The Grand Coherence, Chapter 14. Pre-Christianity and the Commonsense Theology of Creation and Fall
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
No time to read? Listen to the (AI) audio instead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L91inz7t-mVIE-_QrM0OuxaHZNLG4KNn/view?usp=sharing
To readers who followed my suggestion to skip ahead at the end of chapter 9: Welcome back! We've been focused on topics that are a little less grand than the very nature and destiny of the universe, such as natural history and how to read Genesis 1, and how people ought to live, both in terms of general principles and especially with respect to sexual matters. Large topics! But not quite so large as the one we were wrestling with in the chapters leading up to chapter 9, and to which we now return, namely: what is the true worldview? What is the ultimate truth about all things? What is the shape of the grand coherence of truth that can finally answer the profoundest and most universal questions of the seeking mind? That's what we'll aim to settle by the end of the book.
We concluded in chapter 9 that scientific materialism tries to squeeze the world into too small a cage. There are simply more things in the world than it can account for, things like ethics, beauty, human reason, free will, and the extraordinary design that pervades nature. It has to keep trying to explain things away, or promising to explain them away, while denying readily available commonsense or traditional explanations just because they don't fit into its oversimplified worldview. We must break free of this. We must deny its denials. We must abandon its project. The world isn't like that. Reality isn't scientific materialist. Scientific materialism isn't true. What should we believe instead?
Old mapmakers sometimes drew dragons in the corners of the map, where the real geography wasn’t known. Those dragons have become a parable for human credulity. Our minds don’t like blank spaces. When we don’t know, we tend to guess, and then forget that our guess was a guess. One consequence of this is that sometimes old ideas can linger for a long time after they're refuted, because no better alternatives have been offered, so people revert to old habits. So I want to supply an alternative to scientific materialism quickly, before readers' minds tire of skepticism and fall back into the old scientific materialist habits into which the pervasive biases of modern civilization constantly tempt them.
The famous "I think therefore I am" of Descartes is valuable, among other things, as a reminder that for us, subjective experience is certain, while objective truth is conjectural. Subjective experience is fundamental, known, and indubitable, though stultifyingly private, and often hard to describe or remember. Objective truth about things is pursued by means of extrapolation and generalization, as we seek to make sense of our subjective experiences by fitting them into a worldview. Unfortunately, the Western intelligentsia has for some time now been hard at work fitting the data into the wrong worldview, ignoring some things and misinterpreting others for the sake of the scientific materialist project. This has led, for one thing, to a neglect of serious, focused, subtle introspection. We need to try to relearn that art in order to get more of the basic data needed to populate a worldview with true concepts. We need to open our minds.
And I think the first lesson the world teaches to anyone with an open mind is its goodness.
When I first began to write this passage, I was sitting on my porch swing in the early evening, looking up at the branches of an oak tree, its leaves trembling in some breeze that I couldn’t feel, in front of a deep, dimming blue sky graced by ragged-edged clouds. And I was transfixed, overwhelmed by the goodness of things.
It's happened many times before and since. Such moments, such impressions, such unaccountable flights of aesthetic ecstasy are, I think, actually very common, and in one way very transient and forgettable. They are forgettable partly because they are so common, partly because they are so private, and partly by their irrelevance, that is, their irrelevance to all the troublesome business of the world, to making a living and all that. To focus on them seems escapist. A responsible part of your mind immediately begins whispering, "Don't you have things to do?..." Yet in the moment, and often in memory, too, they reveal themselves to be supremely valuable and real. To the extent that you surrender to them, let them occupy the mind, and focus on them, these experiences seem wonderfully unique, and infinitely precious. "Wow!" we say. Or "Beautiful!"
