To conclude this series, Jamie now turns to the family of arguments categorized as Longing. These apply to broad religious experience, but also in more narrow focused ways, including an argument from C.S. Lewis.
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody, this is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back to the podcast Towel and the Basin.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. And so in these previous episodes... This is now the sixth episode in this little series that we've been looking at, Can We Know God Exists? And so we've been looking at these families of arguments. So quick recap, the first... So if you've missed any of these, you can go back and kind of dive into the previous episodes. We had cosmological arguments. We had teleological arguments. We had moral arguments. Fourth was ontological arguments. Last episode, we look at arguments from meaning. And now this episode, we're going to look at like the last of these in this series and it's called longing. And you told me something... Well, I'll just let you take it away. How should we understand this?
Jamie Dew: Yeah. So longing, well, there's various ways to talk about it. Broadly, these arguments that actually fit under the category of religious experience. So I think that there's lots and lots of different kinds of religious experiences that one can talk about. And generally speaking, evangelical apologetics has been incredibly suspicious of these kinds of arguments. At least of late in the last couple of decades. And at least of late in North America. C.S. Lewis was a big fan of these kinds of arguments. And I'll kind of maybe talk in just a minute about why some have been skeptical of these arguments and maybe even some of the guidelines for, and concerns with them that I think are legitimate. Nevertheless, maybe I'll put forward some arguments that are worth our consideration. And I've said to you, I think before, maybe off air. I don't remember what at this point. Joe, I don't know whether it was on air or off air. But anyway, I've said to you, like for me personally, people want to ask of the kinds of arguments that you could make, which ones do you think are the most significant?
I think, well, this just depends on what you mean by significant. You mean philosophically significant? Do you mean personally significant? For me personally, these are significant kinds of arguments. Meaning that we're getting into the kind of stuff... We may persuade nobody else in this podcast. But again, we've talked about that. Apologetics is about cogency, which is persuasion. And what persuades one person may not persuade another. But for me personally, it's this kind of stuff that we're talking about right now that actually seems to do it for me, amongst some other things as well. But from the apologetics standpoint these are the kinds of things that I go, "Huh." I remember I've gone through two relatively substantial seasons of doubt and struggle in my life after I came to faith in Christ. One was when I was still in my twenties. One was in my early thirties.
And I mean, these were not moments where I was like about to walk away from the faith or anything. But there were moments where I was asking some really hard questions and I did not exactly know how to answer them. And I really felt the weight of them and struggled. And I remember towards the end of that second season of doubt and struggle, it was thoughts like this, like we're about to talk about the got me. And just thought, "Wow." It's that the universe is a particular way. We talked about it in the last podcast about meaning and information. We are in a universe. What we're about to talk about right now is a bit of like the existential counterpart to what we talked about in the last podcast. The last one, we talked a lot about information and cells and DNA and things like that.
And how, from my seat that seems to require a mind behind it. You're in a world physically speaking that is not ordinary. Right? It's complex and there's information and there's data. And man, just physically speaking, it's hard for me to wrap my head around how that could be unless there's a God. But now existentially, this is a world where we don't just go through it like robots and observe random things and kind of go through mindlessly. This is a world where we have desires, and we fall in love, and we laugh at jokes, and we do all those things. It's that the universe is a particular way that persuades me. And essentially it's the experiences of longing and transformation that I think are awfully hard to understand if there's not a God. That are universal across the board. So let's talk first of all, about just religious experience broadly. What we mean by these types of things. Okay.
Joe Fontenot: And you explained earlier that this religious experience is kind of how the general philosophical community talks about this? Is that right?
Jamie Dew: Right. So when we talk from a philosophical seat in philosophy of religion about religious experience, we start off talking broadly about defining religious experience in ways that pretty much any religion could talk about. So from that seat, just to start that way. Well, it's any experience of something sacred. It normally happens in a religious context. It has very strong feelings, visions, mystical experiences, things of that nature. There tend to be intense... They tend to take place in moments of praying, fasting, meditating, worshiping, chanting, and so broadly within the field of philosophy or philosophy of religion those are the kinds of things that we point to. Something that's universal, we'd note. Meaning by that every person seems to have something like this. And I know atheists would chip in right here and say, "Not us. Not us." Well, wait a minute. I just simply mean that all people throughout history and no matter where in the world, they all will claim to have kinds of religious experiences.
