I am currently reading a book called “The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings” by Philip Zaleski. It is a biography of a group of thinkers who were based around Oxford University. The group included members such as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Adam Fox, to name just a few. They were all acclaimed and accredited in their respected fields. Not only where they all brilliant scholars and writers with diverse stories and backgrounds, but they all also happened to belong to the same faith. They all fell in with the Christians. In my own personal life, I was introduced to their works unknowingly through the popular Lord Of The Rings Trilogy by J.R.R Tolkien.
I was young when I discovered Mr.Tolkin’s magical world of elves and wizards. However, the moment I picked it up, I was immediately drawn in, I couldn’t get enough of it. Unbeknownst to me, there was a far deeper meaning in his books. Likewise with C.S Lewis’s “The Chronicles Of Narnia,” my love was first with the fantasy and then much later with the philosophy and symbolism.
As an adult working to make sense and flesh out my understanding of what I will call “the way things work” (meaning: how the world works as a whole in both the physical and metaphysical), their works and lives have taken on a new role in my life. They are like mentors, guide, and teachers, though they have long passed. They serve me almost in the same way as they helped each other, I’ll be it not in such a personal way. Nevertheless, their lives are a testament to the thinking Christian, of which I aspire to be.
There are plenty of books and papers written to expound on them being intellectual Christians. That is not my aim here, I only want to touch on it before I move onto my subject matter. Which I will be calling “The value of external experience in the understanding of the way things work.”
What Role Does Experience Play In Our Understating?
It is not without reason that almost all of the philosophers who have longstanding contributions all valued experience in their works. If a metaphysical mold of reality doesn’t fit the physical experience, then you have a deep-seated issue in the outworking of that mold. In other words, if you have a false understanding about the nonphysical parts of reality and if it’s true that the nonphysical parts of reality have and effect in the physical world, then you will behave wrongly in the physical world based off of your wrong understanding of the nonphysical world.
For instance, if you do not have a working knowledge of justice and you are sentenced to jury duty, you might condemn an innocent man or set a guilty one free. We can all agree that those are both awful outcomes. Now, if my claims thus far have been accurate. Then I think it is fair to say that life experience has a role to play in our understanding of the way things work if we want our ideas about the world to be true.
What I have thus far played out seems palatable and easy to accept until you find that it works against you in some ways. Here I will oversimplify for the sake of brevity. If you agree that experience is a litmus test for the metaphysical, then you must take into account personal testimony. This will cause trouble for both the atheist and the theist alike. We must take into consideration the experience of those who have both lost faith and those who have found faith. This makes the total consideration behind either God or Godless, a whole lot more complicated and tedious. Due to the simple fact that people lie and personal testimonies are often unreliable. It means to be either a fully convinced theist or atheist, you have your work cut out for you.
It is not impossible to be either, but it certainly is a great deal more complicated than the general populous makes it out to be. I am aware of the multitude of other angles available both for and against what i am saying, but I must remind you that I have been oversimplifying for the sake of time. This is by no means a closed issue for me, and I write this mainly to start a larger conversation in hopes to better understand the role that experience plays in our paradigms.
To say I am intrigued is vastly understating my bemusement here. First being that I read Tolkien before I became a Christian and have since seen his and C.S. Lewis’s works vilified by mainstream Christians and evangelicals alike. But more to the point, I am getting the book and indeed would like to discuss more.
Absolutely! I would love to discuss the topic in more detail.