The Fresh Fragrance of Jasmine

I was now having regular sex with Susan who was self-identifying as bisexual, and like Francis Digby her faith was falling apart and she was undergoing an existential crisis on the eve of her final exams. The fact that I did not find Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics or defence of evangelic Christianity compelling had a negative impact on Susan. I just finished reading Jacque Monod’s book Chance and Necessity. Susan also read the book and it had the same negative impact on her faith as the writings of Altizer and Hamilton had on Francis Digby, it shuttered her faith.
She could see Schaeffer’s apologetic edifice collapsing under the burden that Darwinian evolution was true and that the case for a materialist view of reality and the Universe was perfectly rational and reasonable in terms of the available empirical evidence. She could now see my point that a simple biological evolutionary based critique of Francis Schaeffer was not easy to rebut. In her despair she seemed to take heart in retreating into the refuge of fideism. This was not intellectually a viable option, no sane person should consider retreating from reason in order to find security in pure ungrounded and quarantined faith.
Her weeping over her loss of faith in the early hours of the morning, in the pitch darkness before dawn, woke me up from a deep slumber. I had fallen asleep after we had made love. All this time she had been lying awake in anguish. In desperation she asked me like a child:
‘What must I do now if there is no God?’
It felt like the chickens of Susan’s guilt and regret had finally come home to roost squarely on my shoulders. I was in my second year of study and now I had to deal with Susan’s emotional breakdown. Was it guilt over our sexual relationship or was she really losing her faith for sound intellectual reasons.
‘God exists, God is there,’ I said trying to comfort her.
‘How do you know that God exists?’ She asked as I held her in my arms.
‘I have my reasons.’
‘What are your reasons?’
‘Necessity, metaphysical necessities.’
‘I don’t understand, what do you mean?’ She asked.
‘Necessities in Nature depends on the existence of law-like relations that are not self-evident or self-explanatory. The intelligibility, the encounterability and the knowability of the Universe is not self-evident or self-explanatory and this gives me sufficient reason to accept that there is a God,’ I argued.
‘Do you really believe in God, you not just saying this to make me feel better?’ Susan asked.