Notes on C. S. Lewis and Science

As the 50th anniversary of Lewis's death is looming this November (the 22nd, to be exact), and because I'm writing a book on Lewis, C. S. Lewis in Crisis that I'll be finishing this October, I'm musing about an article on the three ways that Lewis faced off against scientific materialism that still resonate today. 

Undoubtedly writing on 1 of these 3 themes

Here they are 

1. The first one is materialism. The basic question is this: Are we just material stuff, or are we something more? In Miracles, Lewis argued that naturalism is self-defeating, and consequently faced off against the scientific materialism of his day, which seems to be enjoying a sort of resurgence today. (Think Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker.)
2. The second is meaninglessness, you know, Dawkins's "blind, pitiless indifference" and Weinberg's "pointless" universe: Why do human beings seek something transcendent, something (or Someone) beyond this world? Lewis maintains that we desire God more than anything we can find on earth.
3. The problem of anomie: Why do we have an innate sense of what’s right and wrong? This is Lewis’s argument from natural law and God as the Lawgiver. (Lewis presented this argument most forcefully in Mere Christianity.) Justin Barrett argues, from neuroscience--against others in his field--that this argument makes a great deal of sense in the ways our brains have evolved.

I have no interest in creating a hagiography of Lewis, but I would like to see in what ways his insight resonate, or need to be reworked, today.

Any comments?

Katie's Last Wedding (A "Reprint")

I found a blog entry tonight that I penned exactly one year after I performed a wedding on the Today Show in September 2005. For whatever reason (probably because it brought back good memories, perhaps because these were happier days at the Today Show), I decided to repost it.

The introduction by Al Roker defined the moment as unusual. “The wedding will be presided over by the Reverend Greg Cootsona….” Until then, I had tried to ease my jangling nerves that it was just another nuptial in my pastoral life.

You see I wasn’t immediately convinced about performing a Today Show wedding. A friend and producer on the show (whose wedding I had performed in New York City) called, with “an unusual opportunity.” Not sensing Amway in my future, and bolstered by her assessment that I “would be perfect,” I pondered. And balked. But eventually, I accepted the assignment. 

Smiling for the cameras at the reception

Two nights before my introduction by Al Roker, a driver met me at BWI’s baggage claim with a sign and (surprise!) bearing my name. This doesn’t happen often on my way to nuptials in Chico (although I could get used to it). Two days and two cars later, at the 5:15am call for the show (2:15 California time), a stretch limo transported me. As I entered the car, the driver phoned the show saying, “The Reverend is in the car.”

Now out of the car and walking toward the stage in front of the Cheasapeake Bay, I patted the tube of Recapit Cement safely in my pocket. The pressure of such a large audience squeezed out a strange neurosis: that the recently applied veneer on my front tooth covering a discoloration (itself a wedding honorarium from my dentist) would pop out in medias homily. I’m just not sure how I would have applied the bond in front of the TV audience, but such thoughts never occur to the neurotic.

Following the introduction, I walking on the runner set on smooshy grass and recalled the previous day and worries of an impending rainstorm (as a hurricane brewed to the south with Matt Lauer sent to the scene). That day of rehearsals, I had expected diffidence and attitude from the crew. Instead it was also fun and encouragement. On the stage for Trisha Yearwood’s concert following the wedding, I spied a gorgeous drum set (their petrified wood shells unearthed from the depths of Lake Michigan), and asked if I could take it for a ride. The crew encouraged me. After a brief solo, the soundman offered his assessment: “You might have missed your calling.” Perhaps not totally encouraging the day before the Big Event. Speaking of the sound man, the show’s attention to detail astounded me: The multiple camera men, sound techs, and general assistants making everything work flawlessly. That was change for me—I’m happy in church when the mic’s on. (Why can’t we have several professionals making sure the church’s sound works and the lights are on like The Today Show? That’s right. Congregations don’t gross half a billion dollars a year.)

The night before, I was eating pizza and drinking Cokes with the mostly 20something under-producers, pages, or whatever they were, and we discussed my former church, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian (which was in the midst of a scandal so it was pretty interesting). We sat out on the back porch of the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club (in Stevensville, Maryland, by the by), talking about life, about a homosexual brother, about faith, about the show the next day. Behind their words I saw the same ambitious eyes of youth that want to make a mark on the world and maybe to glimpse a bit of fame themselves.