They have a lot of different kinds. So there's a diversity. And then there's a religious importance to it. They will attach their religious beliefs to these experiences in some way. All right. That's not what I'm endorsing today. Okay. So I'm going to be real clear about that. Anybody listening out today. "Oh we got you [inaudible 00:06:12]." No I didn't. I'm telling you flat out, that's not what we're endorsing here. Okay? So I'm just setting the broad context. In philosophy of religion these are the kinds of things that people talk about. Okay. I don't want to talk about that broadly. I want to talk about two particular kinds of religious experience. Number one, longing, and number two, a transformation. And I don't think either one of these... Let me be clear, I don't think either one of these, "Ooh, you run arguments here." In fact, I'm not even sure you can. For some of this, I'm not sure can put this in a logical form or argumentative form.
I'm not suggesting that man, if you run some fancy argument with these two things, you just conclude the God of Christianity. No, but the reality of these two things, longing and transformation are certainly confirmatory, if you will, of the perspectives that we hold. In other words, they're greatly consistent with the perspectives that we hold. And for me, the kinds of experiences that we have fit very nicely with Christian theism. And I go, "Yeah, I would expect to have that kind of experience if in fact, the God of Christianity existed." And I do have those experiences. And so it seems to me, that's in keeping with that. So let's talk first of all, about longing. Okay?
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: C.S. Lewis talked a lot about this. And by the way, I'm indebted here to one of my former PhD students. Rick James wrote his dissertation under me on Lewis' sense of longing. Lewis called this Sehnsucht. It's a German word for longing and desire. And I got to admit before Rick studied with me, I didn't think too much about these. But it was interacting with that work and really seeing what Lewis was getting at there that I started to think, "Huh? You know what, at the end of the day, this is the kind of stuff that actually persuades me."
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, and so you and I, we have these longings for various things. And so when you talk about what we mean by longing... So Lewis described it this way, he talked about longing as a form of nostalgia. Right? So imagine you go back through your childhood neighborhood. I do this sometimes when I'm passing on I-40 in North Carolina, going from the mountains back towards the Eastern part of the state or something like that. Or I'm going on 77 from Charlotte up through or something like that. I grew up in Statesville, North Carolina. And every time I do that, I'll pass through my hometown and just see the neighborhood that I grew up in. And the home that I grew up in and the Beavers Country Store that I used to go buy gum at every single day and stuff like that.
And when I do that, there is a nostalgia, this deep sense of longing. And this deep sense of connectedness to something. But nostalgia is past focused, right? Nostalgia is this deep sense of connectedness and longing for something that has already come before us and now gone. Right? But what he talked about with longing or this notion of Sehnsucht was a nostalgia that faces the other direction. Right? It faces towards the future. That there's something that each of us is longing for, this hunger, this thirst, this sense that I am deeply connected to and longing for wanting to be on with it on the other side.
And you know, as a young man... I've always been a kind of guy that's passionate and thought about the future and cast vision and was driven to accomplish and to achieve and to do all those things. Hence the degrees and all that junk. I'm 44 and here's the thing, Joe, I've gotten to do everything in my life that I'd ever, ever, ever want to do. I've gotten to preach. I've gotten to teach, I've gotten to write, I've gotten to see the coolest places in the world. I've gotten to have a family. I've gotten to do, literally everything that I could ever want to do. My bucket list is empty. I got nothing left on it. There's literally nothing left on my bucket list. Other than I guess it'd be really cool to be a granddad and to see my grandbabies and such.
And yet, there's still this sense of longing for something in front of me. And that longing has been there the whole time. But I think as a young man, I always just thought it was a longing for something in my life. Like I want to get married one day. Well, I got to do that and I love her and she's dear to me. And she is the best thing this side of heaven. And yet I'm still longing for something in front of me. I want it so... It's really interesting, back in the year 1996, the youth group I was in, we buried a time capsule at our church to be open in November of 2020. So guess what just happened a month ago? That youth group dug it up and I couldn't remember what we did. I knew I put something in it, but I couldn't remember what it was. I'd written a letter to myself and to my future family. And when we read... Some friends of mine got it, retrieved it and sent it to us.
And I read the letter that I had written to my family in 1996, before I was married to Tara. Before we were even dating. Again, we had already dated once before we were dating again. And then before, certainly, before my kids were born. And it was, it was so neat to see as a 20 something young guy writing to my future family. I was blown away by the love, affection and longing for my children that I had then. I mean, I was in love with my kids back then. I've always wanted that. And now I have them and they are sweet and wonderful. And I bless God for them and thank God for them. And yet there's still a longing. And I think as a young man, there was this sense that there's this longing, this craving and it was because there were so many things in life in front of me that had yet not happened that I longed for. I think I just always thought that that longing was for those things.
