Stop Arguing,
Start Enchanting

In 2015, physics Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek wrote a best-selling book in which he describes the physical universe as the product of an artist. Wilczek grew up Catholic but lost faith as a teenager and turned from God. When asked in an interview if he was religious, he replied: "Physics is my religion."¹

Yet he remains sympathetic to questions about God, and believes science has much to say about who or what God is. He notes how many of the bright stars in the history of science espoused strong Christian beliefs: Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell. Wilczek explores beauty through the lens of Core Theory and quantum physics and asks whether the world we inhabit embodies beautiful ideas.

His answer: a resounding yes.

Embodying beautiful ideas is what art does. A painting embodies the ideas of the artist. So Wilczek is saying that the universe is a work of art — which indicates that behind this cosmic work of art is an Artist. He admits the ideas are "strange and deeply hidden," but they are beautiful, and beauty in this register is not decorative. It is structural. It is the grammar of the real.²

Wilczek's lifelong adventure into physics and cosmology reveals his own quest to recover meaning and purpose after walking away from religion. He is not alone. The world thirsts for beauty and wonder. And this thirst is an opening — one the church has largely failed to walk through.

An argument seldom convinces unbelievers to change their minds. Beauty, on the other hand, works on a different plane. It steals behind the "watchful dragons," as C.S. Lewis liked to say, and works on the emotions — convincing the heart.

McGrath was summarizing Lewis's conviction that beauty can disarm the gatekeepers of the rational mind and speak directly to a person's heart — not a wishy-washy emotional clump of sentiment, but the very seat of the intellect. The sights and sounds of the world and the work of an artist not only affect our thoughts and emotions but can expand and open new pathways of cognitive function.³ Beauty works on us like a gardener works the soil.

Historian Cardinal Avery Dulles reminds us that before there was a Christian apologetic, Christianity was first a message.⁴ Distributed through personal testimony, it spoke of the truthfulness of Jesus Christ as the risen Lord. Those who employed a defense of the faith in the early centuries were not only concerned with making a true argument — they also wanted to make a beautiful one, an attractive one.⁵

So what type of defense should Christians use? One that highlights the attractiveness of the message itself — the message of hope.

C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, and T.S. Eliot emerged in the early twentieth century as literary apologists — imaginative apologists, apologists of the beautiful.⁶ Dulles notes that Lewis's work especially maintains its freshness and vitality more than a half-century later, while massive tomes of previous centuries gather dust on library shelves.⁷

Lewis's unique approach was an apologetic of beauty. The imaginative apologist begins from the standpoint of mere Christianity and engages readers in such a way as to make Christianity not only seem reasonable but attractive. Lewis reached the general secular reader and the believing reader who had no time for technical theological works.⁸

Lewis insisted that the object of defense for the apologist is Christianity itself — not a person's personal conception or opinion about religion. And he warned against keeping abreast of recent theological movements, lest this confuse what must stand as the standard of permanent Christianity in the apologist's mind.⁹

The Christian apologia is to be a defense not limited to sophisticated arguments but a common explanation from the common person of their uncommon hope. And the form of explanation need not be argument, debate, or formal discussion.

We need to stop arguing and start enchanting. Lewis believed this. Later in his career, he wrote fewer apologetic works and focused on stories. Formal apologetics became less effective after the late first century — it wasn't until the twentieth century, when the new imaginative apologetics arrived, that we witnessed the largest impact on cultural apologetics ever recorded.

Consider how Lewis combined his intellectual work with his fiction. He wrote That Hideous Strength as a creative way to show the argument he had laid out in his University of Durham lectures — what we now know as The Abolition of Man. He used an intellectual-imaginative approach to express Christian witness, with the desire to comfort, guide, and inspire his readers. He wasn't trying to win debates. He was trying to woo people toward reality.¹⁰

There is a world out there hungering for significance — a world where Nobel physicists write about the beauty of the cosmos and quietly ask whether someone made it. Let's argue the faith less and woo the world with deep expressions of wonder and beauty.

The watchful dragons are still at the gate. But beauty still knows how to slip past them.