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Some thoughts in first-draft form.
Recently I saw a prominent Christian author suggest that at its best Hollywood might aspire to "pure, innocent entertainment," leisure without the baggage of art. Now, I'm no enemy of whimsy and fun, but I must protest; pop art is still art! Movies tell stories by which we narrate our lives, often in deep and profound ways. So I want to dig in to an unlikely genre: animated children's movies. I hope we can see in two Pixar films, Toy Story and WALL·E, that even pop art can capture a whole sweep of culture, and isn't restricted to a few idle laughs.
Toy Story is, on one level, just a fun adventure about toys. Buzz Lightyear, a space ranger action figure, is introduced into the community of sheriff Woody and a host of other toys. Woody sees Buzz as a rival and plots against him; the two get into some serious trouble and become friends as they work together to return to the safety of home. We've got comedy and camaraderie, action and animation -- fun!
Yet, whether consciously or unconsciously, this film also tells a profound story that has shaped Western culture for centuries, the story of disenchantment. At the center of both the problem and solution of the film's conflicts is Buzz Lightyear's belief that he is a real space ranger, not a toy. Once he overcomes these grandiose visions of himself and his world -- his mission from Star Command aims "to infinity... and beyond!" -- he can start solving the real problems facing the toys. Once he recognizes that his enchanted world was just imaginary, he can move forward bravely and genuinely in the real, disenchanted world in which he actually lives.
This is a perfect allegory for modern stories of disenchantment, stories of "losing my religion." Richard Dawkins would be proud to tell the tale: There is no Space Command out there with a majestic mission for us, no God who comes to redeem the world unto a bright future, and if we would just give up those delusions we could concentrate on the real world in front of us and make real progress. Even more than that, when we come to grips with reality, once we let disenchantment sink in, we will be empowered to do even greater things than we imagined in our false, enchanted world.
WALL·E criticizes this story of disenchantment and offers in its place a story of re-enchantment. In a disenchanted world we are not Buzz Lightyear's space rangers, not made in the image of God, so we come to see our humanity as something that is merely incidental. In time, we regard our bodies not as beautiful and glorious expressions of the divine but rather as limitations to our aspirations of progress, prisons of weakness from which we must be freed in order to realize our true destiny. And what will liberate us from our bodily prisons? Technology. Technology becomes not a tool to help us tend the garden that is the world but a liberator to rescue us from the confines of our outdated bodies and the frustratingly weak physical creation.
The film exposes the hidden side-effects of this mythos of secular technological progress. Our lofty, if abstract, aspirations to "progress" quickly fade into a fascination with meaningless trinkets. In an instant we consume their novelties, toss them aside, and immediately turn to the next trivial pleasure in line. They may just be trinkets, but when we are consumed by them destruction follows in their wake. When trashed they remain in our world and crowd out the deeper, embodied aspirations of humanity. (This is no partisan attack on capitalism, by the way; the film's humans live in a socialistic society in which everyone receives everything without working, and that is part of the problem.) Since we regard our world as a "disenchanted" place, we are happy to dump our trash on Earth and run lightyears away in our spaceships, leaving behind robots on cleanup duty.
Protagonist WALL·E is the last robot on Earth, and somebody forgot to turn him off! For centuries our solar-powered antihero has been faithfully organizing and compacting our trash so that one day we might return. In a fascinating contrast, while we built technology to escape our feeble bodies, our technological creation WALL·E is thoroughly spellbound with the splendor of embodied humanity. At the end of the workday his curiosity explores human song and dance, and he even learns to dance himself. Notice that this is no mere environmentalist screed: The problem in the movie is not that we have failed to love Mother Gaia but that we have forgotten our humanity. This is a Christian critique of secularization, of disenchantment.