Transported in the stretch limo, I arrived on the wedding set (that’s on odd combination of words) at 5:30 am. (Did I mention that that’s 2:30am California time?) As I walked in along a wooden ramp, I glimpsed some bright lights above the clubhouse. Katie Couric was already working with lights on and cameras rolling. Knowing that she had trained down from Manhattan the night before, it struck me as imminently tiring and a high price for fame.

But no one at the event would have ever know she was tired. Wearing her flip-flops on the set, cracking jokes with the wedding guests on commercial breaks. It was pretty charming. I finally met her for a brief moment, at the reception. Every moment she was mobbed by people, with barely a moment to herself. The price of fame, I suppose. And I asked her, “Could I do the fan-thing and take picture with you?” She was pulled away. And then a moment later, turned back to me, “I’m sorry. What did you ask me?” It was a moment of humanity. (And she hadn’t yet received my gift, a t-shirt from the church.) So I was sold.

Oh yes, how about the wedding? Once it started, the cameras disappeared. (Like a friend and TV producer prepped me: “Just imagine they’re video cams—you’ve seen those before.” Amazingly it worked.) Mark and Sarah were the most focused couple I’ve ever married. They had spent so many hours in front of the camera that they actually looked me in the eye as I talked of passion and commitment in the improvisations of marriage and jazz. Mark, this big, studly guy cried as he vowed his love, and Sarah serenely wiped his tears. (People, I’m told, were also crying from Times Square.)

Afterward, as I rode in the longest of four limos back to airport, I saw the moment fading fast. So I asked the driver to stop at a gas station and bought a San Pellegrino. I looked out from the convenience store and thought, “A stretch for me—that’s pretty cool.” With no more tricks up the sleeve, I begrudgingly headed toward the airport, and soon was in the United gates. I’d never waved goodbye to a limo before. Slowly I was slipping back into obscurity. Off to the plans for that weekend: Monterey Jazz Festival (the last one we attended with her mother before the latter suffered an acute stroke)—in my mind, a pretty sweet consolation prize.

My brother, during a brief sojourn with an Episcopalian church group, edited their newspaper, which he called “The Highly Parishable.” In that spirit: those three minutes and forty-five seconds of fame (and the days surrounding it) were certainly parishable fruit. One realization was, given the seven million or so who would view that day, I would preach to more in those minutes than I probably throughout my lifetime. But the fruit had been picked and was half eaten. My shelf had a few days more: two radio interviews on the Monday I returned. At one point a few weeks later, I was visiting a member in the hospital and someone in the next bed blurted out, “Weren’t you the guy on The Today Show?” It finally got to this: “I saw a little bit of your head in the picture of the wedding in US Magazine.”

Sarah and Mark have thankfully kept in touch as they entered post-TV life. Several months later would reveal that this was Katie’s last Today Show wedding. (Luckily, I grabbed a picture with her at the reception.) I’m doing hospital visitation, numerous church committee meetings, teaching and preaching, and yes, the occasional wedding without, of course, an introduction by Al Roker.

Yes Friends (Revised)

I've been teaching on friendship recently, which has reminded me of the incredible importance of friendship. So I've adapted this chapter from The Time for Yes, and reposted it. Let me know what you think!

I have indeed received much joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, my brother.

Paul to his friend Philemon (Philemon 7)

Jesus put it so well: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Can I add something similar? “Where our friends are, there will our hearts be also.”

This brings me to a question: What does Scripture lead us to understand makes good friendships? I’m teaching a class at Bidwell Presbyterian on Christian relationships. So I’ve been thinking about this topic quite a bit and particularly the people I like to call “yes friends.”

Three key elements of “yes friends” find their way into the biblical book of Proverbs. First of all, we need friends to give us support and advice: “Where there is no guidance, a nation falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety” (Proverbs 15:22). If it’s true for a nation, I'm pretty confident it works for individuals. In fact, a somewhat recent survey (from 2006) found that one in four Americans doesn't have anyone to confide in. That to me is the definition of a lonely life. And that's why we need “yes friends.”

