categoryFaith + ReasonFaith and/or Reason
The Paper Chase
CS Lewis on the Incompatibility of Reason, Science, and Materialism
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound — a proof that there are no such things as proofs — which is nonsense.
Rational Faith
Why believe in God? If God exists, why doesn’t he eliminate suffering and evil? Does evolution disprove Christianity? Can religion be explained by cognitive science? People have grappled for ages with these kinds of questions. And many in today’s academic world find Christian belief untenable. But renowned philosopher Stephen Davis argues that belief in God is indeed a rational and intellectually sound endeavor. Drawing on a lifetime of rigorous reflection and critical thinking, he explores perennial and contemporary challenges to Christian faith. Davis appraises objections fairly and openly, offering thoughtful approaches to common intellectual problems. Real questions warrant reasonable responses. Examine for yourself the rationality of the Christian faith.
Paul Tillich on Doubt as an Element of Faith
The affirmation that Jesus is the Christ is an act of faith and consequently of daring courage. It is not an arbitrary leap into darkness but a decision in which elements of immediate participation and therefore certitude are mixed with elements of strangeness and therefore incertitude and doubt. But doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. Therefore, there is no faith without risk . The risk of faith is that it could affirm a wrong symbol of ultimate concern, a symbol which does not really express ultimacy (as, e.g., Dionysus or one’s nation). But this risk lies in quite a different dimension from the risk of accepting uncertain historical facts. It is wrong, therefore, to consider the risk concerning uncertain historical facts as part of the risk of faith. The risk of faith is existential; it concerns the totaliy of our being, while the risk of historical judgments is theoretical and open to permanent scientific correction. Here are two different dimensions which should never be confused. A wrong faith can destroy the meaning of one’s life; a wrong historical judgment cannot. It is misleading, therefore, to use the word “risk” for both dimensions in the same sense.
Fool’s Talk
In our post-Christian context, public life has become markedly more secular and private life infinitely more diverse. Yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. Most of these methods assume that people are open, interested and needy for spiritual insight when increasingly most people are not. Our urgent need, then, is the capacity to persuade―to make a convincing case for the gospel to people who are not interested in it. In his magnum opus, Os Guinness offers a comprehensive presentation of the art and power of creative persuasion. Christians have often relied on proclaiming and preaching, protesting and picketing. But we are strikingly weak in persuasion―the ability to talk to people who are closed to what we are saying. Actual persuasion requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Guinness notes, “Jesus never spoke to two people the same way, and neither should we.” Following the tradition of Erasmus, Pascal, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge and Peter Berger, Guinness demonstrates how apologetic persuasion requires both the rational and the imaginative. Persuasion is subversive, turning the tables on listeners’ assumptions to surprise them with signals of transcendence and the credibility of the gospel. This book is the fruit of forty years of thinking, honed in countless talks and discussions at many of the leading universities and intellectual centers of the world. Discover afresh the persuasive power of Christian witness from one of the leading apologists and thinkers of our era.
The Allure of Gentleness
The revered Christian author whose bestselling classics include The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines provides a new model for how we can present the Christian faith to others. When Christians share their faith, they often appeal to reason, logic, and the truth of doctrine. But these tactics often are not effective. A better approach to spread Christ’s word, Dallas Willard suggests, is to use the example of our own lives. To demonstrate Jesus’s message, we must be transformed people living out a life reflective of Jesus himself, a life of love, humility, and gentleness. This beautiful model of life — this allure of gentleness — Willard argues, is the foundation for making the most compelling argument for Christianity, one that will convince others that there is something special about Christianity and the Jesus we follow.
Letting Others Help You Find the Way
Gregory Alan Thornbury relates the crucial role for his faith of a responsible Christian thinker: [Carl F. H.] Henry helped secure my faith because he was doing more than responding tit-for-tat to higher critics of the Bible’s historical reliability. Henry did that, but he went one step further: He brought philosophical gravitas … His focus was broad. He addressed epistemology — how we can know the truth, which was my primary concern as an undergraduate philosophy student. I had come within a whisker of losing my faith. But because Henry was a philosopher defending biblical authority, I rallied. ¶ I had come within a whisker of losing my faith. But because Henry was a philosopher defending biblical authority, I rallied. ¶ Humanly speaking, had it not been for … the theologian with a titanic brain and a journalist’s pen, I could have gone the other way. Henry showed me how to be both a scholar and a follower of Jesus. From that moment in my undergraduate days, I covenanted with God to help people like the 18-year-old version of myself — people who are on the boundary of leaving the church, and are looking for just one good reason to stay.
True Paradox
How do we explain human consciousness? Where do we get our sense of beauty? Why do we recoil at suffering? Why do we have moral codes that none of us can meet? Why do we yearn for justice, yet seem incapable of establishing it? Any philosophy or worldview must make sense of the world as we actually experience it. We need to explain how we can discern qualities such as beauty and evil and account for our practices of morality and law. The complexity of the contemporary world is sometimes seen as an embarrassment for Christianity. But law professor David Skeel makes a fresh case for the plausibility and explanatory power of Christianity. The Christian faith offers plausible explanations for the central puzzles of our existence, such as our capacity for idea-making, our experience of beauty and suffering, and our inability to create a just social order. When compared with materialism or other sets of beliefs, Christianity provides a more comprehensive framework for understanding human life as we actually live it. We need not deny the complexities of life as we experience it. But the paradoxes of our existence can lead us to the possibility that the existence of God could make sense of it all.
