Monday, May 30, 2016

Kreeft on the Problem of Evil: "shiny reason is not the answer"

"Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat."

As Kreeft lays out the plan of the book he says he will first work through ten easy answers to the problem of evil -- answers which turn out to be inadequate. See how artfully he explains this rationale:

Each of these ten answers is a nice, clean shortcut around the mystery. Who wants to steer into the fog bank when there are roads running through the clean air? 

The Bible looks like a fog bank. Its story centers on mystery. Christianity is not one of the neat, clean little roads. It is like Noah's ark, a big, sloppy, cumbersome old boat manned by a family of eccentrics and full of all kinds of animals who have to be tamed, fed, cleaned, and mopped up after (remember, Noah had no deodorants!).

The ten easy answers are like sharp, trim, snappy craft with outboard motors skipping over the surface of the great deep and leaving the drippy old ark behind as hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. Their only problem is that they don't reach port. They sink. Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat. (page 28)

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Blogging Daily, Unknown Merit

Blogging daily fetching thoughts
from passing notions fraught
with ephemeral concerns.

Bloggers publish more than print
and so in this immediacy lent
the words are more unworthy.

Media forms of past at least
tended to a better feast
for hungry mind and soul.

Of course it's not immediate
this one often indigent -
can tend to empty words.

And poems that are not at all
though definitions hear the call
define some 'poets' who are not.

Blogging daily may have merit
Gives ambitious author carrot -
but that is meager feast.



Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Do Words Make Real?

Do Words Make Real?

Do words make real?
Letters, concepts shaping,
sounds and shapes reflecting
light that shines on cave's stone wall?

Words give thought --
form reception, perception;
toy with what we see,
determine what we say,
define and form.
Do words make real?
Would saying so be real?

What of music -- surely
this is real. Emotive.
Speech of soul elicits;
drawing, leading,
calling tears and laughter --
dancing, otherworldy.
The Muse and those who tease,
embedding ring in soul,
pull us where they go.
But is it real because we feel,
because we yearn, because we know?​

Sartre, Camus
and brothers told us yes -
and no, for answers cannot
be their own undoing, 
words saying words not real.

Muse - wordless -
leads in world with million
points of bearing, candles
tossed about the seas:
now raging, now calm,
now lit, now gone.

What is real?
I. Is that enough?”
Why ask? The heart knows
eternal without knowing.
To question this must speak
with empty voice;
“no” requires “yes”,
meaning nothing when “I” is gone.

Irony is weak for this,
hopeless to explain:
eye curses light,
fish defies sea,
woman denies man or man, woman.

It's very real we see
when ask
why skeptic mind alone
is given shrine, driving
masses thinking, blinking, bowing.
The only real knows there is not,” we say,
smug but dead. We implode
in word, truth, reality. Too late.
Mortality does not lie.
The end of educated ignorance,
knowing what but never why.

A call of faith breaks through,
the soul of grasping words,
the secret home of Muse:
faith, fraught with
unfriendly friends, ideas
foreign to her person.
The true heart hears her voice,
wisdom's call: “There is,
and knowing knows it so.
Question as you will;
question the questioner.
I will be here still, rejected
lover whom to lose is
to be no more.”