These “yes friends” give us encouragement in their counsel: They affirm what we may not see in ourselves. They celebrate our victories. And they stand by and encourage even when we’re not perfect. They grant us freedom to fail. “Some friends play at friendship, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24).

      Secondly—and on the other hand—these “yes friends” aren’t “yes men” (as the phrase goes)—those who will just tell us everything’s ok. Biblically, they are called  “flatterer” and don’t fare too well in Proverbs. Who wants to be told “all is well” right before the tornado arrives? Who wants compliments when a personality course correction is what’s needed? “Whoever rebukes a person will afterward find more favor than one who flatters with the tongue” (Proverbs 28:23).

      Though not a Christian—for one thing, he lived before the New Testament or Jesus existed—the philosopher Aristotle had some pretty good things to say about friendship. He philosophized that friendship isn’t just about people we like or have things to offer us, but that friends seek the Good together. Paul wrote rather rhapsodically, about four hundred years later, and yet in agreement with Aristotle: love “does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). Still one more reason that flatterers make us feel giddy for a while, but also prove to be pathetic companions.

Finally and most importantly, our friendship—or intimate community—begins to define us, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20). We become whom we hang out with.

When we get in the company of those who support our deepest yearnings and passions, we come to our truest selves. There we realize our dreams, the important dreams, our “yeses”—the ones God put in our hearts, the ones where passion meets mission. 

That’s why I want yes friends.

The Resurrection of Christ

To celebrate this great day of Easter, I turn to two great theologians. 

An Icon of the Resurrection of Christ

The first is brilliant (and sometimes overly dense) Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, 

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

I also had to quote something from the greatest living New Testament scholar (by my lights), N. T. Wright’s whose book on the Resurrection may be the most important new book I’ve read in the past decade: 

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.

And 

The resurrection completes the inauguration of God’s kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.

Finally from Wright, 

The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.

As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!"

Today, let’s say yes to God’s invitation to a resurrected and new life.

Good Friday

I'm reposting this from last year's Good Friday meditation.

“Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God’s scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.” Philip Yancey

Martin Luther Theologian of the Cross

Martin Luther, who in many ways initiated the Protestant Reformation, offers this moving meditation on Jesus suffering. And, as we turn to remember Jesus’s crucifixion today, on Good Friday, let us remember that the cross represented a shameful, four-letter word in Latin, crux. The word signified a death reserved for political traitors and villains and never for Roman citizens. Cicero’s Orations denounced both the reality of the cross and its usage by polite Romans. Death on cross was “the most cruel and abominable form of punishment”, and the very word “should be foreign not only to the body of a Roman citizen, but to his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.” 

And now to Luther:

The whole value of the meditation of the suffering of Christ lies in this, that man should come to the knowledge of himself and sink and tremble. If you are so hardened that you do not tremble, then you have reason to tremble. Pray to God that he may soften your heart and make fruitful your meditation upon the suffering of Christ, for we ourselves are incapable of proper reflection unless God instill it. 

The greater and the more wonderful is the excellence of his love by contrast with the lowliness of his form, the hate and pain of passion. Herein we come to know both God and ourselves. His beauty is his own, and through it we learn to know him. His uncomeliness and passion are ours, and in them we know ourselves, for what he suffered in the flesh, we must suffer in the spirit. He has in truth borne our stripes. Here, then, in an unspeakably clear mirror you see yourself. You must know that through your sins you are as uncomely and mangled as you see him here. 

We ought to suffer a thousand and again a thousand times more than Christ because he is God and we are dust and ashes, yet it is the reverse. He who had a thousand and again a thousand times less need, has taken upon himself a thousand and again a thousand times more than we. 

No understanding can fathom nor tongue can express, no writing can record, but only the inward dealing can grasp what is involved in the suffering of Christ.

Today we are called to focus on what the Cross of Christ means for us.

C. S. Lewis: God First, Then Heaven

One of the most prevalent cases brought against faith in God is that we create God because we fear death. It is an argument associated with Sigmund Freud, but by no means limited to him.    

Lewis on God and heaven

       C. S. Lewis did not believe that proper religious faith “solved” the crisis of death. He was utterly convinced that faith in God must be our starting point. 

