The QOTD, on the limits of reason:

“The third problem, that of conflict between knowledge and rationality… is often called the dilemma of ultimate commitment and the problem of presuppositions.

The problem is crucial, not only because no one has seemed able to solve it but because the Christian commitment of many Protestants depends upon the assumption that it cannot be solved. For the argument provides a rational excuse for irrational commitment… It argues that (1) for certain logical reasons, rationality is so limited that everyone must make a dogmatic irrational commitment; (2) therefore, the Christian has a right to make whatever commitment he pleases; and (3) therefore, no one has a right to criticize him (or anyone else) for making such a commitment…

No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: ‘How do you now?’, ‘Give me a reason’, or ‘Prove it!’ When such challenges are accepted by citing further reasons which entail those under challenge, these may be questioned in turn. And so on forever. If the burden of proof or rational justification is perpetually shifted to a higher-order premise or reason, the contention originally questioned is never effectively defended… An infinite regress is created.

To justify the original contention, one would eventually have to stop at something not open to question for which one does not and need not provide justificatory reasons. These would be the halting points for rational discussion… However, if all men do not cease their questioning at the same point - if ultimate standards are perceived not to be certain or if different people deem conflicting ‘ultimate’ standards to be certain - then ‘ultimate relativism’ results. Some way of arbitrating rationally among competing ultimate stopping points by appeal to a common standard is now excluded in principle. If these ultimate statements are matters of contention, then there will be no Archimedes’ lever with which to decide among competing sets of ultimate standards. Indeed, even if everyone did subjectively happen to stop at the same place or accept the same standard, there still would be no way to prove rationally that this universal subjective standard led to objectively true statements about the world…

Obviously, one cannot, without arguing in a circle, justify the rationality of a standard of rationality by appealing to that standard… The limits of rational argument within any particular way of life seem, then, to be defined by reference to that object or belief in respect to which commitment is made or imposed, in respect to which argument is brought to a close. Thus reason is relativized to one’s halting place or standards, and cannot arbitrate among different standards. Different halting places - i.e., standards, criteria, presuppositions, conventions, dogmas, articles of faith - are taken by different individuals and define irreconcilable communities. Whatever may explain how such differences arise, reason can never dissipate them.

– W.W. Bartley, III, The Retreat to Comitment, pg. 72-74.

The QOTD, on postmodernism:

“Postmodernists nearly all reject classical foundationalism; in this they concur with most Christian thinkers and most contemporary philosophers. Momentously enough, however, many postmodernists apparently believe that the demise of classical foundationalism implies something far more startling: that there is no such thing as truth at all, no way things really are. Why make that leap, when as a matter of logic it clearly doesn’t follow? For various reasons, no doubt. Prominent among those reasons is a sort of Promethean desire not to live in a world we have not ourselves constituted or structured. With the early Heidegger, a postmodern may refuse to feel at home in any world he hasn’t himself created. Now some of this may be a bit hard to take seriously (it may seem less Promethean defiance than foolish posturing); so here is another possible reason. As I pointed out (above, p. 73), classical foundationalism arose out of uncertainty, conflict, and clamorous (and rancorous) disagreement; it emerged at a time when everyone did what was right (epistemically speaking) in his own eyes. Now life without sure and secure foundations is frightening and unnerving; hence Descartes’s fateful effort to find a sure and solid footing for the beliefs with which he found himself. (Hence also Kant’s similar effort to find an irrefragable foundation for science.)

Such Christian thinkers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Kuyper, however, recognize that there aren’t any certain foundations of the sort Descartes sought—or, if there are, they are exceedingly slim, and there is no way to transfer their certainty to our important non-foundational beliefs about material objects, the past, other persons, and the like. This is a stance that requires a certain epistemic hardihood: there is, indeed, such a thing as truth; the stakes are, indeed, very high (it matters greatly whether you believe the truth); but there is no way to be sure that you have the truth; there is no sure and certain method of attaining truth by starting from beliefs about which you can’t be mistaken and moving infallibly to the rest of your beliefs. Furthermore, many others reject what seems to you to be most important. This is life under uncertainty, life under epistemic risk and fallibility. I believe a thousand things, and many of them are things others—others of great acuity and seriousness—do not believe. Indeed, many of the beliefs that mean the most to me are of that sort. I realize I can be seriously, dreadfully, fatally wrong, and wrong about what it is enormously important to be right. That is simply the human condition: my response must be finally, ‘Here I stand; this is the way the world looks to me.’

