Every summer, I try to finish reading "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton, and every summer I manage not to finish by way of stopping to take notes every few pages. Already this summer I'm almost done (but I cheated -- I picked up where I left off last time).

In reading, I came across this bit of wisdom:

Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to
try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

It got me thinking: there are in this world a lot of foolish ideas hiding behind a curtain of large, empty words. Big lofty scholarly words, like "Humanism", "postmodernism", and "philosophical naturalism". But when you boil these concepts down to their core, it becomes clear that there is no core remaining -- everything has gone up in smoke and steam. "Humanistic Secularism" says nothing more than "only those things we see are true." -- or in other words, "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist." And yet the fact that some things can be seen is proof enough of the things which can't be seen -- everything that can be seen must have arrived to existence somehow, and nothing that we see now can be its own maker. "Postmodernism" simply says "nothing is really true -- especially not the things we thought true before." And "Philosophical naturalism" says nothing more than "everything happens naturally" -- which is especially empty, since it defines "naturally" as simply "the way we see things now."

Many non-Christians claim Christianity to be false by saying that it is simply yet another form of the "monomyth", a kind of story that has been discovered to be common to cultures throughout the world. And maybe they are right in their comparison -- but shouldn't that simply confirm and reinforce the truth of Christianity? If it is foolish to believe Christianity simply because it is so similar to what every culture has once believed, it is even more foolish to disbelieve Christianity simply because every culture has believed something so similar to Christianity. "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities", declares Paul in Romans 1, " -- His eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." Every nation on earth has once believed in the story of creation because God has made clear to every nation that same story.  The fact that man has distorted that story does not disprove the truth of the original -- it only proves the truth of God's word further: "for although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."

And even that clear truth that can be seen has been challenged. The "many-worlds hypothesis" tries to combat the idea that every finely-tuned orderly part of creation points toward a personal and intelligent creator by saying that of course our world is orderly, but there exists another world that is not orderly. Not only are we the product of random chance, but we simply happen to be the "winners" of those millions of chance happenings that would lead to a universe so perfectly designed as ours. But this again is empty -- they attempt to answer the question of how we could possibly have by chance defeated incalculable odds to arrive at a universe that is laid out exactly to support life by simply repeating that we have by chance defeated those odds and now live in a universe laid out exactly to support life. They answer the question with the question, and go round in round in circles like this until it becomes pointless to ask them any longer. 

When you force yourself to stop and state the things you hold true in a blunt, one-syllable way, then you come to learn if what you believe is really believable. This is when you find that your mind must really start to work -- and when it is made clear that Christianity can answer what the world cannot.

"Why is Christianity so like what all people say is true?" "Because it is the truth all people know." 

"How is the world so well made?" "Because it was made so well."