But if we've learned from Descartes that all knowledge must originate in subjective experience, we should take these experiences seriously, as evidence of something. C.S. Lewis went far down this road and ended up concluding that the experience we usually describe as "beauty" was really the desire for God. I won't attempt anything as ambitious as that. But I think we must conclude from the world's power to delight us so transcendently, that it is good, or at any rate it has a lot of goodness in it, so much so that it wouldn't be unreasonable to hazard a conjecture taught by old Christian theologians: that everything that exists is, in its own proper nature, good
There is a lot of confusion nowadays about the purpose of education. The best education may be the one that best inculcates this conviction, that teaches the student to enjoy and wonder at so many things that the enormous goodness of the world is irrevocably revealed to the mind and the heart.
The world's beauty and goodness are so abundant that they far surpass what we could ever enjoy. I don't just mean that a rich person with infinite money would never run out of beautiful places to visit and beautiful things to look at. For each single beautiful thing or place, there is no particular limit to how long a person might contemplate it with delight, other than the limits set by our own weakness.
There are, of course, accidental limits on aesthetic enjoyment set by the practical business of this world. I've had to stop admiring a beautiful sky reflected in a puddle, or a maple turned crimson in the blaze of autumn, lest I be late for work. But there are also limits set by a person's own imaginative capacity. Often, I've stood in a beautiful, serene forest, with its million leaves trembling tenderly, and a brook burbling over stones beneath it, and felt its wonderful peace seep into the nooks of my soul, yet nonetheless grown bored within two minutes, let alone five. That feels like my own fault, though in a sense deeper than any choosing that I'm capable of. Maybe it's a symptom of the fallenness of human nature. But I can imagine, though only just, a being strong and good enough to enjoy, and enjoy, and enjoy, without this shameful propensity for boredom. Maybe with divine help I can become like that myself. We'll need a greater capacity for aesthetic appreciation than we have now to remain happy in eternity. It's one of the rewards of a virtuous life.
Aesthetic experiences are characteristically inarticulate. We hardly dare to try to describe them. We may say they are "indescribable" or that they leave us "speechless." If we do speak, almost everything is lost in the description. Poetry is the great exception, though in some ways it's the exception that proves the rule. Poets, among other functions but perhaps most importantly, specialize in delighting others by articulating to some degree, though very inadequately, as any wise poet will be the first to insist, the inherent goodness of the world as we experience it, which others feel but cannot even begin to express. Poets perform this magic by using words in odd ways, calling things what they are not through metaphor and simile, being sensitive to words’ connotations and homophonies to create suggestions and associations, and so forth, in order to enhance the power and subtlety of language. Poetry, at its best, is a school for the capacity for wonder.
I read somewhere, long ago, that an important difference between the thought-ways of the modern Western mind and the thought-ways of the ancient Greeks is revealed if you compare the answers that would be given to the question: "Which is more like science, history or poetry?" Modern Westerners would say history, because at least history is true, whereas poetry is just made up. The ancient Greeks, this writer claimed, would have said that poetry is more like science, because… well, at the time I didn't understand the reason, and then I forgot it. But perhaps I begin to see. I think the ancient Greeks distinguished, first of all, the transient from the ideal. History deals with mere events, flux, transience. Poetry and science seek to penetrate the natures of things. Poetry and science are, in different ways, timeless. They're not mere chroniclers but seek to shed light on a permanent or eternal reality, getting at essential natures of things that don't change over time, while abstracting from what is accidental and fluctuating.
These claims about poetry may seem odd, since at one level, poetry seems to be nothing but words arranged in rhythmic and/or rhyming patterns. Yet the connotations of the word "poetic" reveal that there's more to poetry than that. We sometimes call prose "poetic," because it is beautifully evocative and has that quality of timelessness that we associate with poetry. I've never heard it done, but we'd easily understand it if someone called a poem "prosaic." And yet the association of poetry with rhythm and rhyme is strong and not accidental or arbitrary. I think there are two reasons for it, both important, and both illuminating about poetry's purpose.