The appearance of a female robot, Eve, presents the opportunity for hope, for re-enchantment. She is sleek and advanced, representative of the future, while WALL·E is kinda dumpy to look at and has a cockroach for a best friend. This is not unlike most couples I know. Eve discovers a plant, proof that Earth may yet be salvageable, places it in her robotic "womb," and hibernates while WALL·E sacrificially cares for her. They return to the human spaceship to deliver their botanical proof that Earth's suppressed potential, where WALL·E meets humans quite opposite his embodied expectations. Rather than be a people of dancing and laughter and food, we lay on hoverchairs idly staring at screens and chatter over frivolities. WALL·E's imitation of embodied humanity inspires us to recover the simple profundity of our bodies and the physical world, and we return to Earth in the hope of "re-enchanting" it, recovering the divine stamp on all of creation.
Combined, these two films tell our story: We live in a radically disenchanted cultural world, and it is absolutely anti-human. It provides a radical critique of disenchanting secularism as tantamount to vapid dehumanization, and counters that by recovering the physical, the bodily human, we might re-enchant our world, seeing real hope and real "change you can believe in." This project of re-enchantment -- which is to say, this project of re-emphasizing the image of God in humanity and the goodness and purpose of God's created order -- in one to which Christians ought to be devoted. If we can, we will be doing something deeply orthodox yet profoundly "relevant," not in the sense of selling out to secular culture but instead in the sense of captivating people with real Christianity right where they are with the proof of where they could be.
How will we reflect on this project, and how will we go about it? The movie suggests that we may turn to dancing, to laughter, to feasting, to children, and above all to love. For the movie is at root a love story between two very different, yet still very good, genders. And isn't that true for Christians? At root, we are telling a love story between the groom Jesus who lays down his life and the bride Church who carries within her the potential future for the life of the world.
i stop Debating with People On this Post ..because we cant convence people that dont believe in jesus that there is one and they cant convience us that theres not..so only they can diecide for themselfs all we can do is help and go on our way and let god take care of it ....im pretty positive thats statement is going to start a controversy but o well
I am done replying to people like you. So have fun living in your little Godless World.totosli_08 and marieelissa:
Proving The Existence of God
A common project among Christian apologists is to produce arguments which will prove the existence of God to non-Christians. No one can deny this clear logic, it is said, and so clearly once all of the Christians’ proofs have been heard others will be compelled to become Christians. Thomas Aquinas made use of some of Aristotle’s arguments in order to provide us with the so-called cosmological arguments, which are based on causation:
Everything in the world has a cause.
Therefore, the world must be caused from something outside of it.
That cause is God.
This is a simplified version, of course, so if there is a minor error then please ignore it. The basic idea is this: Doesn’t there have to be some reason, some cause for the world? Why is there something rather than nothing?
This has been persuasive to some extent to many people. However, in the end it only works if all sorts of Christian assumptions get smuggled into the argument. For instance, who says that there must be a first cause? What if there is a chain of infinite causes? Similarly, who says that the world as a whole must have a cause, just because particular things in the world have causes? And who said that this cause must be God? What if it is an impersonal force or law of nature? These questions do not end.
Another common argument is the teleological argument, the argument from design:
The world is very orderly.
Order does not come from chance, so the world must have been designed.
That designer is God.
Again, this is a bit simplified, but focus on the basic idea: Doesn’t the world seem to “work” a bit too well to be simply the product of chance?
An older response to this argument is the Darwinist counter-interpretation: Things appear orderly because of naturalistic evolution, the fundamental principles of which may serve to explain anything from biodiversity to the formation of galaxies. However, more recently the “design” argument has been based on the apparent order or design in basic constants in physics, which are not said to be determined by any type of evolutionary hypothesis, so the Darwin-inspired counter-interpretation will not work in the end. Of course, at this point we are no longer dialoguing with anyone who is amazed merely by the beauty of trees and stars, but instead only to scientists who are impressed with the mathematical precision of obscure scientific constants.
Even so, this argument still requires that all sorts of Christian assumptions be smuggled in in order to get anywhere. For instance, if God is so great, who designed him? Who says that this designer was personal? What if it is just the impersonal forces and laws of nature? Who says that there was only one designer? What if there were all sorts of competing designers? Who says that this designer is good? After all, isn’t there all kinds of evil in the world, from hurricanes to murder?