There is, however, another sort of reaction possible here. If it is painful to live at risk, under the gun, with uncertainty but high stakes, maybe the thing to do is just reduce or reject the stakes. If, for example, there just isn’t any such thing as truth, then clearly one can’t go wrong by believing what is false or failing to believe what is true. If we reject the very idea of truth, we needn’t feel anxious about whether we’ve got it. So the thing to do is dispense with the search for truth and retreat into projects of some other sort: self-creation and self-redefinition as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, or Rortian irony, mockery, as with Derrida. So taken, postmodernism is a kind of failure of epistemic nerve.”

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 436-37.

The QOTD, on biased authority:

“Medical journals are rarely accused of ideological bias, they are accused of financial bias. The press are rarely accused of financial bias, they are accused of ideological bias. If you studiously spend one month looking for the opposite bias in both, what will happen is that you will become an alcoholic.”

- The Last Psychiatrist.

The QOTD, on food:

“Perhaps because we have no such culture of food in America almost every question about eating is up for grabs. Fats or carbs? Three squares or continuous grazing? Raw or cooked? Organic or industrial? Veg or vegan? Meat or mock meat? Foods of astounding novelty fill the shelves of our supermarket, and the line between a food and a ‘nutritional supplement’ has fogged to the point where people make meals of protein bars and shakes. Consuming these neo-pseudo-foods alone in our cars, we have become a nation of antinomian eaters, each of us struggling to work out or dietary salvation on our own. Is it any wonder Americans suffer from so many eating disorders?”

– Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, page 301.

Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. “The world has changed,” she tells us, “I can feel it in the water.” She’s actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.

Zinn: Of course. “The world has changed.” I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn’t changed. Not at all.

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

- McSweeney’s, Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for the Fellowship of the Rings.

The QOTD, on NPR:

300 people were shown either a real or altered photo of two different protests, and then asked to recall what happened back then. The point of this study was to show that altering a photograph will change how the events are actually remembered (in this case, as bigger and more violent.)… But, here’s the thing: these subjects weren’t actually at the original protests. Their original memories also came from images– hopefully not altered images, but certainly selected images. Right? The TV newspeople didn’t pick the boring pictures, did they? I get that doctored photos are bad. But how much of our memories and knowledge of the past are largely determined not by “reality” but what, or how, we were shown it in the first place. Obviously, a lot. Therein lies the question: is it worse to see a doctored photo, or doctored reality?

Here’s an example: search your mind for recollections about the Tiananmen “episode” in 1989. Can you remember anything– anything at all– other than that guy standing in front of the tanks? Do you remember who was protesting? Why? The question isn’t why you don’t remember anything, hell, it was 20 years ago and a solar system away; the question is why you do remember that guy. Are you better off for knowing this? Are you smarter? Or do you carry the false impression that you know something about which you really know nothing? That’s the Matrix– not only do you have false memories, but you get to feel good about being a knowledgeable, aware, citizen of the world.

NPR runs a cult this way. It offers an eclectic mix of topics, selected on purpose to allow you to think you are getting depth. You listen to NPR, and you think you’re learning, growing, becoming a Renaissance Man. You’re not. Sure, it beats CNN, but that’s not a battle anyone is supposed to lose. Its target audience is insecurely intelligent people who want desperately to be intellectual and well read but who don’t actually want to read too much. What NPR offers is sentiment; the feeling that you know something.

– The Last Psychiatrist.