The first reason is mnemonic. Rhythm and rhyme are an aid to memory. This is more important than it sounds. Rhythm and rhyme serve as a kind of certificate of authenticity. It's easy for a story to be told and retold, each time a little differently, until the original details are lost under a sediment of improvisation and forgetfulness. That is much less likely to happen to a poem, because if you change the words, you break the rhyme scheme and/or the meter. Rhythm and rhyme are like the ridges in old gold coins that prevented unscrupulous people from shaving off a little of the valuable metal and then spending the coin as if it were whole. The ridges prevented such tampering by making it easily detectable. With a poem, we're probably getting the exact words, laboriously crafted, words by which the sensitive soul of the poet described a sublime moment. Poets have reason to prevent their words from being changed, because they had to be chosen so carefully to accomplish the difficult feat of translating the most private experience into public language.
By their mnemonic power, rhythm and rhyme help poems to be bearers of mystery. You typically remember a prose text by understanding it and remembering its sense. But because you remember a poem as much by means of rhyme and rhythm as by understanding it, the poem can charm and puzzle, but stick in your memory, and then travel with you, still mysterious, still waiting to be understood, until the right moments come along for you to grasp different aspects of its sense. And so the poet can be more ambitious in filling his text with wisdom and wonder.
But I think rhythm and rhyme have an even more important function. They evoke and pay fitting homage to nature because nature is a poem. It has rhythm. It rhymes.
Sunrise and sunset. Seed-time and harvest. Generation follows generation, passing from childhood through old age. The world is full of rhythm.
Each sunrise echoes, and yet is a little bit different from, the last. Each apple tree, each calf, each child reminds us of its parents, and yet is not the same. The world doesn't merely repeat itself, but repeats itself with a difference. The world rhymes.
And as a scheme of rhythm and rhyme knits together and unites the varied words of a poem, so intricate patterns knit together and unite the splendid variety of nature, making it possible for it to be fascinatingly diverse in the extreme, and yet coherent. For two great aspects of the goodness of the world are variety and pattern. Nature is inexhaustible in the abundance of things it offers for our wonder, yet it still has a kind of unity. There are many, many kinds of mammals and birds, of trees and mushrooms, of landscapes and rocks, even of weather, but the same laws of physics apply to them all, and they are constantly exchanging the same substances. The water molecules and carbon around that are in you have passed through a thousand bodies. You'll never see all the places that Earth has to offer, but part of your substance has probably been there, or will go there, someday, after you die. Your substance has never visited the most distant stars, nor probably ever will, yet you can see their light. We're all bound together in a great chain of being, as the words of a poem are bound together.
Nature is a sea of wonderful change, and there is great variety over time even if you stay in just one place. It will offer a tremendous variety of beauties over the course of a year, as the cycles of nature wash over it. It might change, for example, from the snow of winter to the flowers of spring to the green leaves of summer to the gold and red leaves and ripe fruits of fall. It will be dimmed by clouds one day, windswept the next, then sunny and peaceful, then wet with rain. It will be pink with sunrise, then bright with morning, then hot and lazy with afternoon, then pink again with sunset, cool and refreshing with evening, and finally solemn below, glittering above through the long hours of a starry night. And yet through all this variety and change, there are patterns, threads of constancy. Always gravity tugs down and lets us stand firm on the ground. Day after day, the sun rises. We exploit these patterns for our own economic arrangements, planning ahead so as to keep safe and warm and secure food and shelter. We store up some goods that are now abundant but will be scarce. We enjoy the flowers of springtime or outdoor swimming in summer the more intensely because they'll soon be gone. There is so much pattern in nature that we might almost think it should have no room for surprising variety, and so much variety in nature that we might almost think it should be impossible to fit it all into patterns. Yet somehow the world manages to be both marvelously varied and pervasively patterned. The rhythm of the seasons, and the days, and the life cycles of animals and plants, goes on and on, and each sunrise, each springtime, each hatching of young, rhymes with the last. That nature is like a poem is probably one reason why we enjoy hearing words arranged in rhythm and rhyme.
