As Flynn explains, by “denying the principle that things really do, unexceptionally, have explanations, we throw ourselves into a catastrophic, self-defeating skepticism, where nothing can be counted as knowledge, or any belief rationally justified, including—and this is important—the belief that things lack explanation.” In short, brute facts end up being a universal acid that eats through the intelligibility of reality, including rationality itself, which is why Flynn spends so much ink analyzing many of the best naturalistic arguments and objections, and showing the reader why they ultimately lead either to self-defeat or to global skepticism. 

There have been many attempts to prove the existence of God and disprove a sui generis universe in which sentient life is a mere accident of the Big Bang. A new book offers some fresh insights into why theism is a better explanation than naturalism for understanding reality, including the ability to do science.
“In fact, the fundamental claim of this book is that if one believes the world actually is intelligible—that things make sense, and ultimate explanation can be had—then God exists.” This is the provocative thesis of philosopher and writer Pat Flynn, whose new book, The Best Argument for God, insists that the real philosophical dilemma we face is not between theism and atheism but between theism and absurdity, or a reality that is utterly unintelligible.
To make his case, Flynn first offers some preliminary remarks about philosophy and science. Many people today believe that science is our most reliable method for arriving at certain knowledge, and that if something cannot be proved scientifically, its truth claim is questionable at best. There are problems, however, with this attitude. For one thing, the belief that science is our most certain source of verifiable knowledge cannot itself be proved by science since no scientific experiment could ever demonstrate it. It is therefore a philosophical posture posing as a scientific one. Furthermore, science itself rests on philosophical foundations (contra the objections of some pop scientists).
Consider, for example, that science can investigate the occurrence of change, such as ice melting, leaves falling, or animals digesting, to discover the physical processes that cause these material changes, but it cannot tell us what the nature of change is. In other words, science presupposes the reality of change to get off the ground—for without change there would be neither physical processes nor causes for scientific inquiry to examine—but it cannot tell us what logical categories are needed to make sense of what change is or how it is possible. Philosophy, however, can.
In fact, making sense of change was a major dilemma in early Western philosophy, when Parmenides argued that change was simply an illusion (which would, of course, destroy science), and Heraclitus instead contended that there was no stability, that everything existed in a state of constant flux. It was Aristotle who solved the puzzle by distinguishing between “potential being” and “actual being,” and by recognizing that “form” and “matter” are two irreducible categories of the natural world (known as hylomorphism).
That, however, is a story for a different day. The point for now is simply that philosophy considers the most general features of reality, features that science must take for granted before it can even get started. As Flynn puts it, “Philosophers latch onto and subsequently analyze experiential features of the world that are so broad that they cannot be coherently called into question and must therefore be considered pre-scientific. Philosophers work with experiences the denial of which would make science itself impossible.”
For instance, the denial of change not only makes scientific investigation impossible but also is self-refuting. After all, to deny change first requires formulating the relevant thought and then expressing that thought, which involves the mind and the body moving through a sequence of changes. So if change is undeniable, how do we make sense of it? Seeking an answer has led a great many philosophers down the ages to theism. This is because, as the thesis of Flynn’s book maintains, commitment to a complete explanation, or to an answer that is fully intelligible, must itself transcend the category of change altogether. In other words, whatever explains change must itself be unchanging, which makes it unlike anything we experience and therefore radically unique.
Furthermore, when we consider other fundamental features of reality, such as “contingency” (the fact that things in the world depend on other things for their existence) and the nature of existence itself, every ultimate explanation necessarily terminates in an unchanging and necessary being who, upon analysis, must be one, simple, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect or fully good, omniscient, and omnipotent.
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Written by A.J. Melnick |
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Harvard today is at a crossroads.  What it does next will impact the rest of American higher education, the nation, and the world in many ways. President Bacow has announced that he is stepping down in June.  A presidential search committee is looking for a successor.  Much is at stake.

Harvard University has consistently ranked #1 in many global assessments of the world’s top universities. For generations it has sought—with the aid of a massive endowment—to be ‘the best in the world’ in as many fields as possible. Former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis once noted that Harvard ”holds, in the public imagination, a distinctive pre-eminence.” True, but Harvard today has lost its way.
When Lewis was dean he said he once had had some difficulty in finding a university mission statement. He needed one in order to certify Harvard’s participation in the N.C.A.A. intercollegiate athletic program. “It turned out,” he wrote at the time, “that for 360 years Harvard College had never had a mission statement.” Lewis finally settled on Harvard’s Charter of 1650, a fundamental document in which Harvard committed itself “to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness….”
Even though Harvard long ago jettisoned the “godliness” portion of that document, the Charter of 1650 is more or less still in legal force today. Nevertheless, modern secular Harvard has always tried to keep its Puritan legacy at arm’s length. This was exemplified in 2017, when the university even held a contest to erase the Puritans from the former 1836 alma mater, “Fair Harvard,” expunging the words, “Till the stock of the Puritans die.”
Earlier, in 2007, the university barely acknowledged the 400th anniversary of the 1607 birth of its namesake, John Harvard, who willed half his fortune and library of around 400 volumes to the young college. We don’t know much about John Harvard (the famous statue in Harvard Yard is merely a representation). But one thing we do know is that he was a strong Christian. Given the titles in his library, we also know that he had a strong intellectual bent. He was clearly a man of vision and generosity. The university might at least have celebrated those qualities. But about all that Harvard University could officially muster at the time to mark the 400th anniversary of John Harvard’s birth was a display of copies of his books (all of John Harvard’s original library was lost in a fire in 1764), except for a 1634 edition of a book by John Downame, appropriately titled, The Christian Warfare against the Devil, World and Flesh.
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A big problem we face today is that we have not made use of these authentically American ways to refresh our institutions. Our leaders have essentially doubled down on patching up the existing model that was created out of the Depression and postwar era, even as their limits and lack of suitability to today’s world become increasingly apparent.

Before we can talk about Christian nationalism, we first have to talk about nationalism. As many people conclude that something has gone fundamentally wrong in America, nationalism is just one of the proposed solutions. Christian nationalism is a variant of that.
Catholic integralism is another variation on this same theme. Others promote “post-liberalism.” The Left, of course, wants some kind of socialism. Some call for an American Pinochet. Some people on the dissident Right even flirt with discredited continental political philosophies.
While it is understandable that people want to see America change for the better, these approaches won’t work because they are foreign to the American political and cultural tradition.
America is not a “nation” in the European sense. Nationalism was a 19th-century European state-building movement. It was about constructing national identities out of the people in various estates and villages who spoke different dialects of the same language. America, on the other hand, is a continental empire—even if, like “nationalism,” “empire” is another word we would not use to describe ourselves. Manifest destiny was not about forming a nation out of a pre-existing sub-region with a shared history but about conquering and taming the West. America has always been something of a protean nation: restless, forward-looking, growth-oriented, constantly churning, changing and building. This makes it a bad fit for the imposition of some static concept of “nationhood.”
This is why “nationalism” is not a word that Americans have traditionally used to describe what they want for their country, even in the halcyon days of the 1980s. Even if the content of something like nationalism is said to be what Americans have always believed, the word itself is a foreign symbol. It doesn’t compute for most Americans.
As Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell has shown, wokeness shot rapidly through American culture because it exploited Protestant religious themes that are embedded deep in our public consciousness, whereas Marxism never got traction because concepts like “class” don’t resonate in America. Opponents of wokeness should learn from this: the language and symbols we adopt will have to resonate with Americans’ own self-understanding.
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