How can you not like a book by a media host, author and Catholic apologist, who has studied and published about Tolkien, perhaps the greatest writer since Shakespeare ? In another work Coren defends Catholicism, and is one of the few to do so [reviewed here]. In this book, the scope is broader – a general defence of Christianity against the more lurid lies told about it. It is appropriate and just. I doubt that many 'authors' will publish scripts 'against Islam' for example. But Christianity is an easy target. No one will dare criticize the Mohammadan cult, but spreading vacuous and uninformed trash about Christian theology is 'cutting edge' and de-rigueur to claim 'intellectual' gravitas. Or so the big-brains think. The Christianophobia displayed by the popular culture and Islam, along with most 'teachers' or professors, and certainly most of the media, needs to be refuted. Coren does that in an accessible and easy-to-read manner.

Some of Coren's main themes include:

1. How can there be order from chaos ?

There is no example in history of authentic progress without authentic order. Nations and empires were only economically and culturally productive when they were relatively ordered societies, with a suitably strong government. Further, when the moral order of those societies began to decay, economic and political collapse quickly followed. The Roman Empire is only one example of this. First came moral disintegration, then political catastrophe....

Obviously moral order is necessary for cultural progress. The ancients did not invent the thousands of medieval creations because they did not believe in progress, but in cycles and in impersonal, capricious and vicious 'gods'. Christian culture was the first to propose order, progress, and linear development. This idea reaches even into the natural world. For example even the Big-Bang, another theory parading as fact, maintains that chaos erupted and then fell into order. This is scientifically impossible. Not one single experiment has ever produced chaos which then settled into an ordered format. Not one. There is plenty that science can't explain, including the many gaps in evolutionary theory [which I support]. More to the point, multi-culturalism, statism and political correctness leads to disorder. Without social order there is indeed no formation but only chaotic degradation.

Coren writes:

Beyond this is the debate surrounding the relatively recent discoveries concerning DNA. The noted British philosopher Dr. Antony Flew, who for decades had been one of the academic world’s respected atheists, was obliged to change his mind about God and creation in late 2004. He said that “Superintelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” It’s difficult to over-estimate the ripple this sent though the atheist and secular communities, who first doubted that Flew had actually said such a thing, and then, once they knew that he had, set about accusing him of having had a nervous breakdown or even of being mentally ill.

Consider for a moment the size of the earth, which corresponds precisely to the enormous and various demands of layers of nitrogen and oxygen that exist around fifty miles above the planet. If earth were any larger, this amount of gas would not allow gravity to exist as it does, and if any smaller it would similarly make life impossible. Of all the planets that exist, while we can speculate that others might contain meaningful life, earth is the only one with the exact recipe of gases to guarantee such an overwhelming variety and complexity of life.

2. Christians hate reason

My personal favourite. The list of Christians who developed in part the modern world, dating from late antiquity [circa 500 AD] is the longest such list from any culture, during any epoch in world history. Literally thousands of inventions were stimulated, deployed and improved. Some were ideas or assets that flowed from the east and incorporated into Christian medieval society. Again a unique attribute of Christian Europe. Many more were self-initiated and built on newly discovered, ideas, patterns and physical laws. Moslem apologists can name 2 Moslem 'thinkers' who interpreted Plato and Aristotle. Suddenly Islam is civilization and light. A very quick compendium of hundreds of Christians who actually invented something can be made by the informed in less than a minute. But medieval Europe 'was dark and barren'. Or so say the egotistical ignorasmuses such as Voltaire and Gibbon, themselves by-products of the High Middle Ages.

Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918 and is recognized as the father of the quantum theory. His research was revolutionary, transforming our knowledge of the atomic and of the sub-atomic. He came from a family of theologians, was a devout Christian, and was even a church warden for almost thirty years of his life. Planck wrote, Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: “Ye must have faith.” It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with. And, There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean politician and philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon, himself a scientist, writing in Of Atheism, stated, “It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”

It’s a pithy and acutely observant remark that applies even more bitingly to the twenty-first century than to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth. Bacon, by the way, is sometimes used by modern atheists as an example of an anti-Christian, perhaps because of his possible homosexuality. But it’s untrue, and his work in science as well as in philosophy was always, he claimed, undertaken to aid his country, his faith, and the truth.

3. The Galileo canard

Another personal favourite. Christian-haters teach that the Pope and Church tortured, beat, trampled on, and desecrated both Galileo and science. The opposite is true. The Church funded Galileo and commissioned his works. The Pope and most of the Bishop's supported the idea of heliocentricity – at least as a theory and found no reason why it contradicted Church teachings. The problem was that Galileo was merely parrotting what Copernicus had already published as a theory [Copernicus was a Catholic]; stating that it was fact, but with no proof using experimentation that it actually was a fact. Today of course we have globaloneywarming parading around as a 'fact' supported by those who supposedly believe in science but can't answer the simplest objections about a natural chemical which is 95 % emitted by the earth mother, and comprises 1 % of atmospheric gases. Who in reality are the cretins and worshippers of lies and superstition ?