The QOTD, on religious fundamentalism:

But isn’t all this just endorsing a wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’.

It is therefore hard to take seriously the charge that the views I’m suggesting are fundamentalist; more exactly, it is hard to take it seriously as a charge. The alleged charge means only that these views are rather more conservative than those of the objector, together with the expression of a certain distaste for the views or those who hold them. But how is that an objection to anything, and why should it warrant the contempt and contumely that goes with the term? An argument of some kind against those conservative views would be of interest, but merely pointing out that they differ from the objector’s (even with the addition of that abusive emotive force) is not.

– Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (available online for free, here), pg. 244-45.

The QOTD:

“One thing I’ve learned over the past 20 years of studying about four issues in great detail is that it takes an enormous amount of work to have a meaningful opinion on any complicated issue.”

– Paul Campos.

The QOTD:

“There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it’s not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise — the principle at the core of American culture.

Despite President Barack Obama’s early personal popularity, we can see the beginnings of this schism in the “tea parties” that have sprung up around the country… [T]he tea parties are not based on the cold wonkery of budget data. They are based on an “ethical populism.” The protesters are homeowners who didn’t walk away from their mortgages, small business owners who don’t want corporate welfare and bankers who kept their heads during the frenzy and don’t need bailouts. They were the people who were doing the important things right — and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong.”

- Arthur C. Brooks, The Real Culture War is Over Capitalism, Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2009.

One of the hardest, most profound, and most illuminating lessons that I’ve learned is that truth is hard to find. It is hard to be right about anything. It’s much harder than people think.

“One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller’s Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn’t stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it’s a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you’re shown that it is not.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. ‘People take reality for granted,’ Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. ‘Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.’

For Teller (that’s his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don’t see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like… This may be why exposing the ’secret’ of a magic trick is so often deflating. Most of the time, the secret is that we’re gullible and our brains are riddled with blind spots.”

- Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion, Wired Magazine, April 20, 2009.

In a strange way, I believe that this is what the techniques of the meditative traditions (e.g., mindfulness based-stress reduction, zazen, etc.) may really be about: our normal consciousness is cluttered by concepts of the world around us. We create conceptual categories so that we can analyze and understand the world and then predict what it will do. These concepts are necessary because our minds aren’t capable of seeing all of reality. Consequently, as Teller points out in the article, our attention functions as a spotlight in the dark which reveals its subject but which necessarily conceals everything else. Our concepts, while necessary at times, leave us open to biases, distorted thinking, and unexamined assumptions.

In meditation, by clearing your mind of distractions and focusing on the present moment, you are, with practice, hopefully, able to perceive the world with more immediacy.

“We each have three lives: the untouchable past, where our mistakes are stored; the immeasurable present, where we make them; and the impenetrable future, where they group and marshal. The present is the bottleneck: and the only reason most human pasts are not more untidy than they are is that we can only manage one mistake at a time. That bottleneck is the pinch in the hourglass, the restrictor which means events must pass us by one single grain at a time. We could take this as an opportunity to see things clearly, but it seems we’d rather not — most of us prefer to speculate hopelessly in the unfathomable scale of the future, or flounder hopelessly in the massive scale of the past. It’s an unfortunate distraction because, as we often tell each other, once the moment has passed we don’t get it back.

What this means is that those who can see the present clearly, and who do view the past and the future with the precision of good perspective, have a tremendous advantage over everybody else. They have a different relationship with fortune than the usual fumbling that the rest of us can muster. They can slip through the gaps between events that others do not even notice. They can make coins disappear.”

- Dave Whiteland, Planetarium, September 9, 1999.

