Ain’t It Grand?
Ain’t it grand
To be a Christian?
Ain’t it grand?—Blind Willie McTell
A few weeks ago my wife and I were in a restaurant which had a pretty good selection of pop music playing in the background. The music wasn’t loud enough to be heard clearly, but I kept recognizing songs when a loud guitar or vocal line cut through the ambient noise. One of these was the guitar solo in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” which is not a favorite song of mine but has always caught my attention because of these poignant lines:
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone
I suppose most people recognize the sensation described there, and the sadness that comes with it. I know it very well myself, and have done for as long as I can remember. But it struck me that evening, with a great sense of relief, that to be a Christian is to believe that the sadness is not the end of the story. That “fleeting glimpse” is not just a stray emotion, a meaningless fluctuation of consciousness, a bit of irrational hope that is ultimately no hope at all. It is a real glimpse of something that is really there. The inexpressible yearnings known by every human heart have a real object, and a real hope of attaining it.
Materialism and atheism have their built-in presuppositions and prejudices, and one of these is the notion that the burden of proof is always on the non-materialist. They scoff at this universal desire for the transcendently perfect, but as a matter of objective reason, it is at least as plausible that the desire itself should constitute evidence of its object as that it should be considered a pointless emotion. After all, as many have pointed out: we know hunger, and food exists; we know thirst, and water exists; we know sexual desire, and sex exists; we long for love, and love exists; we desire to know, and knowledge exists. It should be at least puzzling to anyone who thinks about the question with an open mind that we could have a spiritual hunger that cannot, in the nature of things, ever hope to be satisfied.
A week or two after the “Comfortably Numb” incident I was reading an article in The Atlantic by an evolutionary biologist arguing for a purely naturalistic explanation of altruism and generosity. The underlying assumption was that it’s very important to have such an explanation. It’s not enough that evolution be able to explain the material development of the human body; it must explain everything, including our moral development and the existence of morality itself. For those committed to the idea that scientific materialism is the only valid approach to reality, all of reality must, obviously, be seen as the sort of thing that can be approached this way. Therefore evolution must be an all-encompassing explanation. The author said nothing about this goal, but it was implicit throughout the article.
The theoretical objections to this view are obvious, and have been taken up by people much better equipped for it than I am. What struck me was the sheer unnecessary constriction and narrowness of it, and the sense of how much larger my mental world is than the author’s. My conception of the world includes the material, and more; the materialist’s cannot admit even the least trace of the spiritual. I can believe in everything that science can establish about the material world; I can also believe in a God who created that world for purposes of his own. Therefore I do not have to forcibly crush my natural instinct to look for purpose in the world, or in my own life. I do not have to crush my instinctive belief that love is something real, not just a byproduct of material phenomena. Or my belief that the self which is the one thing of which I am immediately and indisputably conscious has no actual existence. Or my belief that good and evil are objective categories. Or my belief that to choose one over the other must have some sort of ultimate consequence for the chooser.
None of this proves that Christian belief is true, of course. But it does mean that one who holds it lives in a world that is far more naturally suited to human beings than the world of the materialist. It is a grand world, in two senses: it is both large and splendid. I have yet to hear a convincing materialistic explanation of how such creatures as ourselves got into a world which is so much less than they are.
Note: you may, depending on how your computer is configured, be able to hear a thirty-second sample of that Blind Wille McTell song here, at the Amazon page for the CD. Or try this eMusic sample. But the one at Amazon is better; it’s a later recording on which you can really hear the big ol’ 12-string guitar.
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