I will spare you the ontological argument, but suffice it to say that all of these arguments are embarrassingly inadequate at proving anything meaningfully Christian on truly non-Christian grounds. They can always be re-interpreted to prove whatever the re-interpreter already believes about the world, even for the atheist who believes the world is governed by impersonal forces and chance. And if they can at all be salvaged, it will only be after such prolonged debate that no one will be convinced.
What About Christian Theology? What Do Christians Already Know About God?
At this point I hope the Christian will stop for at least a moment to reconsider the motivations in this so-called natural theology (basically, proving God’s existence on “naturalistic” terms). After all, the cosmological arguments come to us from Aristotle, and today’s great proponents of the teleological argument are Deists! If we are trying to do something Christian, why are we just using shoddy, question-begging versions of arguments that are owned by prominent non-Christians?
Now, the proofs are about knowing God, so what does Christian theology have to say about how we come to know God? In Christian theology we come to know of God by means of divine revelation. There are two kinds of revelation – general (revelation in all of creation) and special (the Bible). The following is a prominent text about general revelation which is often cited to promote natural theology.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1)
This text has been used as the basis for the design argument. Upon further inspection, however, it has nothing to do with the design argument. It says that the heavens declare and proclaim God’s glory, not that they serve as evidence which can be used as the primary premise in the teleological argument. The text says that they themselves reveal God, not that there is an argument that reveals God which uses them as evidence. While God reveals himself to us where we are, it is not on our terms.
Instead of agreeing that we come to know about God by means of God’s revelation, the “proofs” say that we know about God by means of arguments we form using God’s revelation as evidence. This is very hostile to the doctrine of divine revelation. After all, is God’s revelation insufficient; did God accidentally forget something crucial? Is God’s revelation superfluous; did God give revelation even though we could have reached him on our own steam? Is God’s revelation not authoritative; is there some human standard by which it is best to judge God? Is God’s revelation unclear; does God need to speak using anti-Christian structures (naturalism) in order to say Christian things?
Yeah, But That Just Isn’t Working
But, we still have to ask, why does a bald appeal to God’s revelation, whether special or general, not prove effective when arguing with non-believers? Here we discover that natural theology uses a faulty doctrine of man (anthropology) in its project, because natural theology treats humans as basically thinking machines. We are, it says, led around by our “reason” alone. Notice how this works just as well for a flesh-and-blood human as it would for a very advanced computer; this is an overly narrow understanding of humanity. Instead, as philosophers are recognizing more and more, it is less that we are thinking machines and more that our reasoning abilities serve to direct and focus our actions. Much more basic are our ethical commitments or values; these drive the use of our reason.
The cash value is this: According to the doctrine of sin, all people are fundamentally committed against God in an ethical way, and if these ethical commitments prevent “neutral” reasoning then the proofs will never and can never work because they do not get to the core issues which divide the “believer” and the “unbeliever.” More broadly, natural theology treats man as the sufficient judge of truth in and of himself, meaning that man has some sort of ultimacy or autonomy. But if God is truly to be God, the sovereign creator and governor of all, then man cannot be ultimate or autonomous, for if man is ultimate then God is not. If man can make sense of the world on his own terms without reference to God, then God is not truly the sovereign creator and governor of all. If man can truly understand the world while considering the cross foolishness, then the cross cannot be the summary narrative of the entire world. For this reason, if the “proofs” for God’s existence work then Christianity is false, because the “proofs” only work if humanism and not Christianity is true.
What, then, can the Christian do? The Christian can reason with non-Christians, and often intellectual confusions about Christianity are important to discuss, but the Christian can never redeem someone from the ethical commitments which drive his reason against God – only God can do that. Does this sound like, ultimately, we can do nothing? Of course, that’s the point; God is ultimate, not man, and so man is not capable of reaching out and grabbing God on his own; God must grab man.