We must be on our guard here, lest scientific materialist habits of thought creep in and steal away the insights we are gaining by contemplating nature. Because beauty isn't reducible to atoms and forces and energy, modern society tends to be quietly dismissive of it, regarding aesthetic experience as merely subjective, personal, fanciful, arbitrary.
But beware! Remember the terrible lesson of the grue problem! We stand upon the edge of an abyss of skeptical madness, where all our scientific reasoning would lose its epistemic warrant and fall into the void because of the inescapable arbitrariness of the concepts in which it deals. We can only keep our balance on that perilous precipice by insisting on the reality of ideas, on the real existence of the concepts by which we interpret the world and discern patterns in it. Earlier, I used the word "intuition" to name the faculty by which we know that green really is a proper concept, and grue is not. But I might almost have named it "aesthetic sensibility." Certainly it seems to be akin. There is an aesthetic appeal to an orderly world in which grass is green, and something repugnant about a crazy world in which grass is grue. Might not our faculty of discerning and delighting in beauty involve the perception of ideal forms behind the transient things of the world, and therefore of the proper concepts by which the world can be legitimately interpreted? We cannot see past the curtain of the amnesia of childhood to be sure, but doesn't it seem likely that our minds were populated with the concepts that reason so sorely needs precisely in moments of aesthetic delight? Frog! Cloud! Rock! Kitten! So shouts the child, with an ardor and conviction that the most eloquent poets might envy, and sometimes have. Doesn't it seem likely that the child who gleefully shouts "Frog!" has just glimpsed, once and for all, the eternal form of frogness? We saw, we thrilled with wonder, and we knew, our knowledge being the residuum of intuitive certainty that aesthetic wonder left behind. Inductive reasoning comes in afterwards to apply the concepts seeded by aesthetic experience for the scientific interpretation of the world. Maybe poetry is more fundamental than science. We'd better not risk it by doubting away its magic.
Isn't there a kinship between the states of mind of a poet who sees how a verse ought to flow, and of a scientist who sees how a natural law ought to operate? We like order, and we believe in order, and the preference and the belief are not unrelated. Wishful thinking is not a mere fallacy. We can translate our wishes into testable hypotheses, and learn things we would never have known, if we hadn't started with the wish. Our feeling that something is fitting, and reasonable, and makes sense, can be valid evidence. That's how we know grass is green, not grue, and that oranges are round, not squound. It's an indispensable ingredient in a thousand acts of inductive reasoning. The scientific study of nature is connected with discernment of nature's peculiar goodness, brimful of order and variety.
And if nature is a poem, it stands to reason that there should be a Poet behind it. If nature is pervaded by beautiful design, we have reason to conclude that some great Artist designed it. From natural order to divine Creator seems like an easy step. Has mankind in general really found this to be such an easy deduction? Yes, in a way. The vast majority of mankind has believed in some kind of divinity or deity, and worshipped some sort of God or gods. But what sort has varied so much as to cast doubt on whether there was any common intellectual origin. The Christian God, omnipotent, omniscient and all-wise, eternal and "outside time," everywhere present yet invisible, fully good, differs greatly from the beautiful but petty, passionate, quarrelsome, deceivable gods of Olympus. And yet it has often been guessed, from many clues, that all these gods sprang from the perception of a universal fatherhood behind the world, so that many of the "gods" were, in the beginning, simply God under different names, before they fell from that distinction by becoming the subject of lots of irresponsible storytelling, and being pooled with other gods into pantheons. For a deity to have made and to preside over and sustain the beautiful order in the world completes the picture nicely, and most human beings who have ever lived seem to have believed in some version of that.
