Most young Christians are unfamiliar with their own intellectual traditions.  They are disconcerted when persons of an unserious disposition taunt them with questions like “If God exists, then why is there evil in the world?” or “If God made everything, then who made God?”

It isn’t that these are bad questions, but that we have been answering them for centuries, and persons of the taunting sort aren’t listening.  I would rather have a real conversation than a conversation-stopper.

But if that is the game, it doesn’t hurt to point out that two can play it.  Perhaps it will give young persons a little break from the taunters while they are taking the time to acquire those traditions they ought to have.

If God is a being who can’t not be, then why does He need to have been made?

If God doesn’t exist, then why is there good in the world?

If good and evil are illusions, then why do we have them in the first place?

If ethics is just a trick our genes play on us to get us to cooperate, then why not skip the trick and just have a gene to cooperate?

If morality is just an instinct, then why does it sometimes tell us to resist our other instincts?

If we are nothing but evolved mud, adapted to its environment, then why don’t we feel at home in this world?

If every possible desire is for something in this life, then why, when we get what we wanted, do we ask “Is this all there is?”

If there is no meaning, then considering that seeking nonexistent things is maladaptive, why do we seek meaning?

If the only reason for intelligence is that it helped our ancestors find mates, catch food, and escape from things that might eat them, then why do we also compose fugues and concertos?

If using our minds to answer the question doesn’t count, so the only reason people believe in God is that they want Him to exist, then wouldn’t we also have to say that the only reason people disbelieve in God is that they don’t want Him to exist?

If everything is about survival, then why don’t we just kill the old, sick, helpless, and all others who cost resources?

Oh, I forgot.  Perhaps you think we should.

How much do we read?  I suppose the answer depend on what one means by reading.  Much of what we call by that name is barely the same activity.  We say we have no time for real reading.  But we seem to have plenty of time for snack prose.

Unlike the older forms of prose, which encourage patience and thoughtfulness, snack prose encourages hastiness in thought and expression.  It also promotes a higher emotional temperature and lower ideational content.  No wonder there are so many insults on Twitter:  The median tweet is 34 characters.  That’s enough for what is flatteringly termed a “thought,” but not for an argument.

Interestingly, snack prose begins to set the style of prose in general.  Smaller bites.  Shorter paragraphs.  Gnomic sentences.

Just look at the ones in this post.

At the personal level, there is a solution, for anyone who cares enough to implement it:  Read more.

And turn all that other junk off.

On a cold summer day in the morning

Edward’s teacher gave Ed a grave warning.

“Read humbly, my boy,

“Learning’s not just a toy,

“For you can’t learn from what you are scorning.”

From time to time someone argues that abortion couldn’t be against the natural law, because sometimes during the course of gestation spontaneous abortions occur.

Here is the difference.  In one case, the unborn child dies because something goes dreadfully wrong during the natural process of development.  In the other, he dies because someone kills him.

The two kinds of death are not comparable.  A miscarriage should no more be called a “spontaneous abortion” than the death of a grown man from a heart attack should be called a “spontaneous homicide.”

Related:

Posts about abortion

“This I regard as history’s highest function,” says the Roman historian Tacitus, “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”

Curious.  Today we tend to think that the commemoration of virtuous deeds and the condemnation of wicked ones is suitable, perhaps, for teaching children about the founders of the country (and perhaps not even then), but not to be taken seriously by adults.  History for grown-up people isn’t about unscientific things like virtue and vice, we say, but about causes and effects, about what makes things happen.

But whatever Tacitus may have got wrong about the history of his own people, he understood that virtue and vice are real causal factors in affairs.  Vicious persons behave differently than virtuous ones, and although there are various ways, such as checks and balances, to protect some approximation of the common good even with less virtue than we wish that we had, there is no way to get by without any.

Thus to leave virtues and vices out of the picture is not more grown-up and scientific, but less.