The QOTD:

Chapter 2 summarizes Olson’s groundbreaking work on how interest groups work to reduce a society’s efficiency and GDP. Some of this work seems obvious in retrospect and indeed Adam Smith noted that businessmen rarely met without conspiring against the public interest. There are a handful of automobile producers and millions of automobile consumers. It makes sense for an automobile company, acting individually, to lobby Congress for tariffs. The company will reap 20-40 percent of the benefits of the tariff. It doesn’t make sense for an individual consumer, however, to lobby Congress. It will cost him millions of dollars to lobby against Congress and preventing the tariff will save him only a few thousand dollars on his next car purchase. The economy suffers because some resources that would have been put to productive use are instead hanging around Washington and because cars are more expensive than they should be…

How could the Great Depression have lasted so long? Olson suggests assuming that a lot of prices are fixed by colluding business cartels and/or by government regulation. The prices are fixed higher than they would be in a free market, which imposes costs on society and guarantees supranormal profits to cartel members. If there is inflation, the losses to the economy from the cartel are ameliorated. The fixed price is no longer than much higher than what would have been the market price. In the event of deflation, however, the fixed price is now ridiculously high, demand for such an overpriced product plummets, and production plummets. Investment in new factories will fall to zero almost immediately.

Olson divides the economy into a fixprice sector and a flexprice sector. The fixed price part of the economy includes government workers, union workers, products produced by cartels, agriculture supported by government, and imported raw materials whose price is set on world markets. The flexprice sector would include simple services such as cleaning houses and babysitting, In the event of deflation, the output in the fixed price sector will collapse, driving a flood of young and newly unemployed workers into the flexprice sector. The schoolteacher will continue to earn $100,000 per year and retire at 52. The laid-off manufacturing worker will find that the market-clearing wage for cleaning houses is one third of what it was before the economic downturn. This is in fact what happened during the Great Depression. Folks who kept their jobs sailed through; folks tried to make a living as street vendors could not earn enough to eat…

Olson showed back in 1982 that modern macroeconomic theory was basically worthless in developed stable countries. Macroeconomics posits a free market in which wages and prices adjust dynamically. That applies to an ever-smaller sector of the U.S. economy. We have a rapidly growing governnment that directly or indirectly employs more than one third of our workers, many of whom are unionized. We have a health care system that consumes 16 percent of GDP and is staffed with doctors who restrict entry into the profession via their licensing cartel. The financial services sector is about 10 percent of the economy and they now tap into taxpayer money to keep their bonuses flowing in bad times. The automotive industry kept itself profitable over the years by successfully lobbying for import tariffs. When the profits turned to losses, they successfully lobbied to have taxpayers pick up those losses. A university-trained macroeconomist might be able to predict what will happen to babysitters in a depression, but not the price of cereal, the wage of a manufacturing worker, or the fate of those Americans who collect most of our national income (e.g., Wall Street, medical doctors, government workers).

A cashflow approach is much more effective for figuring out where we’re headed. Money flows out to the folks on Wall Street who bankrupted their firms, to schoolteachers who’ve failed to teach their students, to government workers who feel that simply showing up to work is a heroic achievement, to executives and union workers in America’s oldest and least competitive industries. If times are tough and money is tight, that means almost nothing is left over for productive investment. What would have been a short recession will turn into a long depression and decades of higher taxes and slow growth to pay for all of the cash ladled out. Special interest groups will continue to gain in power.

– Philip Greenspun, reviewing Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, 1982.

“The modern mind,” writes Wendell Berry, “longs for the Future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven.” Berry argues that we’ve been conned into believing that the present is something we need to escape because it’s just not good enough. We can’t be here now because we don’t yet have enough money, enough gadgets, or a large enough house. We’re not yet powerful enough or “happy” enough to live in the present. The truth is, if we’re satisfied with what we have in the present, we’re less likely to be obedient consumers, so the supply-side of the economy has invested trillions to engineer dissatisfaction into our shell-shocked psyches. Leisure, love, and laughter can be best had in the future, we begin to believe, but we can’t put our fingers on where that disturbing idea came from.

- David Wann, Simple Prosperity, quoted by My Money Blog.

