Monthly Archives: November 2017

Christian Re-enchantment V: Enchanted Realities & Incredibility

This post is a reminder of the tremendous intellectual challenge to taking a realistic stance towards an enchanted reality.

Consider what it is like to believe that there is one enchanted reality which is actually real. You have to believe that the whole of reality has two parts. One part is the natural everyday reality which follows the laws of science. The other part is an enchanted reality which has the structure of an unrealistic fiction. This enchanted part can be as disorganized as a dream.

I follow Wittgenstein who reminded us that reality is everything which is the case. Part of what is the case is what science tells us about while the other part of what is the case consists of what is told of in some religiously significant narrative such as the Iliad, the Norse Sagas or the Bible.

The only constraint on taking a realistic stance towards an enchanted reality is a limited form of the law of non-contradiction. You cannot think of anything really being X while really not being X. Although in the narrative of the enchanted reality you can write that something is X and yet not X. You can say contradictions but you cannot think of them as true.

Typically the enchanted narratives as candidates for telling the truth about reality are not as crazy as dreams. My models are the narratives about Jesus in the Gospels. I am willing to include some of the miracle stories about saints and reports of Marian apparitions. But for present purposes of noting the challenges to belief the Gospel narratives suffice as a model for the problems.

For a rational 21st century Christian the challenge is twofold. One challenge is religious. The other is philosophical You must defend accepting one religiously significant narrative of an enchanted reality from amongst many others as telling the factual truth about the way things are. You must be prepared to explain how the part of reality studied by science is self-contained. The part of reality studied by science is properly studied only by the secular methods of natural science. Nothing accepted as real in the enchanted part of reality will give any natural scientific result which could not have been obtained using the methods of natural science alone.

Basically, you must be prepared to explain how science operates independently of any religious narrative although natural science does not give the whole truth. Science does not tell us everything which is the case. Some religious narrative is needed to supplement science to tell us everything which is the case.

To appreciate the difficulty of the challenge to a 21st Christian, try imagining how the multiplication of the loaves and fishes or Jesus walking on water has a place in a full history of the world just as much as a normal event such as the assassination of President Lincoln.
———————————
My book on sexual morality requires no narrative about enchanted realities other than the everyday one about our thoughts and feeling. But the traditional sexual morality I justify on purely secular grounds receives more motivation if placed in a Judeo-Christian framework.

My book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism was released by Tate Publishing on March 11, 2014. See Book Web Page for information about the book. The publisher’s listed price is $26.99. Printed copies can be purchased here by credit card for $3.99, plus $3.71 for shipping and handling.





To purchase the printed book by check, send check of $3.99 plus $3.71 for shipping and handling per copy. Send to:
Charles F. Kielkopf
45 W. Kenworth Rd.