Intelligent Design: dodgy science, worse theology

Electron micrograph of H. pylori bacterium, with flagella clearly visible. Image by Yutaka Tsutsumi.

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First, some clarification. We’ll start with what Intelligent Design is not:

Christian doctrine teaches that the universe, life, and human beings are created by God. That is, Creation was a deliberate act. Also, God is omniscient and omnipotent, and chose to exercise creation in a particular way. This is not the definition of Intelligent Design.

The teleological argument refers to a philosophical argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the world around us. The universe and our place in it appear to be purposeful, and a purposeful creation suggests a purposeful Creator. Variations on this line of thinking can be traced back to before Plato, and it also features in the work of St Thomas Aquinas as one of his rational arguments for God’s existence. This is also not the definition of Intelligent Design.

So what is it?

Intelligent Design (or ID) maintains that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof.” (from intelligentdesign.org). In short, ID proponents claim that scientific inquiry can identify the intervention of intelligence in the evolutionary process.

The major feature of ID theory is the concept of “irreducible complexity”, specifically the idea that there exist structures and systems in nature that are so irreducibly complex that they could not have evolved step-wise via evolutionary theory.

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In general, if we talk about trying to discern God’s influence in the universe scientifically, we have two major problems:

• There is no control group. Because God is omnipresent and not subject to human will, he can’t be excluded from part of an experiment to try and see what would happen “without” God’s intervention.
• More generally, science lacks the tools for investigating the supernatural. If we are suggesting that this “Intelligent Designer” is in fact God (and thus supernatural), then it is not clear that his influence could be discerned by scientific inquiry. If we’re thinking of aliens (or anything else non-supernatural), then I am not sure that “intelligence” would be the most easily identifiable evidence.

There are major theological issues with ID because it argues that God’s involvement in the universe is only necessary for stuff that we can’t explain by natural law. This is a classic “god of the gaps” argument, and it is lousy theology. Christianity teaches that God is involved everywhere. That God is the author and sustainer of the natural laws. ID suggests that God mostly lets the universe tick along by itself, but every now and then he steps in to design a bacterial flagellum, or whatever the latest example of irreducible complexity is.

Philosophically, the entire premise of ID seems doubtful. The central claim of ID is that the intelligence of the “designer” can be discovered scientifically. But if the designer used normal physical processes in any way, it is not clear that the influence of “intelligence” could be discerned.

Let us consider: I put a kettle on the stove and the water boils. By studying the stove and the kettle and the water (or steam if you wait too long), you can discover exactly how the chain of events unfolded. But it is not clear that the intelligent involvement and motivation could ever be discoveredin this way. Did I want a cup of tea? Was I acting on instruction from someone else (in which case my actions involve no intelligence of my own)? Even if we look at the all physical actions that I undertook to make the kettle boil, it is not clear that the “intelligence” involved could ever be identified scientifically.

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A note on irreducible complexity:

As a side note, I believe that irreducible complexity itself is an important avenue of study. But it is an avenue of study that involves evolutionary theory, not Intelligent Design. It is a challenge to see if there are limits to current understanding of evolution, and whether there are aspects of biological development that seem to argue against it. In the same way that dark matter and dark energy have forced us to reconsider a lot of what we thought about cosmology and gravity, it is possible that there could emerge a parallel biological paradigm which works in concert with evolutionary pressure to guide the development of life. But that is something for biological science to explore.

An argument against one theory is not an argument for another. So we have a theory (such as gravity), and we can make observations and conduct experiments that support or refute it. But refuting that theory does not support another: the two processes are independent.

The problem with ID is that it tries to argue against evolutionary theory, but gets a bit fuzzy on the details of what it is arguing for. ID proponents try to identify things in nature that can’t be explained by evolution, and then use such things to argue for ID. But what exactly is the unifying theory of ID?

“Sometimes, intelligence is involved rather than pure selective pressure based on reproductive fitness and survival. Other times, evolution just does its thing.”

But why was “intellegent design” applied in the case of a bacterial flagellum, and not elsewhere? For any explanatory power, a motivation for ID influence to appear in a particular biological feature would have to be clear prior to the knowledge that the specific feature appears to be irreducibly complex. This lack of a clear alternative theory means that, at most, irreducibly complex biological features can be seen as a challenge to current evolutionary theory. They cannot possibly be a positive argument for ID.