Joe Fontenot: That totally makes sense. This is really the first time I've ever thought about that. But I can understand what you're saying.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Well, I got all those things and that longing is still there.
Joe Fontenot: And if anything, it's almost like the older you get the more that longing intensifies.
Jamie Dew: It intensifies and it becomes less and less this world. At least becomes less and less satisfying to you. I mean, look, I can tell you that with every passing year... If you're listening to this and you're a psychologist, I'm not suicidal. I promise you. But I'll just say this, this world charms me less every single day. Every single day I see in it, that there's really not much else in it that I love. And that I feel like I just got to have, or I got to do. There's only one thing left I've got to have and got to do. And that is Kingdom in Christ. And so from my seat now, this sense of longing, the older I get the more I began to look back and say, "Maybe all along, it was just confusion on my end to think that this longing was for these things."
But actually the thing that I have been longing for the entire time, it's like Lewis talked about. It's this nostalgia that's forward facing. It's for something else that I'm supposed to be with. That I'm on the other side of that I just can't be with it. He has this to say about... There's this quote in The Weight of Glory, I'll just read this. It says this, "Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but it is the truest index of our real situation." And then he says in The Problem of Pain, he says, "Either it is a mere twist in the human mind corresponding to nothing objective, serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind and its fullest development in the poet, the philosopher or the saint. Or it is a direct experience of a really supernatural to which the name revelation might properly be given."
In other words, what he's saying, either this is just some neurological thing. That we're built this way. And oh, by the way, a lot of the naturalists... If you're wondering how an atheist would respond to all this, they'd probably just be sitting here right now listening to me talk about this, rolling their eyes and saying, "We have explanations for all this." And look, they'd say, "Look, we can tell you." This is in the last 20 years. People talk about, "Is there a God gene? Maybe the brain is neurologically wired to believe this stuff." As if somehow that's supposed to dissuade us from thinking that there's a God. Like, "Oh, we don't need God to explain this. Look, we can do it within neurology" To me that's so silly. Look, just because you've figured out the physical apparatus by which the brain may process those things, doesn't take away from the fact that there may indeed be a reality to it.
Just put it this way, if God did indeed make us. And he did indeed make us to long for him. And he made us to be physical creatures, well then wouldn't he have made a physical apparatus within that physical creature for which that function to happen. Of course, he would have. So the fact that there may indeed be some... And look, if there is in fact a God gene, this does not take away from the thought that there's a God. This does not count against that at all. If there really is a neurological wiring towards that, to me, that's actually evidence for the fact that there's really someone who put it there that way. It's wired that way because you're supposed to long for him.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. It almost sounds like that pushback is really confusing how something is versus why something is.
Jamie Dew: Exactly. Exactly. Well said.
Joe Fontenot: In attempts the why, but it just kind of ignores it and talks about how.
Jamie Dew: Well said. Very well said. It is that way. What it is and why it is are two different questions. So I think, to me it's this sense of longing. And so I can remember coming through that second season of doubt and struggle. And I remember saying to my wife one day, "If there really is no God, then universe be cursed for this cruel sick twisted joke it's playing on all of us in making us think there's meaning and purpose to all of this, when there's really not." The fact of the matter of it is everything around us screams at this. And even within us, each of us has this deep sense of longing that we're supposed to be connected to something. Maybe we have that sense of longing because in fact, you are supposed to be connected to something. And I just can't shake it.
I cannot shake that we would be this way if in fact there were no God. So this is one way I think you could argue that there's got to be somebody out there that we're made for, that we're supposed to be longing for. I think there's another way you can do it. And that's just transformation. I tell people sometimes when they say, "Well, why do you believe this stuff?" And I've said in some of our other podcasts, I think that the cosmological arguments, teleological argument and all that stuff, I think they work logically. I come to the end of them and I'm sort of rationally convinced that yeah, I think, I think there has to be a God. But they don't necessarily do it for me. Well, what is the stuff that "does it for me?"
It's this stuff, the longing stuff. And it's all of that. But it's also, I've said, and I think I've even said on this podcast, a handful of times, I have no way of accounting for my life and the transformation that has happened in my life, apart from Jesus Christ. The fact is, I'm not supposed to be here. Not just as the president of an institution like this, and as an academic. I mean, I was that kid that failed two grades. And I'm that kid that had squandered his life. I had literally failed at everything I'd ever done prior to meeting Jesus Christ. And yet the moment I met him, I was so radically and deeply transformed by him, that all I have ever wanted to do since then is promote him, proclaim him and do his work, build his kingdom. And to do that work that he was calling me to do, required me to set out on a journey and to do things and achieve things that I never could have done on my own.
