True Paradox Quotes

“Why do we experience beauty as transcendent yet somehow impermanent and corrupted, and suffering as somehow wrong, rather than simply a part of the natural order?”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most,” the central character in C. S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces says as she reflects on her encounters with beauty. “And because it was beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else, there must be more of it.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“do we have a compulsion to devise elaborate ideas about our place in the universe? Why do we experience beauty as transcendent yet somehow impermanent and corrupted, and suffering as somehow wrong, rather than simply a part of the natural order? Why do the advocates of each new system of justice believe they can devise legal codes that will achieve a fully just social order, even though every previous system of justice has failed?”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“Even if you doubt that Christianity could possibly be true, I hope you will agree that it offers a surprisingly apt explanation of the features that make great art distinctive.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“This perception that beauty is real and that it reflects the universe as it is meant to be, but that it is impermanent and somehow corrupted, is the paradox of beauty. Any religion or system of thought that claims to be true needs to shed light on this paradox.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“The conviction that the universe is the rational creation of a rational God was what got Isaac Newton out of bed in the morning. And the same was true of many other giants of the scientific revolution.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“limited role that idea making plays in the materialist account”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“But even the most sophisticated materialist accounts of religion leave out its most important dimension: we are drawn to a particular religion or philosophy because it seems to us to better explain the nature of the universe than the alternatives. This feature is central to our embrace of a particular religion or system of thought, or so it has seemed to men and women in all places and times. Yet it seems to be left on the cutting-room floor in the materialist accounts of religion.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“To put it plainly, truth is not the principal objective of a criminal trial. This is why Americans do not assume that acquittal in a criminal trial proves that the defendant is innocent. As tempting as it is to borrow the techniques of criminal defense lawyers, they are a poor strategy for showing that Christianity or any other set of beliefs is true.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“Objection #1.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“Christianity explains our inability to sustain transcendence as evidence that creation, and the creation, have been corrupted. But Christianity teaches that the moments of transcendence are more than simply chemical changes in our brains. They are hints that the universe is not as it is intended to be and as it will one day be.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“is not a religious believer himself. But during a public conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson after his translation of the Psalms was published, he remarked that the Bible is so beautiful he sometimes finds himself wondering if it might be true.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“The second link is more direct. Some truths can only be conveyed, or are conveyed more effectively, through beauty.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“The first is that beauty often creates a desire for truth.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“We tend to think of truth as objective statements about the world, shorn of any connection with beauty. But there are at least two ways in which beauty is indeed linked to truth.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“The failure to engage the complexity of our existence can mar even the work of supremely gifted artists. The contemporary Christian artist Thomas Kinkade painted glowing, intricately detailed landscapes, often with cottages or rustic homes. As the art critic Daniel Siedell has written, the paintings invite Kinkade’s “clientele to escape into an imaginary world where things can be pretty good, as long as we have our faith, our family values, and a visual imagery that re-affirms all this at the office and at home.”19 Although the paintings are very popular, they deny a central dimension of our experience: the ugliness and horror that so often accompany beauty. (This wasn’t accidental; Kinkade once said, “I like to portray a world without the Fall.”)”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“even if Christianity offers the most compelling explanation of beauty, this does not mean that Christian artists will produce the finest art. As anyone who has encountered contemporary Christian music can attest, Christians are responsible for a great deal of highly inferior art. One reason for this seems to be a tendency in the past generation, at least in the West, for Christian artists to copy or critique rather than to create, as one cultural critic puts it.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“important point is that the creative tension among the three dimensions of God, and the paradox that God is both unity and diversity, is very similar to the qualities that we associate with a beautiful painting or concerto. Christians believe that this is not an accident and that it should not be a surprise that the beauty in a universe that was intended to be beautiful directly reflects the complexities of its Creator. To paraphrase a point made by the theologian N. T. Wright in another context, great art reflects the Creator back to himself.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“Beauty points beyond the creation, as dualism claims, but it also is a feature of the material world. This world is not as it should be; it has been bent and corrupted. We long for it to be transformed.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“transcendence is central both to our experience of beauty and to nearly every human religion. But religions vary dramatically in their understanding of beauty. To see this, we need to distinguish among three different conceptions of a spiritual dimension in the universe: pantheism, dualism and Christianity.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“the current materialist explanations are notably thin. They flatten out the complexity of beauty and describe something that most of us do not recognize as its essence.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World

“Unlike with animals, as Darwin himself acknowledged, our sense of beauty involves “complex ideas and trains of thought.” As he put it, “When . . . it is said that the lower animals have a sense of beauty, it must not be supposed that such sense is comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiform and complex associated ideas.”2 Beauty, in other words, is a lot more complicated with us.”
― David Skeel, True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World