Don Williams’ Blog

Don June 29th, 2009

LV Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            The world is not all sweetness and light.  It can be dark and cold, and the cold can be harsh and cruel, especially in the long winters of the upper Midwest.  But the brightest light can cut right through that darkness and be all the sweeter for doing so.  The poet’s job is not to deny the darkness and the harshness, still less to curse them, but to display in concrete images the truth     that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.

 SONNET XVII 

The concrete walks were softer than the ground.

            The pond was smooth and hard, though scarred by skates.

            A few lone futile flakes of snow whirled ‘round

            In the iron grip of a wind that howled with hate.

The skaters that had scarred the pond were gone

            And rested now, no doubt, by warm hearth fires.

            They’d left the wind to prowl the waste alone

            And wail of its own alien desires.

At times, through scudding clouds, a star would flame,

            Hinting from a height remote and pure

            Of longings of its own it could not mane,

            Though still the message came, and that was sure.

But once, they say, three Wise Men from afar

            Bowed to the Name beneath just such a star.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don June 27th, 2009

LIV Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            The title says it all.

 A PURPOSEFULLY ATROCIOUS POEM WRITTEN AS THERAPYAFTER RECEIVING A REJECT SLIP, 20 Dec. ’74. 

The problem with this wretched stuff

Is that it ain’t obscure enough.

Anyone can plainly see

What it means, and that must be

The death of any poem that’s wrote.

The meaning must be so remote

That no one can make head nor tail

Of it if you want it to sell.

Oh, that these were the good old days

When any scop could sing his lays

Of battles the king had recently fought.

His verses were not judged as naught

If someone recognized the deeds

They sought to capture—no, indeed!

That is what we need today:

Poems that have something to say,

Clothed in metaphor to be sure,

But let them not be so obscure

That no one can tell what we’re after,

Or they may hang us from the rafters!

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don June 24th, 2009

This review appeared in Philosophia Christi, 6:2 (2004): 375-77.

Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason.  Downers Grove, Il.:  InterVarsity Press, 2003, 132pp., pbk.

C. S. Lewis’s famous debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic club over the validity of his argument in Miracles for the self-defeating status of naturalism may or may not have produced much clarification of the issues, but it definitely produced a tendentious interpretation of Lewis’s career:  that he was so mortified at being defeated that he gave up rational apologetics from then on.  Never mind that many of the people who were present either thought Lewis had won or that the debate was a draw; never mind the fact that he revised the relevant chapter in a later edition of Miracles to meet Anscombe’s objections and published several subsequent essays on apologetics.  Why let mere facts stand in the way of a good myth?   

Victor Reppert first destroyed the “Anscombe Myth” in “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19:2 (1989).  It is good to see that discussion brought forward for a new generation of readers.  If Reppert had done nothing else, he would have performed a valuable service here.  It is to be hoped that more people will read his complete review of the evidence in the new book and that this particular bit of arrant nonsense will finally be put to rest.  But Reppert’s goal is much broader:  to bring Lewis’s argument for theism up to date and see how it fares after all these years.  He concludes that the argument from reason is still a good one.

Reppert begins with his review of the Lewis-Anscombe debate and then moves on to a discussion of a healthy approach to apologetics, rejecting fideism (just believe) and “strong rationalism” (Christian truth is so evident that any rational person should accept it) in favor of “critical rationalism” (Christian apologists can show that Christianity is a reasonable option).  I find myself wishing there were a middle position between his “strong rationalism” and “critical rationalism.”  He points out well the problems with strong rationalism of the Josh McDowell type.  But . . . if Christianity is really true, the universe ought in the final analysis to reflect that truth. One doesn’t want to be able to offer nothing more than one reasonable alternative among many.  I feel this problem at the end of the book, where I believe Reppert has earned the right to be at least a bit less tentative than he is.  Naturalists really can’t defend naturalism without cutting off the limb they are wanting to sit on . . . but Reppert is not willing to say that this is irrational?  How self defeating must a position be before we are willing to say so? 

