing God. Thus, "I act as though God exists".
There is a passage in "Perelandra" by C.S. Lewis that came to mind while thinking of the seriousness with which you consider (and push back against) surrender to the belief that there is a God:
As soon as the Lady was out of sight Ransom’s first impulse was to run his hands through his hair, to expel the breath from his lungs in a long whistle, to light a cigarette, to put his hands in his pockets, and in general, to go through all that ritual of relaxation which a man performs on finding himself alone after a rather trying interview. But he had no cigarettes and no pockets: nor indeed did he feel himself alone. That sense of being in Someone’s Presence which had descended on him with such unbearable pressure during the very first moments of his conversation with the Lady did not disappear when he had left her. It was, if anything, increased. Her society had been, in some degree, a protection against it, and her absence left him not to solitude but to a more formidable kind of privacy. At first it was almost intolerable; as he put it to us, in telling the story, ‘There seemed no room.’ But later on, he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments—at just those moments in fact (symbolised by his impulse to smoke and to put his hands in his pockets) when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s on his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fullness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. At first, of course, the wrong moments occurred pretty often. But like a man who has a wound that hurts him in certain positions and who gradually learns to avoid those positions, Ransom learned not to make that inner gesture. His day became better and better as the hours passed. (Perelandra, Ch. 6, C.S. Lewis)
In my blog series "The Ark" I posited that the Catholic Church had been at times the guardian of civilization - in other words, it did the job of an ark. As I learn more about the Catholic Church (shedding some of the Protestant bias that I was brought up with as I move forward) I have come to understand that partly this is because they (the Catholic Church) have managed to keep their heads when losing their hearts. The Protestants (huge generalization here!) have tended to do only the latter; scientists only the former. I trust that you will manage both, recognizing that each is in equal measure a gift. Jonathan Pageau spoke of straddling two worlds as being something which might tear one apart. But what I hope for is a bringing together.
In Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas, "The Dumb Ox", he describes the following:
Siger of Brabant, following on some of the Arabian Aristotelians, advanced a theory which most modern newspaper readers would instantly have declared to be the same as the theory of St. Thomas. That was what finally roused St. Thomas to his last and most emphatic protest. He had won his battle for a wider scope of philosophy and science; he had cleared the ground for a general understanding about faith and enquiry; an understanding that has generally been observed among Catholics, and certainly never deserted without disaster. It was the idea that the scientist should go on exploring and experimenting freely, so long as he did not claim an infallibility and finality which it was against his own principles to claim. Meanwhile the Church should go on developing and defining, about supernatural things, so long as she did not claim a right to alter the deposit of faith, which it was against her own principles to claim. And when he had said this, Siger of Brabant got up and said something so horribly like it, and so horribly unlike, that (like the Antichrist) he might have deceived the very elect.
Siger of Brabant said this: the Church must be right theologically, but she can be wrong scientifically. There are two truths; the truth of the supernatural world, and the truth of the natural world, which contradicts the supernatural world. While we are being naturalists, we can suppose that Christianity is all nonsense; but then, when we remember that we are Christians, we must admit that Christianity is true even if it is nonsense. In other words, Siger of Brabant split the human head in two, like the blow in an old legend of battle; and declared that a man has two minds, with one of which he must entirely believe and with the other may utterly disbelieve. To many this would at least seem like a parody of Thomism. As a fact, it was the assassination of Thomism. It was not two ways of finding the same truth; it was an untruthful way of pretending that there are two truths. And it is extraordinarily interesting to note that this is the one occasion when the Dumb Ox really came out like a wild bull. When he stood up to answer Siger of Brabant, he was altogether transfigured, and the very style of his sentences, which is a thing like the tone of a man's voice, is suddenly altered. He had never been angry with any of the enemies who disagreed with him. But these enemies had attempted the worst treachery: they had made him agree with them.
Those who complain that theologians draw fine distinctions could hardly find a better example of their own folly. In fact, a fine distinction can be a flat contradiction. It was notably so in this case. St. Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence in the reality of his religion: and though some may linger to dispute it, it has been justified. The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the Faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century. Even the materialists have fled from materialism; and those who lectured us about determinism in psychology are already talking about indeterminism in matter. But whether his confidence was right or wrong, it was specially and supremely a confidence that there is one truth which cannot contradict itself.
I recently read David Berlinski's book "The Devil's Delusion". It was refreshing in the same way that I find your lectures to be. What is missing is the foregone conclusion that God does not exist - and cannot be allowed to exist. Also missing is the foregone conclusion that God does exist - and cannot be allowed to die. Instead you begin by respecting the Bible for what it definitely is (rather than despising it for what it is claimed to be), and because of this are able to expose a lot of truth - from an evolutionary psychologist's perspective, true, but given the idea of "the one truth which cannot contradict itself" this simply works. You are one of the archaeologists uncovering the artifact...
As a sub point, viewed from David Berlinski's perspective I find your insistence on evolution being entirely a forgone conclusion somewhat interesting. I'm not arguing against evolution per se: for my part, I grew up "Creationist" (ie, evolution is false) and then become more scientifically oriented (ie, became convinced that evolution was proven to be completely true, so I must make room for that in my theology), but now I am more inclined to hold such scientific claims loosely and for what they are - theories, yet to be proven. And likewise to hold certain Christian claims loosely, until they be proven!
We are promised that "every knee shall bow & every tongue confess" which would mean proof in an undeniable sense. And until then yes, we must "act as though God exists" (Hebrew 11:6) and that must be enough, against the day when we truly see.
Respect,
Jon
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