It's just when we start to appreciate nature as a kind of sublime poem that evil is most shocking. Even small evils, discovered amidst a sublime moment, invade and spoil. An animal just killed spoils the peace of a verdant spring meadow. A bit of hateful graffiti steals the charm from a splendid old building. But far greater evils stalk this sad world of ours. Genocide. Slavery. Rape. Lying propaganda that brainwashes whole populations. In the 20th century, totalitarian regimes killed tens of millions of people. And today, almost a billion people in this world live in desperate poverty, surviving somehow on less than $1 per day. Or not surviving. There is child mortality. There are countries where life expectancies are under 40 years. And nature is full of predation and parasitism.
The problem of evil is an old and famous objection to Christian theism. If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does He let evil continue to exist? A partial answer is that God made people free, and freedom, though good, inevitably involves the possibility of choosing evil. But why are there natural evils, like floods and earthquakes? They aren't the result of anyone's bad choices. And while floods and earthquakes are rare, there is a kind of natural evil that is extremely pervasive, which can be described in terms of what economists call "scarcity" or what physicists call "the Second Law of Thermodynamics." We have endless needs and wants but limited means to achieve them. Often human evil arises from natural evil. The hungry man becomes a robber to get food. More generally, people fight and oppress each other, as often as not, to get scarce resources. Why should the world be made such that resources are scarce? That's not our fault, is it?
And why are we not only capable of evil, but terribly prone to it? We continually fall into wrongdoing without exactly meaning to, hardly knowing where we crossed a threshold of choice into committing a sin. We feel all sorts of sinful desires. Good people may find the old sinful temptation keeps recurring after they have successfully resisted it a thousand times. Even bad people probably feel ten sinful desires for every one they act on. And children begin quarreling before they have learned to talk. Christianity has long called this original sin, but we're not satisfied with a diagnosis. What's the cure?
And the worst of it is that evil seems fated to win in the end. If moral evil doesn't corrupt us, then natural evil will kill us. We will all die in the end. And not only us. As I explained in chapter 7, the whole universe is expanding, moving slowly outwards into the cold and dark. The stars are burning through their fuel supply. In the end an eternal silence will fall on the graveyard of the stars, and from the heat death of the universe, science knows of no way back to light and life.
The heat death of the universe is at least remote, but there is another kind of sadness that is with us every moment. Men pass away eventually, but moments are continually passing away. The cherry blooms with dazzling splendor for a day, a week, maybe a little more, but a hard rain comes and it is spent. A baby smiles for the first time, lighting up the world, but the moment passes, never to return. We can remember. Or at least, we can try. But memory is imperfect. A loving parent of a happy child is more blessed than many, yet who can retain in memory even the hundredth part of the joys and delights that the child's antics and delights and discoveries and affections brought? Time, the great thief, is at work even as we live, forever interrupting joy, often with trouble, but even if not that, then with the soft death of forgetfulness.
Does it make sense even to wish it were otherwise? A world without time is hard to imagine. And yet we are acquainted with things immune to time, namely, numbers and ideas. 2+2=4 eternally and forever, never mind your death or mine, never mind the heat death of the universe. Why can't we be like that? Why can't the precious moments and the people we love be like that? Poetry is again the exception that proves the rule, for it does seem to have some power to make the transient eternal, to "immortalize," as we sometimes say, a place or person or moment. But why can the moments live on only in a poem, and not really?
What makes the problem even more difficult is that we seem to be dependent on what we deplore. The human race loves stories. Around the world, before there were smartphones, people bought TVs when they scarcely had sufficient food and shelter, because TV delivers stories, for which we all have an insatiable appetite. But a story, unlike a poem, must have a complication, an element of evil. Some stories-- The Wind in the Willows comes to mind-- manage to make a lot of story with a little evil, and perhaps we should seek to cultivate more of a taste for stories like that. But there seems to be a law of escalation by which we seek out stories with greater and greater evil in them because they are more dramatic. The result is that most people in history, and certainly most people in contemporary America, encounter far more evil voluntarily in stories than involuntarily in life. Doubtless, our love of stories is in part a kind of training. We love to encounter evil in stories so that we may be better prepared to encounter it in life. But often the appetite for stories seems to become unmoored from any practical use. Can we really wish there were no evil in the world, if the price to pay is that there should be no stories, either? Perhaps we should, but it's not clear that we can. Yet how can we ever be innocent if, at some level, we will the evil that we don't do, so that the world might be interesting?