And it's not just that. It's not just, "Oh, look now I've succeeded in some things." It's the fundamental difference in my heart and my mind that every single believer throughout history can attest to who they were and who they now are because of Christ. And it's those transformative experiences that we've had. And so in short, if those aren't supposed to account for anything, then literally every redemption story throughout history is meaningless. And that's a pretty arrogant, that's a pretty tall order... Pretty arrogant statement, a pretty tall order to say that everybody throughout history's transformation experience is meaningless. If you're not prepared to say that, then you have to let these experiences matter in some way.
So the evangelical world of the last couple of decades has been very suspicious of these kinds of... Or at least of broadly religious experience. And I understand why. But I would locate these two particular kinds as not being full-stop proofs of God's existence, but at least information that has to be taken seriously and put in within the mix of all the other types of information or arguments that we would consider in a bit of what I call a cumulative case. And what apologists will call a cumulative case. And when we take it that way I think that this stuff has some real value to us in apologetics.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. And I think too, if a person is holding out for absolute kind of un-refutable proof, I mean, what can we find that with anywhere? I mean, everything, even gravity we can look at and start to question if we try. And so it's almost like they say in the court, beyond reasonable doubt. We live our lives based on reason.
Jamie Dew: That's right. I mean, and as we've said in some of the other podcasts, in large part, what we're looking at here in apologetics and most of the time is probability. Right? And I think that the better cases for Christianity... Now I've made some deductive arguments along the way. Like I did in the last one where if there's meaning and information in the universe, there must be a God. I did that. But that's just one piece. That's one argument set in the whole tapestry of apologetics. We're looking at a broad spectrum of information and data, and asking from that what's the most probable explanation? And I think that for me, the most probable explanation is, that there's got to be, not just some thing out there beyond all this, but a somebody is out there beyond all this stuff. And you know what? I'm inclined to think when we take it all together...
So let me do this to summarize it all that we've looked at over this particular mini-series within the podcast, if you look at all these arguments, would any one of them prove without any doubt whatsoever that there's a God? Probably not. But at number two, would any one of them get us the whole picture of the God of Christianity? No, they wouldn't. They would each only give us a piece. So like for example, cosmological arguments, could you get all the way from there to the existence of the God of Christianity? Well no, probably not. But what you would get to is that there has to be a person out there, and then that person has to be really powerful and really wise to put all this together. Okay. Well, what about a teleological? Could you get fully to Christianity? No, but what you could get is that there's again, a somebody out there. And he seems to have a lot of knowledge because look at how fine tuned everything seems to be.
And what about moral arguments? Could you get all the way to the God of Christianity from there? We'll probably not, but you would get that this being that's out there is good in nature. Now take just those three together for just a minute, power, knowledge, goodness. What is that starting to sound like? Now, add this, meaning. So once again, it's personal this being is personal, because it's trying to communicate. Now longing. There's something worshipful in that. So put all that together, a being, a somebody out there really powerful, really good, really smart, knowledgeable, really awe inspiring, such that we would long for and want to worship.
Now, when you do that, this is what we mean by cumulative case. When we do that across all of that stuff, while no one of those arguments by themselves is going to tell us everything. But when you begin to put it all together, just what we find in the universe and what our experience in the universe is like, it starts to sound an awful lot like the being that is given to us in the Old and the New Testament, and that Christianity affirms. And it sounds different, I should say. And I'm not trying to throw any shade at anybody else, but it sounds very different from a Hindu picture, very different from an Islamic picture, very different from even a Jewish picture. This is the God of Christianity that the broad cumulative case is beginning to point us to. And now when you add to it religious experience that I've been transformed by such a being, this kind of stuff does it for me. And so I'm still a Christian.
Joe Fontenot: That's good.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, yeah. [Crosstalk 00:24:07] wondering.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah. For the record, the president of NOBTS is still a Christian. Put that on the record. So, then the final question is, can we know God exists? It seems pretty clear taken together. The work is on the person who goes the other direction.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right.
Joe Fontenot: Well, this is great Jamie. Thanks so much for walking through this with us.
Jamie Dew: You bet.
Hey, everybody, this is Jamie and Joe, again.
Joe Fontenot: If you like this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way. And we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.