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Stop Arguing, Start Enchanting
In 2015, physics Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilzcek wrote a best-selling book titled A Beautiful Question, in which he describes the physical universe as the product of an artist. Wilzcek grew up Catholic but admits to losing faith in conventional religion and turning from God as a teenager.
When asked in an interview if he was religious, Wilzcek replied, “Physics is my religion.” Yet he remains sympathetic to questions about God and believes science has much to say about who or what God is.
He notes how many of the bright stars in the history of science espoused strong Christian beliefs: Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Maxwell. Even Einstein, though he was not a Christian, viewed “the world as God.”
In his book, Wilzcek says the physicality of the universe asks if the cosmos possesses a metaphysical source. He explores beauty through the lens of Core Theory and quantum physics and asks if the world we inhabit embodies beautiful ideas.
His answer: “A resounding ‘Yes!’”
Embodying beautiful ideas is what art does. A painting embodies the ideas of the artist. So, Wilzcek is saying that the universe is a work of art, which indicates that behind this cosmic work of art is an Artist.
Wilczek says that Nature’s Core does “embody beautiful ideas,” but those ideas are “strange and deeply hidden.”
Here’s how Wilczek summarizes his exploration of Nature’s Core:
“The world, insofar as we speak of the world of chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen.
“And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you!”
Wilczek’s lifelong adventure into physics and cosmology reveals his own quest to regain some of the meaning and purpose he lost when he walked away from religion.
Why is Wilczek’s work important for us to know about?
The World Thirsts for Beauty and Wonder
An argument seldom convinces unbelievers to change their minds. Beauty, on the other hand, works on a different plain.
When we push on the edges of the universe, God comes romping into the picture. Questions of God lead to questions of personal meaning. Why am I here? Why do I matter?
Beauty stirs these questions, even illuminates them.
Our chief desire in life is to discover and be in a relationship with the Person who created us. “God designed the human machine to run on himself,” writes Lewis. “He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.”
Wilczek’s work stirs people to consider how the mysterious contours of our world can only, at times, be described in terms of beauty.
All of us can describe an encounter with the beautiful. That unexplainable split second when a tingly sensation rushed into our hearts, gave us goosebumps, and froze us in amazement—what Cambridge professor Peter de Bolla describes as “mutism,” or being struck dumb. We somehow know that the cosmos is alive with beauty.
Wilczek is one voice among many in the academy exploring how wonder and beauty give meaning to our world. If we’re attentive to work like his, it will help us see that the world thirsts for the beautiful and help us form a relevant cultural apologetic.
It’s no secret how secular the world is in the 21st century.
Christians respond to this secularity with apologetic books that will train you to defend the Christian faith through reasoned arguments, be a better apologist, and have a better grasp of the common philosophical and theological arguments and objections and the best answers to those objections.
But there’s another way to bear witness to God in our secular age.
Beauty as Apologetic
An argument seldom convinces unbelievers to change their minds. Beauty, on the other hand, works on a different plain. It steals behind the “watchful dragons,” as C.S. Lewis liked to say, and works on their emotions, convincing their heart.
“Beauty bypasses rational analysis, appealing to something far deeper within us.”
In this quote, Alister McGrath was summarizing C.S. Lewis’s notion that beauty can disarm the gatekeepers of our rational minds and speak directly to a person’s heart. And by heart, I don’t mean a wishy-washy emotional clump of sentiment hidden within our minds. I mean the very seat of our intellect.
The sights and sounds of the world and the work of an artist not only affect our thoughts and emotions within but can expand and even open up new pathways of cognitive function. Beauty works on us like a gardener works the soil; she cultivates it into a life-giving source. A mind awake to the beautiful not only finds nourishment but nourishes the world.
Historian Cardinal Avery Dulles reminds us that before an apologetic, Christianity was first a message. This message was distributed through personal testimony and spoke of the truthfulness of Jesus Christ as the risen Lord.
Due to the nature of these testimonies, Dulles says that preaching in the early church often sought to answer responses to such a claim. So, apologetics first emerged as a formulated response to the doubts of the Christian message.
But those who employed a defense of the faith were not only concerned about making a true argument; they also wanted to make a beautiful one, an attractive one.
So what type of “defense” should Christians use? One that highlights the attractiveness of the message itself—the message of hope.
Enter the new wave of apologists from the early twentieth century.
C.S Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, and T.S. Eliot, emerged as literary apologists or imaginative apologists or apologists of the beautiful.
Dulles says that Lewis’s work especially maintains its freshness and vitality today, more than a half-century later “while massive tomes of previous centuries gather dust on library shelves.” Lewis’s unique approach was an apologetic of beauty.
The imaginative apologist’s approach begins from the standpoint of basic Christianity, or mere Christianity, and engages with readers in such a way as to make Christianity not only seem reasonable but attractive. Lewis’s work reached general secular readers and the believing reader who didn’t have time for “technical theological works.”
Lewis said that the object of defense for the apologist is Christianity, not a person’s personal conception or opinion on a matter relating to religion. In defending Christianity, Lewis warns against “keeping abreast of recent movements in theology” as this can confuse what must stand as “the standard of permanent Christianity” in the mind of the apologist.
“Our business,” writes Lewis, “is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today and tomorrow—Hebrews 8:8) in the particular language of our own age.”
Stop Arguing, Start Enchanting
The Christian apologia is to be a defense not limited to sophisticated arguments but be a common explanation from the common person of their uncommon hope. But the form of explanation need not be an argument, debate, or formal discussion.
We need to stop arguing and start enchanting. C.S. Lewis believed in this. Later in his career, he wrote fewer apologetic works and focused on stories. Avery Dulles observed how formal apologetics became less effective after the late 1st century. It wasn’t until the 20th century, when the new imaginative apologetics hit the scene that we witnessed the largest impact ever in cultural apologetics. ”But Tim, isn’t Lewis’s Mere Christianity a reasoned argument for Christianity?
Yes, it is. But Lewis wasn’t didn’t set out to argue for the faith. He was asked to address his fellow Britons during wartime to encourage them. Lewis’s intent was compassionate service to his neighbors. He wasn’t trying to argue with anyone or denounce individuals.
In other writings, Lewis critiqued the cultural zeitgeist, but he also taught readers how to think about art and aesthetic judgment.
He also wrote stories utilizing pagan myth, adventure, and beauty.
Another example of Lewis’s apologetic program is how he combined his intellectual work with his works of fiction. Lewis wrote the third installment to his Cosmic Trilogy That Hideous Strength, as a creative way to show the argument that he laid out in his University of Durham lectures that we now know as The Abolition of Man.
Lewis used an intellectual-imaginative approach to express Christian witness, and he did so with the desire to comfort, guide, and inspire his readers.
There is a world out there hungering for significance. Let’s argue the faith less and woo the world with deep expressions of wonder and beauty.
Notes for the really curious.