Also, it doesn’t seem to me possible to give a complete account of the issues surrounding apologetic method without dealing with 1 Cor. 2:14.  It would seem that one would have to get past that verse somehow in order to see the amount of irrationality as being as evenly distributed between believers and non-believers as Reppert seems to imply.  Or, to put it more accurately, I should say that irrationality may well be tragically fairly evenly distributed in fact, (I unfortunately think he is right about that), but there should be a difference in theory.  Christians don’t have to be as irrational as they are; non-Christians do.  They have no choice but to be irrational at some point, because they have set themselves against the rational universe that God actually made.  I think this is a pretty important distinction that I wish had come out more clearly.

When Reppert turns to the argument from reason itself, he does a good job of guiding us through the issues.  The argument on p. 68 is especially fine.  “If a materialist says that she believes in materialism because she perceives the reasons for believing it, then I take it she is committed to the existence of reasons,” and therefore has to explain how they can exist in a materialist universe.  It is really the same argument that Socrates used at his defense:  How can you believe in flute playing and not believe in flutes?  How can you believe in divine effects and not believe in the gods?  Reppert has updated it and applied it to the existence of reasons in a useful and persuasive manner.  His refutation on pp. 100-101 of the notion that reason could have been produced by natural selection is also good.  The “inadequacy objection,” which argues that non-scientific explanations do not explain, is one of the biggest hurdles the argument from reason has to face.  Reppert’s question on p. 111 is an excellent response to it:  “Is it more dangerous to the scientific enterprise to suggest that a comprehensive “scientific” account of cognition cannot be correct, or to suggest that truth should not be the goal of our rational deliberations?”    That is a question that we need ask more insistently.

When I tried to update Lewis’s argument in”Some Propositions for a Theistic Argument,” Bulletin of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, 14:1 (1991): 70-81, I focused on the fact that a naturalistic universe is by definition a deterministic universe.  The laws of physics determine everything because the universe, being uncaused, exists a se and therefore by definition cannot be other than it is.  It seems to me that this fact needs to be stressed, for it provides a simpler way of defeating Anscombe’s objections.  It really doesn’t matter whether chains of reasoning caused by non-rational causes can happen to have been valid or not, unless we are free to choose between them on a non-deterministic basis.  If nobody can help believing what he believes, whether it be rational or irrational, then nobody is in a position to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted truth claims or to urge his own truth claims with any moral force.  Valid chains of reasoning might occur, but nobody–including the naturalist making truth claims for naturalism–would be in a position to benefit from them.  Reppert implies all of this when he talks about the problem of knowing that one is rational, but it seems to me that his case would be strengthened by bringing it out more clearly.

Over all this is a very fine book, one of the few books on Lewis that actually contributes something useful to our knowledge of him and our understanding of the things he talked about.  I hope it will have the success it deserves.

Donald T. Williams

Toccoa Falls College

• Apologetics , Inklings
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Don June 23rd, 2009

LIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            If I don’t stop complaining about what passes for “spring” in the American Midwest, I will start sounding like a broken record.  But maybe the poems can avoid that fate more easily than the prose.  Let’s see.

 TO SPRING IN ILLINOIS, 1975 

It’s April now, but you would never know

To see the stubborn falling of the snow.

Except to show that Winter has its nerve,

I do not see what purpose it could serve,

This cruel encroachment on the rights of Spring.

In Georgia, we would never let the thing

Get near this far.  There, as in Camelot,

The Winter never stays where it should not.

But here it doesn’t have the sense to know

When its welcome’s gone, and it should go.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don June 22nd, 2009

This review was published in Mythprint 43:9 (September 2006): 11-12.

Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World.  Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003.  ISBN 080542778-3, pb, xv + 174 pp., $19.99.

From Chad Walsh’s pioneering C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949) to Michael Aeschliman’s The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism (1983) to John Beversluis’s C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (1985) to Scott Burson and Jerry Walls’ C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the most Influential Apologists of our Time (1998) to Victor Reppert’s C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (2002), a number of substantial attempts have been made to evaluate C. S. Lewis as a Christian apologist.  In some ways the best of these studies is Lewis Agonistes by Louis Markos, professor of English at Houston Baptist University.  The title means “Lewis the wrestler,” from the Greek agwn (agon), an athletic contest or struggle.  It nicely captures the fact that for Lewis, apologetics was not simply a polite academic hobby, but rather a phase of the battle of light against darkness, a struggle for minds and hearts with the eternal souls of men and women at stake. 