And so the thoughts of men converge upon a terrible paradox. On the one hand, there is the great truth of Creation: a good, beautiful, wisely ordered, highly varied world, full of things to admire and enjoy, reflecting in time the eternal forms in a thousand variations, and all united in a rhythm of days and seasons and life cycles, and the rhyme scheme of things recurring but a little differently. The world is a splendid poem whose beauties we could never exhaust. On the other hand, there is the great truth of the Fall: that all things are vitiated, impregnated to a greater or lesser degree with evil, sometimes resisting evil but often a little in love with it, transient, decaying, sinking inexorably towards death and ruin, and often tormenting each other in their efforts to survive a little longer. The wiser we are, the more this terrible lesson meets us everywhere we turn. We may be able to forget it sometimes, but it will come back soon enough. It is the world. And I think all the wisest people in history have seen it, more or less. It is present in the book of Job, of Homer and Plato, in the sadness of Buddha and Omar Khayyam. We might call it pre-Christianity, the highest perspective that the human mind can achieve without the help of Christian revelation.
But all this is very strange!
Isn't it strange for me to call it strange, when it is the only world I have ever known? What right do I have to call it strange? Strange, by comparison with what?
Wrong question. We've already seen that all our ability to distinguish the plausible from the strange depends not on mere experience but on the authority of intuition. Experience alone can't teach us that grass is green rather than grue. Intuition must help. On the same authority of intuition, I find it strange that the world is described by these juxtaposed truths of Creation and Fall. Why should such a beautiful and wisely ordered world inexorably fall apart? Why would the Creator who seems to have been at the back of the Big Bang, and who must have infused the world with so much order at the beginning, let it all run down and sink into ruin? It doesn't seem to make sense.
We can hardly imagine what a rescue would look like, so enmeshed are we in this sad, fallen world. Much of its sadness flows directly from the ways that we abuse our freedom. But we can't wish away our freedom, and we can't seem to stop abusing it. And the glories of nature are interwoven with its cruelty. We cannot but admire the ferocity of the lion, yet we pity its prey. What can we wish for in such a case? We wouldn't know how to rewrite the laws of physics to omit the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Yet even if we can't imagine a rescue, we might hope that the great Poet of nature, the wise Artist who must have framed all this wisely ordered world and brought it into being, might. We behold His might and skill through the things He has made. If anyone can save the world from the curse of death, it would be this original Creator. And so, after fully appreciating the glory of Creation and the tragedy of the Fall, there is one more step that reason can take. It can reject the world we seem to see as too strange, and look for some clue that would make it all make sense. It can conceive a hope for some inconceivable redemption of this wonderful, doomed world of ours. And then it can watch and wait for it knows not what, but for some sign that the Maker of the world is on the move, making His great rescue.
Such is the riddle of the world. And now let me give you a quick sketch of Christianity's answer to it.
God made a good world, and part of that creative epic involved was giving freedom to some of His creatures, notably to angels and to human beings, so that they too could choose and create. But first some of the angels, and then the first human beings, fell into sin, that is, into pride and rebellion and enmity to God. And so evil entered the world, and spread, until it infected everything that we see. Human nature became so infected with it that no one manages to live without sin. That's how the world we know, with its terrible juxtaposition of good and evil, came about, and some of it, some moments certainly, and probably some people, will never recover, and the only cure is for them to be cut off and forgotten. But for others, that is for all who will accept it, God has opened up a way back to eternal life.
