the affections of unbelief

Nick Nowalk has a great piece over at The Harvard Icthus entitled The Christian Epistemology of Narnia. Apart from a long and judicious quotation from The Magician's Nephew, Nick offers his own thoughts on unbelief, including this:

it cannot be the case that people fail to believe in Jesus because they are not intelligent enough or incapable of evaluating the evidence coherently.  While sin smears the ways we choose to perceive the world, it is ultimately our affections that are the problem, not our brute capacity for seeing what is there.  Human beings would not have had higher IQ’s if they had not become sinners.  They would simply be more open to the truth in love instead of suppressing it in unrighteousness.  For Christians, the primary epistemological problem is humanity’s hardness of heart toward spiritual beauty.  We simply like the fantasy worlds of our own construction (where we are at the center) better than the real world where there is an awesome Lord who stands over against us in judgment and grace, calling us to account and beckoning us to align our perception of reality around Him.