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There is a difference between being materialistic and being a materialist . If you are materialistic, you value material things above non-material things. By materialism I don't mean the valuing of material things. What I mean is the view that there is nothing that exists that is immaterial. A material thing is some entity which is possible to experience. Some material things are so small you can't see them, but it would be possible to experience them if one's senses were adequate or if the thing in question was bigger. Of course, if you are a materialist, then you will very likely be materialistic. That's all there is, after all. What I mean by stink is some undesirable state of affairs. Getting a large bill from the mechanic is an undesirable outcome (for me, not the mecahanic). War is an undesirable state of affairs. Getting sick is undesirable. These things stink. My claim is that the non-stinkyness of certain states of affairs gives us reasons to think th...

The argument from beauty has a certain intuitive strength. It is roughly as follows: Beauty evokes longing. When we see or hear something of great beauty we long for something beyond what we think is beautiful. A great piece of music impels us to desire for an experience beyond the one we are having. Of course, we can just say it is synapses and endorphins, but when we do we neuter the power of the experience. Perhaps, Lewis suggests, the beauty we are glimpsing is not in the music or painting or mountain-top view, but from somewhere else mediated through our experience. Lewis concluded that there is no way to satisfy the longing evoked by beauty apart from a transcendent reality. That reality, for Lewis, is the Christian reality, God's reality. Either the longing we have is misplaced (there is nothing beyond the ink on the page, the grass on the hillside, or the sound waves interacting with our ear drums) or there is a transcendent reality. If there is no transcendent realit...