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Related posts:

“Creation Science” isn’t.

Hypothetically speaking

Two evolutionists walk into a bar…

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Grainge Clarke on the assumptions of science

There’s an excellent article by W. Grainge Clarke on the philosophy of science and how it relates to the Christian worldview.

On the topic of the underlying assumptions of the scientific method, he writes:

“These presuppositions are, by their nature unprovable, and some philosophers would consider them unacceptable. Behind the acceptance of these presuppositions lies the fact that modern science developed when the dominant worldview in Europe was Christian. If the Christian worldview is accepted they all make reasonable sense. However, on the atheistic worldview, that all is the product of matter-energy, time and chance, then none of these presuppositions are justifiable. To consider just one case: ‘The human mind is capable of rational thought’. If the human mind has been developed solely by non rational forces then there is no reason to believe that it can be rational and certainly it is not to be relied upon. Consider two computers one of which was designed and assembled by the IT staff at the local university and the other by the local kindergarten. Which is most likely to function well? Yet the kindergarten children have much more intelligence than blind chance.”

You can find the whole article here:

“Wrong fight, wrong concepts, wrong everything” by Grainge Clarke

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Related posts:

Hypothetically speaking

Maths, science and abstractions

Where God meets physics

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Nicolas Steno: bishop and scientist

Today marks the 374th birthday of Nicolas Steno, a pioneer in geology and anatomy in the 17th century. Steno (Neils Stensen in the original Danish) was born in 1638 in Copenhagen, and after completing his university education in Denmark he spent the rest of his life travelling throughout Europe and collaborating with prominent physicians and scientists.

While the common approach of scientists at the time was to appeal to the ideas of Aristotle and Pliny, Steno was determined to examine evidence for himself and draw his own conclusions. He was guided in this by his religious convictions about God as Creator of the natural order.

Stressing the importance of investigation and observation, he wrote:

“One sins against the majesty of God by being unwilling to look into nature’s own works and contenting oneself with reading others; in this way one forms and creates for oneself various fanciful notions and thus not only does one not enjoy the pleasure of looking into God’s wonders but also wastes time that should be spent on necessities and to the benefit of one’s neighbor and states many things which are unworthy of God.”

Steno made important advances in anatomy and physiology, most notably in muscle research. He determined that the heart was a muscle (it was thought by many at the time to be a generator of heat), and also demonstrated geometrically that muscles under contraction do not increase in volume (they just change their shape).

But his biggest contribution to science is in the fields of geology and paleontology. After studying the similarities between living sharks and fossilised shark teeth, he decided that the fossils were actually the remains of once-living sharks, now buried in rock. He was not the first to make this connection, but he did go on to define the fundamentals of stratigraphy, the branch of geology that studies rock layers (stratification).

Considering the question of how a shark tooth (or anything else) could become encased in rock, he decided that it must at one time have been surrounded by liquid while the layer below it was already rock. Known in stratigraphy as the law of superposition, this ultimately means that every layer of sedimentary rock must be younger than the layer below it, and this observation is the basis for all fossil dating today. Steno’s theory that the fossil record could be chronologically ordered by the rock layer in which each fossil is was found is fundamental to modern evolutionary theory.

As a follow-up, he also studied crystals and determined Steno’s Law of constancy of interfacial angles, which basically says that the angles between corresponding crystal faces are the same for the same mineral. Steno’s geological work was published in De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus, or Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid in 1669.

In 1675 he was ordained into the priesthood, and in 1677 was made a bishop apostolic in the north of Germany. After 9 years of devoted ministry to the poor, he died in 1686.

Happy birthday, Nicolas – you are yet another great example of Christian faith informing ground-breaking scientific advances.

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Related posts:

Where God meets Physics

Faith is a part of life

Believing and understanding

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What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

Atheism as manifest in the West is an odd phenomenon – in many ways, it’s very much an off-shoot of Christianity. It’s essentially the result of taking Christ out of Christianity and trying to hang onto the rest if it. So we see widespread support for the “loving your neighbour as yourself” commandment, but a willful disregard for its other half (loving God with your all). There is plenty of acknowledgement of Jesus as a teacher, but not as Lord. “He said some good things, but he’s was just this guy, you know?”