The QOTD, on doubt:

All philosophy begins in wonder, said the ancients. With exceptions, contemporary philosophy stops at wonder. We are told: don’t ask, don’t wonder, about what you cannot know for sure. But the most important things of everyday life we cannot know for sure. We cannot know them beyond all possibility of their turning out to be false. We order our loves and loyalties, we invest our years with meaning and our death with hope, not knowing for sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, whether we might not have gotten it wrong. What we need is a philosophy that enables us to speak truly, if not clearly, a wisdom that does not eliminate but comprehends our doubt.

- Richard John Neuhaus, Born Towards Dying.

The QOTD:

“None of this is to imply that new professionals are left without goals. Ironically, however, the primary goal for many becomes, in essence, getting compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals… Once the professional adopts this new, quantitative measure of success, the system has him in the palm of its hand, for he maximizes his compensation by working hard to further the goals of his employer… And work hard he does - 12-hour or longer workdays are standard for many young professionals. According to the Wall Street Journal, “in some investment-banking and law firms, seven-day, 100-hour work-weeks aren’t uncommon.” At First Boston Corporation, a large international investment banking firm headquartered in New York City, “Young associates stay late about three nights a week. The other nights they’re out by eight or nine,” the chairman of the corporation’s recruiting committee tells the Journal.

Moreover, in spite of his marathon effort and to his employer’s further delight, the young professional feels that he must not be working hard enough, because the compensation never quite seems to satisfy him; the feeling of “having it all” eludes him. In fact, his efforts are futile, for no amount of income or status can make whole a social being who has abandoned his own intellectual and political goals. The situation tends to be self-perpetuating. The professional’s priority on compensation inhibits him from developing and pursuing his own intellectual and political goals, because the independent thinking necessary to do that is incompatible with the mind-set necessary to do best for his employers and therefore do best in the rat race. Furthermore, the rat race is an all-encompassing effort: the young professional works the week like a sprint and is left with only a few hours of leisure time out of the week’s 168 hours. To prepare his mind adequately for the professional work ahead, he must spend his hard-won free time “working at relaxation,” certainly not reflecting. Until the professional assigns highest importance to developing and advancing his own political goals, serving the system will be not just his job, but his life.”

- Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds, pg. 121-23.

The QOTD, echoing Stanley Fish:

“It is no good falling back on ’science’ as having disproved the possibility of resurrection. Any real scientist will tell you that science observes what normally happens; the Christian case is precisely that what happened to Jesus is not what normally happens.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, pg. 124.

The QOTD:

“Grasping the nettle — proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality — will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start. But if Christianity is only going to be allowed to rent an apartment in the Enlightenment’s housing scheme, and on its terms, we are, to borrow Paul’s phrase, of all people the most to be pitied — especially as the Enlightenment itself is rumored to be bankrupt and to be facing serious charges of fraud.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

The QOTD, on evidence:

“Turning to the gospels, we find all the puzzles of which readers have been aware for centuries (not simply with the rise of modern scholarship). The stories of Easter morning in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 are notoriously difficult to harmonize. We shall never be sure how many women went in what order to the tomb, at what point two or more male disciples went as well, how many angels they all saw, where or in what order the appearances of Jesus took place. But, as many have pointed out, it is precisely this imprecision, coupled with the breathless quality of the narratives, that gives them not only their unique flavor but also their particular value. Despite the scorn of some, lawyers and judges have regularly declared that this is precisely the state of the evidence they find in a great many cases: this is what eyewitness looks and sounds like. And in such cases the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, they mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion.”

– N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pg. 121-22.

Here’s an interesting claim:

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

My initial inclination is to point out that to reduce “knowledge” to probability judgments, without anything more, is to remove all meaning from the content of the word “knowledge.” But this may warrant more thought.

The QOTD, on utilitarianism:

“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use. To say this is not of course to deny that many of its uses have been in the service of socially beneficial ideals… But the use of a conceptual fiction in a good cause does not make it any less of a fiction.”

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, pg. 64.

The QOTD: C.S. Lewis on the truth of Christianity:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths; i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of the poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’ Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.

Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914 to 1963) (London: Collins, 1979), 427.