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Another weakness within relativism is its inability to define or deal with evil.

I would say that post-modernism, on the one hand, says that there are no absolutes and therefore, no truth at all. Yet they deeply struggle with problems. For instance, one of the examples I came across recently is Michael Foucault, one of the post-modern philosophers who really struggled with the idea that rape was wrong. His philosophy really wanted to break all rules and boundaries and he equated all law with oppression. Therefore, lawlessness meant freedom. To make a law against rape was against his principles, yet deep down in his gut he knew that it was wrong, and it needed to be stopped.

Richard Rorty says that there's no neutral ground on which you can condemn the Holocaust. Now, he wouldn't prefer that kind of thing, but on the other hand there's no grounds on which you can stop it. And he's very glad he lives in a Christian nation where Judeo-Christian values, are all over the culture. And he's glad he's at this time and at this place, but there's no grounds on which he can condemn anything else.

C.S. Lewis had an interesting connection that he made between meaning and imagination, and it has a lot of importance for how we do apologetics today.

One of the reasons that C.S. Lewis is still so popular and still speaks to people in this age is that he dealt with both reason and imagination. And he said at one point in his writings that "Reason is the natural organ of truth, and imagination is the organ of meaning." He argued, in a variety of places, that the only way you really understand any idea or set of ideas, is if you can get an image in your imagination with which to connect it. Of course, that was where he was so good. In his philosophical writings he had great pictures and metaphors that would make his point. And he could also communicate just as well in fiction. The Narnia Chronicles, or in the Space Trilogy, or Til We Have Faces communicate his philosophical ideas in a way that deeply impacts people's imagination.

How did Lewis's conversion illustrate the importance of imagination in relationship with reason?

His first step in coming back from the atheism in which he was rooted at that time, was that he picked up a little book in a bookstore. It was George MacDonald's book, Phantastes. He said something happened to him, something jumped off the page and baptized his imagination. He was never quite the same afterwards. It gave him a vision for what he later described as holiness. He said it took awhile for the rest of him to catch up with that, and he had issues related to his reason that had to be addressed. And then finally, after those were addressed, he had to deal with the matter of the will. And he said he finally submitted to God as "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England."

You also underscore the importance of love, that we want to have right thinking, right practices, but we've also got to have right attitudes.

If we communicate what we believe or our ethical positions without the right attitude, then we're not likely to be heard. I've found that in many cases love itself is one of the greatest apologetics, one of the greatest reasons for faith. Tal Brooke, who is the president of Spiritual Counterfeits Project, talks about living and learning under Sai Baba in India, and he met this missionary couple that spoke to him about arguments for faith. He tried to convert them to Hinduism, but what really made the difference for him was the agape love that they showed him. He realized that that was not present in the Hindu disciples around him and, above all, in Sai Baba, the guru of gurus in India. This other-centered agape love was a self-sacrificial love.

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48