The best description that I’ve heard for this condition is “cut-flower morality”. We think that we can remove the teachings and the wisdom from the divine root and still enjoy their beauty. We deny that humans are made by God, and still expect that humans have intrinsic value.

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I’ve heard the phrase “lucky mud” used to describe humans – it’s a description born from a rigidly materialist mindset that sees us as the current phase of a random and unguided evolutionary process. But the “lucky” part still acknowledges that there is value in human life, and yet the materialist worldview has no place for such value. If we are arbitrary evolutionary byproducts then we are no more special than the coal that we use to heat our homes or the rocks that we crush to make roads. Being alive has no value in such a mindset: how can it? Life is just a temporary arrangement of some chemical elements which displays certain unusual properties.

To quote Dr Manhattan, “A live human body and a deceased human body have the same number of particles. Structurally there’s no difference.”

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Of course, this causes conflict. To actually deny the value of human life is quite literally psychopathic, so instead we try to justify the value of human life from a materialist worldview. So we see silly ideas from people like Richard Dawkins (in The Selfish Gene, for instance), claiming that we have a moral imperative to fight against evolution, even though evolution is the only thing that Dawkins seems to hold sacred. Despite the fact that all of humanity (other than the truly psychopathic) accept the existence of good and evil, in a materialistic worldview these words are meaningless.

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King David, writing in about 1000BC, asked:

“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4, NIV)

In a materialist worldview, there is no answer to the first question. But the missing piece is hinted at in the second part: in Jesus, God became man to reconcile us to Him. The title “Son of Man” was Jesus’ favourite way of referring to himself, and it strongly emphasises the unique place that we have in God’s creation.

There is value in an artistic work because it was created with purpose. We too were made purposefully, and our continual and universal acknowledgement of our worth bears a powerful testimony to our Creator’s handiwork.

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Related posts:

The timidity of New Atheists

Seeing the gardener

Non-moral nature

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Non-moral nature

I’m visiting some colleagues in Hobart at the moment, so I have a new route that I walk to work each day. It’s a tranquil and tree-lined avenue with some lovely gardens, especially now when all the spring flowers are in bloom.

Running alongside the path is a stream, and this morning, in that stream, were some ducks. Mostly they were doing normal duckish things – paddling about, quacking and nibbling the odd bit of water vegetation. But it’s spring, so they were also pretty frisky. In particular, there were two drakes which both seemed very keen on a female duck, which in turn was doing her best to paddle away from them. But the drakes were not to be discouraged. They held her head under the water and had their way with her despite all her struggling and flapping.

Just another day on the river. A light breeze, the delicate scent of flowers in the air and avian gang-rape in the water.

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We often see grand claims to the effect that morality is just a by-product of evolution, but the reasoning is usually circular and the arguments poor. Dawkins, for example, while claiming that everything to do with anything can be explained by evolution, is predictably all over the place when he ventures into ethics. While he has said: “I don’t believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil”, he also claims that our morality is seen when we rise above the selfishness of our genes:

“I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave… Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.” (The Selfish Gene)

But this is just ridiculous: Evolution produced everything, including our sense of morality, but it is objectively “good” to act in a way that counteracts evolution. But the concept of “good” doesn’t actually exist objectively, it’s just an evolutionary product…

We can identify certain patterns of behaviour in the animal kingdom, and infer an evolved tendency towards particular behaviours. But we cannot ascribe moral value to actions based on evolutionary criteria. Stephen Jay Gould, in his 1982 essay “Nonmoral nature” (from which I shamelessly borrowed this title), wrote:

“Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science.”

Some animals mate for life, others are wildly promiscuous and indiscriminating in their sexual behaviour. In Bonobo apes about 75% of sexual activity is non-reproductive, and often involves infants. Sexual cannibalism is common in insects. In several species of mammals, including stoats and hyaena, sexual activity between adults and infant cubs has been observed (with the mother of the infants declining to interfere). Male bottlenose dolphins regularly engage in what appears to be forced intercourse, both within their species and towards other species. Female penguins exchange sexual favours for nest-building materials. Killing and eating infants (within a species, even within family groups) is common in many mammals.

