Reason to Believe; Why Faith makes Sense -Richard Purtill

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-Richard Purtill Page at Ignatius Insight.




"...a universe without God is a universe without reason, a universe without moral values, a universe without hope of lasting happiness. It is precisely that the modern atheist or agnostic inhabits, precisely this world that the modern theater of the absurd, novel of the absurd, art of the absurd, shout, whine, and snivel about. If reason left us no alternative to such a view, intellectual honesty might force us to accept it. But if this view is true, reason has no force. If morality impelled us to take such a view, integrity might make us choose it. But if the view is true, morality has no force. If the deepest needs of our nature were satisfied by this view, then our nature might compel us to accept it. But if this view is true, the deepest needs of our nature are illusory. In sum, there can be no reason for accepting the absurdist view of the universe, for that view destroys all reasons."    p.119






"...a universe without God is also a universe without meaning, a universe in which reason is not to be trusted, the moral law has no force, and the hope of happiness is doomed to frustration. If we were forced to accept such a universe, we would have to make the best of it we could, as the Epicureans, and the Skeptics, too, in their own way, tried to do. But what can force us to such a view? No external compulsion, for too many men of all kinds reject this view. Not reason, for the view denies its validity. Not morality, for the view denies any force to morality. Not hope of happiness, for the view rejects this hope. Thus there can be no reasons for accepting the view that the universe is meaningless, and there are excellent reasons for accepting the theistic view, which makes sense of the intelligibility of the universe, the felt force of the moral law, and our intimations of happiness. The difficulties of accepting and understanding the theistic view may be formidable, but the difficulties of rejecting it are insurmountable. To this conclusion reason leads us, and we can reject it only by rejecting reason."     p. 127

"The Fall consisted of Disobedience.....The apple was "not bad or harmful except in so far as it was forbidden", and the only point of forbidding it was to install obedience "which virtue in a rational creature (the emphasis is on creature; that which though rational is merely a creature, not self-existent being) is, as it were the mother and guardian of all virtues...."  -C.S.Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost.

 ...the sin of the first representatives of mankind lost man a privilege that was not his by nature: the right to happiness in Heaven by direct knowledge of, and delight in, God. Second, the Fall did not make individual descendants of our first parents guilty of any actual sin: only our own misdeeds can do that. But it did deprive all of their descendants of certain helps to virtue and render them weaker and more liable to fall into actual sin.


We have remarked that there are obvious empirical reasons for thinking that man is in some sort of mess. The distance between our aspirations and our performance calls for some sort of explanation, and popular science obliges with a dozen incompatible theories: Freud, for example, blames civilization, and some currently popular vulgarizers of anthropology blame our animal inheritance of aggressiveness. The Christian idea of an original moral failure by the first representatives of mankind is at least as plausible as any alternative and seems to offer a more accurate pointer to the root of the trouble: all our drives (not just our libido or our aggressiveness) are out of our control, and "the evil that we will not, we do."    p.161-2