What's All This Weirdness About?

A Brief Explanation of Why Your Author Traffics in Philosophical Nonsense

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reductio ad Absurdum

Dear long-suffering reader,

You may have noticed that my serial fiction (as well as my nom de plume) tends toward the peculiar. Floating legal masks. Weather balloons with emotional problems. Maps that dispense unsolicited philosophical advice. Sandwiches that achieve political consciousness through advanced decomposition.

You might reasonably wonder if I've suffered some sort of literary head injury, or perhaps developed an unhealthy obsession with Victorian nonsense literature. The truth is both simpler and more devious.

I'm engaged in what the philosophical establishment would call reductio ad absurdum—taking ideas to their logical extremes until their inherent contradictions become impossible to ignore. Specifically, I'm conducting a sustained campaign against every worldview that isn't biblical, using the time-honored tradition of making them look ridiculous through rigorous application of their own principles.

The Van Tillian Conspiracy

My approach draws heavily from Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics, which sounds impressively academic but boils down to something quite simple: every worldview rests on unprovable assumptions, and most of these assumptions are spectacularly irrational when examined closely.

Van Til argued that only the biblical worldview provides a coherent foundation for logic, morality, and knowledge. Everything else eventually collapses into contradiction, absurdity, or both. Rather than argue this point through tedious systematic theology, I prefer to demonstrate it through narrative chaos.

Consider our floating legal masks. They represent the arbitrary nature of secular authority—rules that exist without ultimate justification, enforced by entities that hover untethered to any solid foundation. The mask speaks with the voice of accumulated precedent, citing Garblethorpe v. The Concept of Tuesday as though such nonsense constitutes genuine legal reasoning.

This isn't mere satire. It's diagnostic imaging of worldviews that have severed themselves from their only rational foundation.

The Art of Philosophical Demolition

When you reject the biblical God as the ground of being, logic, and morality, you're left scrambling to construct meaning from thin air. The results are... well, they're exactly what you'd expect from trying to build a house without a foundation. Everything floats, nothing connects properly, and the whole structure defies basic architectural principles.

My fictional worlds simply take this floating seriously. If truth is subjective, why shouldn't maps have opinions? If consciousness emerges from mere matter, why not from sufficiently complex bacterial colonies in moldy sandwiches? If moral categories are human constructs, why not bureaucratize them into permits for metaphysical speculation?

The weirdness isn't random. It's carefully calibrated to reveal the weirdness already lurking in secular thought—we're just usually too polite to point it out.

The Gentle Art of Worldview Deconstruction

Traditional apologetics often feels like intellectual warfare: cite your sources, marshal your evidence, construct your syllogisms, and prepare for counter-attack. This approach has its place, but it tends to generate more heat than light. People don't abandon worldviews because they've been defeated in debate; they abandon them because they've been shown to be absurd.

Fiction accomplishes what argumentation cannot. It allows readers to inhabit other worldviews from the inside, following their logic to its natural conclusions without feeling personally attacked. When Lyra floats by emotional levitation, we're not critiquing anyone's feelings—we're simply exploring what happens when emotions become divorced from objective reality.

When Reginald the weather balloon develops preferences for ginger biscuits, we're not mocking scientific inquiry—we're examining what happens when consciousness is treated as an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems rather than a gift from the Creator.

The absurdity isn't cruel. It's revelatory.

Why Biblical Foundations Matter

Here's the thing: the biblical worldview doesn't eliminate mystery or complexity. It provides a foundation stable enough to support them. When you begin with the triune God as the source of logic, morality, and being itself, you can construct coherent systems of thought that actually connect to reality.

Without that foundation, you get floating legal masks.

The Bible presents a universe where things have genuine meaning because they're grounded in the character of God. Logic works because God is rational. Morality exists because God is good. Knowledge is possible because God has revealed truth. None of these claims can be proven from a neutral starting point—they're presuppositions that make proof itself possible.

Every other worldview starts with different presuppositions and ends up in different kinds of absurdity. Materialism reduces consciousness to chemical reactions, then acts surprised when people behave like chemicals. Relativism declares all truth subjective, then makes objective claims about the nature of truth. Postmodernism deconstructs all narratives, then constructs elaborate narratives about deconstruction.

My fiction simply fast-forwards to the inevitable results.

The Method Behind the Madness

Each story element serves multiple purposes. The bureaucratic complexity of Vireth Hollow reflects the labyrinthine nature of secular ethics—endless regulations with no ultimate authority behind them. The Unfirmament represents the void that secular worldviews must navigate without fixed reference points. The various floating objects suggest the untethered nature of meaning in post-Christian culture.

But the stories work even if you miss the apologetic subtext. They're designed to be genuinely entertaining while quietly undermining the intellectual foundations of unbelief. The goal isn't to club readers over the head with theology, but to create enough cognitive dissonance that they begin questioning their own presuppositions.

If someone finishes reading about weather balloons with emotional problems and thinks, "This is ridiculous—consciousness doesn't work that way," they've already moved closer to recognizing that consciousness requires a different kind of explanation than secular materialism provides.

The Long Game

Van Tillian apologetics plays the long game. Instead of winning individual arguments, it aims to shift the entire conversation by exposing the presuppositional level where real worldview change happens. Fiction extends this timeline even further, planting seeds that may not sprout until years later.

The absurdist approach has another advantage: it's nearly impossible to refute. How do you argue against a floating legal mask? You can't exactly cite contradictory evidence—the whole point is that the mask exists in a world where evidence floats too. The only way to escape the absurdity is to question the presuppositions that make it possible.

Which is exactly the point.

A Word of Encouragement

If you're a Christian reader, I hope these stories encourage you to think more deeply about the intellectual foundations of your faith. The biblical worldview isn't just personally meaningful—it's philosophically necessary. Everything else really does reduce to absurdity when pressed hard enough.

If you're not a Christian reader, I hope you'll consider the possibility that the weirdness in my fiction reflects genuine problems in secular thought. The floating masks and talking maps aren't arbitrary—they're natural consequences of certain ways of thinking about reality.

Either way, I hope you'll stick around for the ride. Lyra's journey through the Unfirmament is far from over, and I promise the absurdity will only intensify as we explore more worldviews that have cut themselves loose from their only rational moorings.

After all, someone has to point out that the emperor's new clothes are floating six feet off the ground and arguing about jurisdiction with a sandwich.

Might as well be me.

P.S. - For those interested in exploring Van Tillian apologetics more systematically, I recommend starting with "The Defense of the Faith" by Cornelius Van Til, or "Always Ready" by Greg Bahnsen. Fair warning: they're considerably less entertaining than floating legal masks, but they provide the serious philosophical framework that makes the floating legal masks possible.

P.P.S. - Yes, I realize the irony of using presuppositional apologetics while writing fiction that requires suspension of disbelief. The difference is that I'm asking you to suspend disbelief temporarily for the sake of entertainment, while secular worldviews ask you to suspend disbelief permanently for the sake of... well, that's rather the question, isn't it?