            As a general guide to Lewis’s apologetic work, Lewis Agonistes is clearly the class of the field.  Walsh is dated, Beversluis unsympathetic and tendentious, Aeschliman and Reppert excellent but limited in scope to one issue or argument.  Markos is comprehensive, covering not only the standard nonfiction works (Mere Christianity, Miracles, Problem of Pain, etc.) but also showing how Lewis’s fiction, literary scholarship, and works such as Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed contribute to a holistic approach in which the modern estrangement between Reason and Imagination is overcome.  The book is organized thematically, first covering Lewis’s preparation for his wrestling in both education and life experience and then analyzing his response to five challenges:  science and the modernist paradigm, the new age and neopaganism, evil and suffering, the meaning of art and language, and heaven and hell.  The emphasis is not so much on Lewis’s arguments in themselves (which, however valid, must be constantly updated) as on Lewis as a role model for our own apologetic wrestling.  In the process Markos gets beyond the typical caricature of Lewis as a reactionary to elucidate the wholeness of his approach, which responds to the challenges of modernity “both by means of a reactive defense that takes us back to an older, medieval countervision and a proactive offense that looks ahead to a new synthesis of ancient and modern” (x).

            The general excellence of Markos’s treatment is marred by an occasional yielding to the temptation to psychologize, speculating about the sources of Lewis’s own need to wrestle toward a synthesis of Reason and Imagination.  I also think he misses the point in his attempt to show how Lewis might have responded to Postmodern forms of intellectual nihilism such as Deconstruction.  Markos contrasts “conservative Evangelicals who argue that language is meaningful because it is not slippery” with “liberal theorists who claim that it is slippery and therefore meaningless.”  He finds a middle way in “poetry that cries out on the rooftops that language is more meaningful precisely because it is slippery” (130).  But why use the word “slippery,” which concedes too much, when a more positive description like “rich” would have achieved his purpose equally well?  One can’t resist imagining a Lewisian “Distinguo!” being thundered over a mug of Eagle and Child beer at that point.  For a much better treatment of this question see Bruce Edwards’ outstanding study, A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy (1986).

            These are about the only flaws I can find in a very fine work, except the fact that a book of this much intellectual substance rather demands the bibliography and index which are inexplicably missing at the end.  Markos avoids the endless dreary summarizing and rehashing which makes most secondary works on Lewis a waste of time that would have been better spent re-reading (or reading) Lewis and gives us readable analysis that is profitable to follow even when I think it is wrong.  And it is mostly right.

Reviewed by Donald T. Williams, PhD 

• Apologetics , Inklings
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Don June 20th, 2009

LII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            We are pilgrims and strangers in this world.  Christianity teaches this truth explicitly, but every other mythology, it seems, hints at it implicitly.  It is as inescapable as death; but it is more than just the fact that life here cannot last forever.  Would we be satisfied here if it could?  Or would we just find the need for something indefinably more growing ever more acute?  Either Augustine was right, and “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” or we are of all men most miserable.  If he was, then we can find spiritual wholeness only in that place where we neither idolize this world nor despise it.

 PILGRIM 

I would not leave the sun-lit stones

That line the streets of Athens town;

But I will search for Hesperus’ Isle

Though in the end I drown.

I would not turn from Caerleon

Nor Byzantium forsake;

But I will seek Broceliande

Though on her rocks I break.

I lose not lightly Rivendell

Nor Misty Mountains’ chilly breath;

But I will sail for Numinor

E’en though I sail to death.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don June 5th, 2009

LI Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            I do not miss the upper Midwest with its interminable winters and cheated falls and springs.  But I am glad I experienced it because of the poignancy the looming endlessness of winter gave to the brief moments of fall: its beauty came with a certain weight behind it because of the heaviness of what one knew it would inevitably bring.  And that weight adds weight to the biblical petition, “Lord, teach us to number our days, that we may present to thee a heart of wisdom.”

 FALL, 1974 

The corn-stalk brown looked almost white

Beside the black limbs of the trees:

A bleak etude in dark and light,

A prelude to the coming night

When endless miles of deep, soft white

Are all the wanderer sees.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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