It begins through a man, Jesus, who was also God, or-- the mystery of the Trinity must at least be mentioned here to get the story right-- the Son of God. Since we could no longer love human lives as they ought to be lived, God became a human being and did it for us. He came among us as a teacher and guide, a leader and king, a healer and comforter, a judge and a prophet, a friend and a brother. He was loved by many, especially by the humble, but also hated by many, especially the proud, to whom He appeared as an exposer and a rival. Jesus had the power of working miracles, which He used during His ministry to cure many of the superficial and transient evils of this world: hunger, sickness, perilous weather, even death. Of course, these sorts of miracles didn't get to the heart of the matter. Stomachs filled with miraculous bread were soon hungry again. Bodies miraculously healed or raised from the dead later sickened and died. But the miracles not only brought great joy in the moment, but served as signs of who Jesus was and what He intended to do.
This world being what it is, a place where good is everywhere so fragile and vulnerable, and evil so pervasive, festering, subtle, jealous and implacable, the inevitable consequence was that Jesus was killed. He was killed especially by two things were among the best human history had to offer, Roman statecraft and Jewish monotheism, thrown into a strange conspiracy of enemies by the provocation of Jesus's goodness. But this death completed and crowned the perfect goodness of Jesus's life, with all its self-sacrificing courage, and all its loving meekness and gentle humility. He worked no miracle to save Himself from this death. But death could not hold Him. After three days, He rose again, and things were so arranged that by doing so, He injected a new element into the midst of history, utterly alien to the fatal sadness of the fallen world, with its inexorable propensity for corruption and mortality. He had only a kind of local fame, and left little if any mark in secular records. He wrote nothing. But His followers, so fearful and confused during His life as the Gospels tell, became bold and fearless, eloquent and persuasive, like trumpets, bearing the message far and wide, indifferent to danger and violence and scorn. And among all that growing band of disciples, a conviction burned that the Resurrection of Jesus was not mere transient relief, as so many other miracles had been, but the dawn of a new world.
The Resurrected Jesus didn't stay long among us in the body. Instead of rotting in the earth after the crucifixion, He stayed on earth for a few weeks, appearing mostly to His apostles but to some others amounting to a few hundred, and then ascended into Heaven, still in the body, first to bring human nature into that blessed realm. Meanwhile on Earth, He remained present in another sense, for the Church lingered as His mystical body, and by a regularly occurring miracle instituted by Christ at the Last Supper, bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, and nourish His followers. His Church remains on Earth, strangely intermingled with it and yet separate, not touched in its inmost heart by the corruption of the world, and again and again rising above each passing age, outliving fashions and classes and nations and empires and schools of thought, immortal in the midst of a universal mortality that sweeps away everything except the Church and what it chooses to sacralize and take with it. But the prophets including and culminating in Jesus have told, figuratively or materially or both, how the world's redemption will be completed, in a terrifying transformation that destroys much, but that preserves, in the end, all that is worth preserving, all that is fit to dwell eternally in the presence of God, and then death will be no more.
From a scientific materialist perspective, all this seems very unlikely. It's not exactly empirically disprovable, but it's gratuitous and absurd and fanciful. But the wise through the ages have seen in their various ways, and we too can see upon reflection if we get the scientific materialist fallacy out of the way, something different. We see a world wisely ordered and beautiful and wonderful, evidently the work of a great and good Creator, which yet has somehow fallen into corruption and decay leading down inexorably into an abyss of meaninglessness and ruin. And this is like saying the world is grue: inexplicable, inconsistent, absurd. And so anything that promises to be an answer to the riddle of the world has a claim, if not to be believed at once, at least to be granted a kind of warrant of potential probability that we sometimes call "hope." Upon hearing all sorts of wonders and oddities, we have an impulse to believe, a kind of misgiving that it just might be true, because the mere commonsense world we experience is ultimately too strange to be believable. Usually such tales of wonder are refuted by evidence. But for this one tale, this proposed answer to the riddle of the world, the evidence, if we let it have its say, drives us the other way, fanning the first spark of hope into the burning convictions of faith.