A Note on the Logic of Theology
I used to be a scoffer, so I behooves me to be patience with scoffing. And yet, at times, it is difficult to summon Christian charity when dealing with Postchristians.
Their common refrain is to scoff at monotheism as if reason and evidence do not support such a belief. The opposite is true.
Their belief is not only unsupported, it is literally a conspiracy theory: for its holds that all accounts and all evidence of every supernatural event ever reported, from the creation of the cosmos to the resurrection of Christ to that time your Aunt Bellena says she saw the ghost of greatgrandmama, are all frauds, mistakes, misperceptions, or delusions. All religions, major and minor, are conspiracies to deceive the gullible, and the opiate of the masses.
History, if nothing else, shows this is not true. Opium use is much higher in times and places when religion is weak. Opium is the opiate of the masses. Monotheism, if anything, grounds men in reality, and keeps them away from the junk.
Logic and evidence supports a belief in God, not the other way around.
“It happened for no reason” is a weak explanation for the Big Bang, that is, the creation of nature from nothing; for the utility of reason, for the existence of the moral sense, for the human ability to think in symbols.
If these things arose from a nondeliberate natural process, then none of these things have a purpose, an end, and aim intended by a maker.
A tool is an instrument make with an end in mind. No toolmaker, no tool. If reason, conscience, abstraction are not tools, then they cannot be tools for reasoning, for moral reasoning, for abstraction, and you could not be reading this sentence here and now, and think about it honestly — because reading, thinking, and honesty are not logically possible in a godless universe.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
