“True Paradox” is written by a Christian in defense of Christianity

How Christianity Explains 

Beauty and Suffering

By 

BARTON SWAIM

An argument for a religion based not on cosmology but the way it makes sense of the author’s everyday life.

The debate between science and religion has reached a glowering standstill. Christianity’s defenders seek to poke holes in the logic of and evidence for evolutionary materialism, even as Darwinian scientists altogether refuse to acknowledge that there is a debate. The New Atheists, meanwhile, a confederation of atheism’s most eloquent popularizers, have convinced their many readers that the chief impediment to global peace and stability is religious belief.

It’s good and right to debate questions like the world’s origin, of course, but those questions are pretty far removed from the experience of most people. With “True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World,” David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests changing the subject: “If we shift from origins to the world as we actually experience it, we will need to explain sensations like our sense of beauty and evil, as well as the puzzles of morals and law.” Each of these areas of experience contains paradoxes—real or apparent contradictions that, if we’re honest, are hard to make sense of. Mr. Skeel’s gentle contention is that the ancient creed of Christianity reckons with each in surprisingly satisfying ways.

Consider beauty. Some, famously Stephen Jay Gould, have asserted that the human ability to produce and appreciate beauty is a fortunate but not especially useful byproduct of natural selection. Others, for instance Steven Pinker, surmise that beauty signified food and fertile vegetation to our earliest ancestors (though sunsets and great paintings don’t typically make us hungry).

Mr. Skeel emphasizes something different about beauty: that it’s rare and elusive. All of us, he asserts, feel “that beauty is real and that it reflects the universe as it is meant to be, but that it is impermanent and somehow corrupted.” Christians hold that the physical world is in a fallen state; its beauty is imperfect and fleeting. Leave aside whether you believe Christianity’s doctrinal claims: They fit our lived experience of beauty in ways the materialist view does not.

In his short book Mr. Skeel touches on a variety of eternal questions—from the mystery of human consciousness to the relationship between law and justice. He addresses the problem of evil in an especially compelling way—not by “solving” it in some philosophically air-tight way, but by questioning its premise.

The “problem,” of course, is that the presence of evil in human affairs seems to suggest that God, if he is there, is either malicious for causing it or powerless to stop it: In either case, he isn’t “God” in any traditional understanding. Mr. Skeel points out, however, that in order to make the argument, terms like “evil and “malicious” must be imported from a worldview that assumes God’s existence. To make the point vivid, Mr. Skeel charts the final illnesses of two very different men: the contrarian journalist Christopher Hitchens and the less famous but equally accomplished Harvard law professor William Stuntz.

.....................


Read more: online.wsj.com