Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Several weeks ago the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from Union University (www.uu.edu), Dr. Gene Fant, came as an IMPACT 360 (www.impact360.net) guest professor.  Union U is IMPACT 360’s academic partner, and our students are technically Union students by virtue of the articulation agreement.  Like my alma mater, Erskine College (www.erskine.edu), where I now serve on the board, Union U is a full member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.  As a brief note of trivia, Union and Erskine are the two oldest CCCU institutions, with the former being slightly older (1823) than the latter (1839).  All that said, Dr. Fant’s area of teaching and research competence is English literature, thus it was altogether fitting that he introduced our community to a rather helpful book (featured above) in the quest to help our students understand how the academic disciplines in  the arts and sciences are meaning-full.  More to the point, they are meaningful to the degree that the disciplines themselves reveal the purposes of the universe’s Designer.  Conversely, these disciplines turn out to be altogether meaningless if Darwin’s materialistic theory of natural selection is correct. 

In the chapter entitled “Shakespeare and the Elements of Genius,” the authors point out that “many of today’s leading Shakespeare scholars reject theism.”  They go on with their argument as follows:

“The awkward thing for them is that William Shakespeare’s work–the work they have dedicated their professional lives to–does not.  The playwright’s themes pose a profound challenge for materialism, assuming as they do the ontological categories of flesh and spirit, good and evil, heaven and hell.  But more fundamental still is the challenge Shakespeare’s genius poses to any worldview that would reduce everything, including the human mind, to the mindless flux of matter and energy.  Not only does his genius seem irreducible to anything so mean, the fruits of that genius find a striking correspondence in the ingenious forms of nature….Are we really to believe that natural selection moved from a single cell in a dirty pond to this?  Vague just-so stories about nature selecting for verbal skill are one thing, but standing in steady contemplation before one of Shakespeare’s mature literary works and then entertaining such an explanation without feeling a deep sense of skepticism–that’s a different matter….if we presuppose that Charles Darwin was correct, then everything in Shakespeare must be reduced further still to the desire to survive and propagate, caused proximately by Shakespeare’s own desire to use his lucky genetic variations to attract the ladies with his flair for poetry (a more elaborate rendition of a male bird’s seductive mating call) and caused more distantly by some remote genetic ancestor, a primitive troubadour whose musical ululations, gibbered around a dying fire, skillfully wooed his audience of spellbound females.  The most ruthlessly consistent and unsparing materialist will dissolve Shakespeare and his fellow geniuses to the pointless concatenations, writhings and bursts of matter and energy….This is a rabbit hole without whimsy or light.”*

*Benjamin Wiker & Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World:  How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (Downers Grove, IL:  IVP Academic Press, 2006):  58-61.