1623, when Galileo approached the new Pope, who was an old friend, Urban VIII. Maffeo Barberini had been and remained a patron of the arts and a supporter of scientific investigation. He had long encouraged Galileo, both as a friend and as a cardinal, and now as Pope tried to help him further. He strongly advised Galileo to approach the entire situation extremely carefully and to outline, as a good scholar should, the arguments both for and against the theory. It’s never been fully explained why Galileo reacted so churlishly to this sound advice from a man who not only had befriended him, but had defended him as well. Instead of pursuing his work, Galileo appeared to seek confrontation and attempted to humiliate the Pope. In his book Dialogue on the Two World Systems he took the Pope’s advice to present both sides of the debate, but had Urban’s position advocated by the character Simplicio, making fun of the character and the argument and making the Pope a figure of fun in the eyes of the academic world.

Even Galileo couldn’t prove heliocentricity, and in particular failed to counter the very argument that had been made by Aristotle two thousand years earlier. The Greek philosopher’s position was that if heliocentrism was indeed true, we would be able to observe it by obvious shifts in the positions of the stars as the earth moved around the sun. Obviously the equipment required to prove this did not exist in the time of Aristotle or Galileo, because of the enormous distance from the earth to the stars.

4. Slavery

We are told that Christians love slavery and that every White Christian male secretly harbours a desire to have a plantation full of Black slaves. This is ahistorical rubbish. Slavery is still practised in the Islamic world, including sex slavery of young girls in many Western metropolitan areas. It is sanctioned and expected in the Koran, along with polygamy and men using their 'right hand' over women, including beating and punishing the female for the sake of 'honour'. A rather Bronze Age attitude.

Christians ended slavery in the West and enforced most of its eradication in Africa and Asia. Today Marxist parties such as the unDemocratic party in the US, claim that all White people want Blacks back in chains. Curiously it was the Republican party that fought the unpopular [in the North] US Civil War, and it was the Republican party which put Blacks into positions of prominence and power in the South post-bellum, much to the visceral disgust of the unDemocratic party which promptly began the KKK to lynch both Blacks and any Whites supportive of Black freedom.

[In the US] 1,350 anti-slavery societies in the country, boasting more than 225,000 members. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, churches were filled with abolitionist speakers and activists, with enormous pressure brought to play on politicians.

The anti-slavery movement effectively began in Britain in 1787 with a meeting of twelve Christians who were experienced in social action, including Wilberforce. Some of the other driving characters behind the movement were Thomas Clarkson – “We cannot suppose therefore that God has made an order of beings, with such mental qualities and powers, for the sole purpose of being used as beasts, or instruments of labour” – along with the converted slave trader and author of “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, and the members of the Clapham Sect.

In 1537, Pope Paul III issued a Papal Bull on the issue of natives, slavery, and the relationship between conqueror and conquered in the New World, who were not, of course, Christian. In that a Papal Bull is a formal and profoundly authoritative document, this is an extraordinarily significant piece of evidence as to the Christian approach to slavery as early as the Renaissance.

“We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ;”

By the 1830s, the real axis of evil that was slavery connected Africa, south Asia, and Arabia, and lasted far longer than it had in the white, Christian world. Indeed, it still exists. According to anti-slavery groups, there are still millions of people who are enslaved servants and concubines, thus being little better off than slaves and sometimes literally enslaved. In Sudan, Animist and Christian tribes were until recently and to an extent still are, raided by Arab militias; the men are killed and the women and children taken as slaves.

There is much more, but the above is a good summary of how Coren defends the defensible. So where does the current animus in the West against Christianity lead to ? Three Christians have it right. The clash of the Bronze age cult of Islam with a decadent West – a war fought from a position of weakness:

Belloc was acutely perceptive and predictive. His books on Islam, for example, speak of the clash of civilizations that would transform Europe, generations before the onset of mass Muslim immigration into the West. He was not always humble, but he was invariably correct. He saw the threat of eugenics and of abortion; he was sharp and clear about the coming modernist attack on concepts of right and wrong and the rape of the culture by moral relativism. He wrote of these monsters long before any other author of note did so.

Moral relativism and cultural degradation:

In the final years of his life, Chesterton predicted that the absolutes of right and wrong would become blurred, religion publicly condemned, and that we would care more for animals than babies, and would worship sex while mocking love. We would, he said, be governed by whim and fashion. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Faith imparted from Reason, used for a higher purpose and realization is being lost:

Since his death, Muggeridge has been quoted often in support and defence of Christianity, and quite right, too. This, for example, from The End of Christendom:

“People think of faith as being something that you don’t really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument.…”

He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason. And this, when discussing Christianity’s unique alternative to modern political and ideological excesses: Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he (Kierkegaard) pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering.

The greatest civilization in history – our own – is directly dependent upon and built upon the great foundations of Christian culture and history, which used influences from the ancient world, themselves products of even more ancient cultures and processes and fused it with a belief in man, in goodness, in progress, in right, in justice, in peace, in self-defence, and in an after-life. It was Christian Europe which developed all of the social, moral, political, economic and rational accoutrements of the civilized man. A fact not often taught today. Good for Coren to correct the record.