      Put another way, Lewis himself did not believe in Christ (or early, God) because of a need to believe in life after death, he believed in life after death because of his faith: 

I… was allowed for a whole year to believe in God and try—in some stumbling fashion—to obey Him before any belief in future life was given me.

This he discerned in the ancient Jews who—in great contrast to their neighboring Egyptians—had no strong belief in an afterlife. It is, in fact, my experience as well.

      Similarly Lewis expressed disdain for those who valued immortality above knowing God. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis notes—with some level of horror and disdain—the story of a priest he knew who simply valued the afterlife without any belief in God,

an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic Irish parson who had long since lost his faith but retained his living. By the time I met him his only interest was the search for evidence of “human survival”… [and] the ravenous desire for personal immortality co-existed in him with (apparently) a total indifference to all that could, on a sane view, make immortality desirable.

Lewis then comes to two conclusions of note: “I was too young and hard to suspect that what secretly moved him was a thirst for the happiness which had been wholly denied him on earth”—the argument from desire that I outlined earlier, but that reappears in this chapter. Secondly, Lewis, now in his early ‘20s concluded, “The whole question of immortality became rather disgusting to me. I shut it out.”Despite the clarity that later reflection provides to what was probably a more muddled conclusion at the time, this comment helps us to understand his comments in Reflections on the Psalms that he came to faith without a desire for immortality. This experience, it is likely, provided the context for his contention that faith in God first was healthier.

      Notably, Lewis’s feelings about the relationship of belief in immortality and God also worked in reverse: to believe meant that we desired heaven with God. Therefore we become more committed to afterlife. In about 1947, Lewis had some major musings on death: 

I have, almost all my life, been quite unable to feel the horror of nonentity, of annihilation, which, say, Dr. Johnson felt so strongly. I felt it for the first time only in 1947. But that was after I had long been reconverted and thus began to know what life really is and what would have been lost by missing it.

      Still, Lewis came to terms with death in his final year. He fell into a deep coma in the summer of 1963, surprisingly pulled out of it, and then died 22 November. As he wrote to Mary Willis Sherburne on that June (apparently because she was dying too): 

Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of?

      So the resolution of death is not insistence on immortality, but belief in the immortal God who promises eternal life, or “heaven” in Lewis’s terminology. Once we have tasted a relationship with this God, we hate losing it.

The Last Supper: Lord or Rabbi?

Rudolph Bostic, The Last Supper

20 When evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the Twelve. 21 And while they were eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.”
22 They were very sad and began to say to him one after the other, “Surely you don’t mean me, Lord?”
23 Jesus replied, “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. 24 The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”
25 Then Judas, the one who would betray him, said, “Surely you don’t mean me, Rabbi?”
Jesus answered, “You have said so.”
26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Matthew 26: 20-26 NIV

The contemporary artist Rudolph Bostic's paints the Last Supper by taking an intimate look at the gathering of Jesus's disciples. Christ occupies the central frame as he stands in front of an arched window that cleverly suggests a halo and addresses his twelve followers as he raises a wine flask saying, “This is my blood.” 
        Bostic divides his three-part painting, or “triptych,” with columns of vines. He uses the foreground to display several large wine jars that recall Jesus’s first miracle at Cana when he turned the water into wine at a wedding. Judas, in the bottom right panel, is separated from the other disciples as he clutches a wine jug.
The Gospels tell a complexity and paradox of mood in this last night of Jesus's life. Similarly, Bostic employs vibrant colors to create a sense of celebration, yet the dark outlines of the forms casts a gloom over the event, hinting to what is to come in the next few days--that is, the Crucifixion of the Son of God. “This is my body broken for you.” In the joyful feast with friends and followers, we realize that there is a hint of what’s to come.
What does this mean for us today? How do we follow Jesus? Perhaps it’s in the words that we use to address him. In verse 22, “the disciples” as a whole call Jesus “Lord,” meaning that he has authority in their lives. On the other hand, Judas, who betrays Jesus calls him “Rabbi” or teacher (verse 25), as one who has some good advice. Perhaps, unless we see Jesus as the true Lord, we will feel free to go our own way... and thus ultimately betray him.