This article possesses no continuous argument of its own, but consists in a series of replies to observations made by J. K. A. Smith, L. Malcolm, and G. Loughlin regarding my book The Beauty of the Infinite. Thus it addresses a great number of topics, often only tenuously related to one another, and in an order dictated by the pieces to which it responds. Certain themes, however, can be identified as dominant: the capacity of natural reason to discover spiritual truths, the proper rhetoric of evangelical persuasion, the ontological premises that inform (and perhaps justify) that rhetoric, the place of aesthetics within theological reasoning, the role of divine law within Christian ethics, the need for Christian rhetoric adequately to encompass the reality of suffering and loss, the Christian metaphysics of being, the nature of Christian hope, the value of ‘tragic theology’ and the Christian metaphysics of evil.

Scientific disciplines seek a truthful description of how things are. One way to think of the way that science does this is to say that science seeks to show how things fit together. In doing this the scientist implicitly makes use of aesthetic and ideal categories, such that aesthetic relationships of things to each other in thought somehow stand for the actual relationships (involving energy, charge, mass and the like). This relationship of ideal thought in the medium of human language to the reality of the world is remarkable. Why is it that we can know anything truthful about the world on the basis of the way we talk to each other? Why is there anything instead of nothing? Scientific practice suggests ways in which these are the same question. It may be that the createdness of the world underlies all truthful human discourses, whether artistic or scientific, mechanical or philosophical.