But it is a very human peculiarity to look unfavourably on this sort of behaviour. Human child molesters are not tolerated: in fact they are generally perceived as the most abhorrent of people. We are outraged by such behaviour in our own society because we recognise an objective morality by which we can judge different actions.

This idea of “evolved ethics” is not new, of course, and the difficulties of trying to extrapolate morality from evolution have long been recognised. T. H. Huxley wrote in 1893:

“The propounders of [the evolution of ethics] adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.” (Evolution and Ethics)

Huxley makes a vital point here. Our understanding of morality and our application of moral principles to society (in our systems of justice, for instance) are far removed from the evolutionary perspective. All societies believe in the existence of objective morality, and we all live our lives accordingly. This leads us to the possibility that absolute moral standards, like the laws of mathematics, are written into the universe and await discovery. In his excellent pair of articles on evolving morality over at the blog Engineering Ethics (see here for part 1 and part 2), Karl Stephan notes five principles which psychological research has found to be widely accepted throughout different societies:

(1) Harm—don’t hurt other people and help them if you can.

(2) Fairness—people in comparable situations should be treated comparably.

(3) Group loyalty—other things being equal, take care of your own (family, friends, city, nation) first.

(4) Authority—there are rules, rulers, and rulemakers who should be respected and deferred to.

(5) Purity—Saintliness, cleanliness, and being without spot or blemish are good things, and grubbiness, filth, and disorder are bad ones.

Stephan also observes that the concept of morality as a Natural Law was also espoused by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, so the while the psychological research is new, the idea has a long pedigree.

Looking even further back,  St. Paul wrote a letter to the newly-established church in Rome in the first century AD. In it, he described how people who had not been instructed in Christian morality nonetheless acted in accordance with that morality, because God has written His law on the hearts of all people:

“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.” (Rom 2:14-15, NIV)

All of our human experience declares that objective morality exists, but an objective morality cannot possibly be ascribed to evolution. Are there laws of  morality written into the fabric of the universe? Do they await discovery?

Or can they be discovered more readily from looking within?

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Related posts:

Secular (in)Humanism

Chesterton on Nature

Two evolutionists walk into a bar…

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Sex and science: Discuss

Sex and science: we need to talk about both. And not just on this blog – we need to talk about them in church and at home, too.

Both sex and science are hugely powerful and important. Both have the potential to be wonderful, or to be terribly destructive. Responsibility and maturity are needed before we can safely handle either.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t teach our kids about sex, or science for that matter. Interest and curiosity (in both areas) are aroused from a young age, so let’s rather start the discussions early. Parents and pastors need to be willing to engage openly with both subjects.

But we need to be honest about both. Eventually, kids are going to grow up and engage with the wider world, and the wider world is drenched in both science and sex.

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Choose your perversion

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Teaching kids that sex is bad or wrong or evil is ultimately destructive. At best, they will grow up with all sorts of psychological baggage that will inhibit their ability to engage in healthy and fulfilling sex lives when they eventually get married. At worst, this sort of teaching will just make sex more attractive and alluring, and the desire to experiment will be irresistable. We’ve all seen the results of irresponsible sexual experimentation, and it’s tragic. But this does not mean that sex itself is bad, or that it should always be avoided. It just means that we need to be aware of what defines a responsible and safe context within which to engage with the power of sex.

I’ve quoted elsewhere the observation by Vox Day that rebellion against religious teachings on sexuality can be a powerful incentive to start ignoring God:

“The idea that there is any rational basis for atheism is further damaged by the way in which so many atheists become atheists during adolescence, an age that combines a tendency toward mindless rebellion as well as the onset of sexual desires that collide with religious strictures on their satisfaction.”

But this does not necessarily indicate a mindless nihilism. If the adolescent has never been given an understanding of why there are limits on how, where and when sexual desires should be fulfilled, then there is no reason not to discard such strictures in favour of a raging libido. “I really REALLY want to do this, and I don’t find myself with any compelling arguments opposing it, so why not?”

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Which brings us to science. Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, writes about his own transition from a nominally Christian upbringing to an atheist worldview:

“I became an atheist because as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn’t see any need to go beyond that. Frankly, I was at a point in my young life where it was convenient for me to not have to deal with a God. I kind of liked being in charge myself.”

