On the Knowledge and Love of God

“A virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue. It would be a strange God Who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing know about God is a new reason for loving Him.”

~ F. J. Sheed, Theology and Sanity (New York, NY; Sheed & Ward, 1946), 9-10.

All Scientists Believe in God

“All scientists — including agnostics and atheists — believe in God. They have to in order to do their work.” So begins this thought-provoking article “Why Scientists Must Believe in God: Divine Attributes of Scientific Law” by Vern S. Poythress.

The Stupidity of the Intelligent

Consider this testimony by J. Budziszewski in light of Romans 1:21-22 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools . . ..

“[E]verything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself — well, if you are like I was, maybe you can — what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is ‘written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.’ The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structures of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one’s will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that commitments are in his control?

Visualize a man opening up the access panels of his mind and pulling out all the components that have God’s image stamped on them. The problem is that they all have God’s image stamped on them, so the man can never stop. No matter how much he pulls out, there’s still more to pull. I was that man. Because I pulled out more and more, there was less and less that I could think about. But because there was less and less that I could think about, I thought I was becoming more and more focused. Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I though I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool.”

~ J. Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism“

The Existence of Evil & the Reality of God

“Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live. . . . A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (. . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God].”

~ Alvin Plantinga, quoted by Timothy Keller in The Reason for God (New York, NY: Dutton, 2008), 26.

The Worth & Excellency of a Soul

“The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.”

~ Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man (Harrisburg, Va.: Sprinkle Publications, 1986), 62.

Islam’s Most Vulnerable Point

“I find it hard to see how Islam, or, for that matter, any religion based on belief in a unitary god, can possibly account for human personality or explain the diversity in unity of the world. . . . If the Christian faith is to make headway after all these centuries, it must begin at the roots of Islam with the Qur’ran’s dismissal of Christianity as repugnant to reason due, among other things, to its teaching on the Trinity. . . . For now and the future, we must recover our nerve, for this is the root of Islamic unbelief and also its most vulnerable point.”

~ Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2004), 10.

The Danger of Evidence Divorced from Revelation

“In evading the knotty problem of revelation, the strategy of adducing evidence for faith from human experience only reinforced the typically modern suspicion that the Christian religion was simply the product of the human imagination.”

~ Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1998), 311.

On the Meaning of Everything

“Because reality is theistically grounded, human beings do not have the freedom of, the justification for, or even the capability of creating and ascribing an independent meaning to the universe. They are not free to do so because God already has done it. They are not justified in doing so because it is a violation of their subordinate, creaturely status. And they are not capable of doing so because of their formidable limitations. Only the rebellious, the proud, and the deceived, that is, only a human nature that is corrupt, would attempt such a ridiculous feat. The meaning of the universe and the authority to determine it are not open questions since both are fixed in the existence and character of God.”

~ David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2002), 261-262.

Which Kind of Love Builds What Kind of City?

“We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God. . . . In the former, the lust for domination lords it over princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to it God: ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’

Consequently, in the earthly city its wise men who live by men’s standards have pursued the goods of the body or of their own mind, or of both. . . . In the Heavenly City . . . man’s only wisdom is the devotion which rightly worships the true God. . . .”

~ Augustine, The City of God, quoted by David Naugle in Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2008), 52-53.

The Deep Meaning of Happiness

For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen (Romans 11:36).

“If God is the proper reference point for all aspects and things in life, then God gives them their true meaning and puts them in the proper order in our lives. This grand union of God, ourselves, and the whole cosmos in a sacred synthesis of rightly ordered love constitutes the deep meaning of happiness.”

~ David K. Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2008), 23.