We note that there is the adolescent rebellion thing again, but there also another motivation: Collins was exposed to new scientific concepts that seemed to explain everything and left no room for God. This is always a danger if a student has never learned to recognise the limits of science and how these limits relate to theology. (As a general rule, science is good on the “How?” questions and proximate causes; it’s really bad on the “Why?” questions and ultimate causes. Happy footnote: Collins later rejected the bankruptcy of atheism and recognised the intellectual fulfillment offered by the Christian worldview).

In particular, it’s very common for explanations of mechanism (such as scientific theories of evolution, quantum physics or cosmology) to be falsely imbued with the quality of agency. Although this is an elementary error, it is a very frequent one: we see it from countless first-year university students, and also from eminent scientists such as biologists Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick, and chemist Peter Atkins. A well-known example comes from Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker. Responding to William Paley’s classic “argument from design” (in which Paley suggested that the apparent design of living creatures points to their designer in the same way that a watch points to a watchmaker), Dawkins writes:

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

It’s stirring rhetoric, but if you actually read it closely enough it stops making any sense. Philosophically, this is an example of a category error – what Dawkins does is substitute a mechanism (natural selection) for an agent (the Creator). In other words, to return to the metaphor, he has found a watch spring, and concluded that the watch did not need a designer. Indeed, he goes further: he claims that the watch spring built the whole watch.

This is ridiculous.  But in the absence of any previous exposure to evolutionary theory, it’s easy to get carried away by the prose until you don’t even notice that it is no longer logically coherent. Of course the Darwinian paradigm is a wonderful framework for structuring biological research, but it still has limits, and Dawkins has gone way beyond what evolutionary science can claim. Likewise, gravity is splendid for predicting the movement of celestial bodies, but it’s useless for explaining magnetism.

Like a hormonally-addled teenager on a hot date, we can be swept along on emotion rather than rationality if we have not learned to recognise the proper limitations of science.

Scientific repression is no solution. There are very real advantages to living with the products of scientific progress, and anybody can see that (although there are certainly dangers as well). But as with sex, we need to teach kids to engage with science responsibly.

And offering a silly substitute like “creation science” instead of the real thing will never be intellectually satisfying, much like a subscription to Playboy will never be a replacement for a loving, intimate relationship.

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If we can start talking to kids about why a sexually promiscuous lifestyle is destructive, they are much more likely to actually value and protect their sexuality.

If we can start talking to kids about why Dawkins, Crick, Atkins, Harris etc. are scientifically off their collective rockers, we won’t have to worry that one day we’ll discover a copy of The God Delusion shoved furtively beneath the mattress.

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Related posts:

Hypothetically speaking

“Creation Science” isn’t.

Overlap in the Magisterium?

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Chesterton on Nature

Another excerpt from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. (I promise I’m not being lazy with these extended quotations, it’s just that he was such a great writer I don’t want to detract from them with my own scribblings).

“The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals.  On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human.  That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger.  It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger.  But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.

“If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden.  For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature.  The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition:  that Nature is our mother.  Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this:  that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.  We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.  This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”

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Related posts:

Plus ça change…

Two evolutionists walk into a bar…

On reading both books

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Plus ça change…

I’ve just finished reading Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton. What’s most fascinating to me is that it was written over 100 years ago and yet the issues that he’s discussing – materialism, evolution, determinism, conflicts fought in the name of religion, morality in the absence of divine guidance, etc. – are all exactly the same things that are shaping the debate today. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Here are a few selected excerpts:

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Chesterton on relativism:

“Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one.  Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view.  We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.  Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.”

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…on the faith of rationality:

“Reason is itself a matter of faith.  It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.  If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself.  I have no right to think at all.’”

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…on the philosophical aspects of evolution:

“Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.”

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…on knee-jerk scepticism:

“The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it… It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end.  It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves.  You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.  But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow.  Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one.  Free thought has exhausted its own freedom… We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks.  We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.”

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…on the history of the Church:

“…in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple:  it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire.  The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast.  It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again:  repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top… If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new.  She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch… How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.”

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Related posts:

Chesterton on Nature

Chesterton on Miracles

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