True Reason
Today’s New Atheists proclaim themselves our culture’s party of reason. It is a claim they cannot sustain. Reason is the New Atheists’ weakness, not their strength and in fact, the Christian faith is a far better place to look for True Reason. In sixteen carefully constructed essays by more than a dozen Christian thinkers including William Lane Craig, Sean McDowell, and Timothy McGrew,True Reason unmasks the frequent irrationality displayed by leading atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. The authors go on to show the great extent to which the Christian faith has historically supported sound reasoning, and that Christian thinkers, past and present, have demonstrated real excellence in reasoned, rational thinking. Making their case accessible to the first-time inquirer as well as the serious student, this top-flight team of writers presents a sound defense and a strong introduction to the true reason uniquely found in Christianity. This paperback edition has been revised and contains additional chapters not included in the first (eBook) edition.
Sincerity
It is not easy to speak the truth; it is less easy still to speak the truth in love, that is, to be sincere. For, as I understand them, sincerity and the speaking of the truth in love are almost equivalents. Some men speak the truth and are rude. Others speak the truth and are blunt. Others speak the truth and are frank. The sincere speak the truth not with rudeness, not with bluntness, not in frankness, but in love. There is no sincerity except that which springs at once from a love of truth and from brotherly love. Sincerity does not exist apart from charity. Love of truth untempered by love for man is a harsh mistress, apt to scold and quarrel, effecting less for all her scolding than sincerity effects by a smile. ~ An Excerpt
JP Moreland on the Church in the West and the Secular Elite
Loving God with Your Mind
Over the past twenty-five years, no one has done more than J. P. Moreland to equip Christians to love God with their minds. In his work as a Christian philosopher, scholar, and apologist, he has influenced thousands of students, written groundbreaking books, and taught multitudes of Christians to defend their faith. In honor of Moreland’s quarter of a century of ministry, general editors Paul M. Gould and Richard Brian Davis have assembled a team of friends and colleagues to celebrate his work. In three major parts devoted to philosophy, apologetics, and spiritual formation, scholars such as Stewart Goetz, Paul Copan, Douglas Groothuis, Scott Rae, and Klaus Issler interact with Moreland’s thought and make their own contributions to these important subjects. Moreland concludes the volume with his own essay, “Reflections on the Journey Ahead.” ~ Publisher’s Description
The Boob Tube for Brooders
Recently a number of philosophically arresting moments have managed to insert themselves into the television landscape. True to form, Ronald D. Moore and company continue to address contemporary political, philosophical, and religious questions in the alternate world of Caprica, territory he brilliantly charted in his groundbreaking Battlestar Galactica. If the pilot is any indication, Caprica promises to explore even more pointedly themes of religious and ethnic tolerance, terrorism, technology, and the nature of the soul. ABC’s FlashForward, clearly aimed at continuing the legacy of Lost and retaining its audience, has somewhat disappointed so far, but has nonetheless woven several provocative existential questions into its narrative, including one powerful Sartrean moment in particular. On the comedic front, NBC’s Community had the temerity to devote an episode to whether humanity is intrinsically good or evil, and did so superbly. I’ll admit to being prone to vegging in front of the tube even when the viewing is less cerebral, but a couple of these moments had me off the couch cheering for the writers.
Dr. Trevor on Reason Supplanting Dogma
We begin to perceive, too, what a powerful lever was afforded by the dualism of Faith and Reason for emancipating the human intellect from the thralldom of Ecclesiasticism; for, leaving out of consideration the legitimacy of the instrument, we cannot deny its unrivaled potency. Never was there a more conspicuous instance of the effectiveness of the ‘Divide et impera’ method. The dogmas of the Church, with their manifold accretions of ignorance and superstition, were found to have lost at least half of their authority and thereby half of the terrorism they had long exercised over humanity. We cannot, I think, feel surprised that the Church from her standpoint of exclusiveness and infallibility should have hurled her anathemas against the authors and propagators of these opinions. Keenness of insight far less prompt than that which has always characterized Romanism might have easily discerned the issue involved in Twofold Truth. It clearly undermined her own position as the divine and sole accredited source of all truth. The verities she chose to stamp with her own brand were to have no longer the exclusive monopoly hitherto assigned them. Philosophy as a rival trader and bidder for the patronage of humanity set up a store of her own, with her own special commodities, authenticated by her own mark, and trader-like did not scruple to boast the superiority of her goods in certain respects to those retailed by the Church. Whatever other effects might attend this rivalry, at least there was opposition — rudimentary free-trade in human dogmas and opinions. A new condition of human liberty was established, which if not destined to bear much fruit for the present was full of promise for the distant future.
Unapologetic
Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the “new atheist” crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford’s crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made. ~ Product Description
Appeals to Motive
Debating Christian Theism
Comprising groundbreaking dialogues by many of the most prominent scholars in Christian apologetics and the philosophy of religion, this volume offers a definitive treatment of central questions of Christian faith. The essays are ecumenical and broadly Christian, in the spirit of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and feature lucid and up-to-date material designed to engage readers in contemporary theistic and Christian issues. Beginning with dialogues about God’s existence and the coherence of theism and then moving beyond generic theism to address significant debates over such specifically Christian doctrines as the Trinity and the resurrection of Jesus, Debating Christian Theism provides an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to understand the current debates in Christian theology. ~ Publisher’s Description
Janelle Aijian on Christian Doubt
For Pascal the first rule of human thought or behavior is that we are not what we were meant to be. God did not create us to live lives shrouded by doubt, but sin has distorted even the faculties that give us knowledge. That means that understanding who I am according to the Christian story means understanding that I am, fundamentally, fallible. I know that my desires can distort the way I see the world. I know that my reason can become prideful and dogmatic, and lead me into error. So for Pascal, and here he echoes Augustine, doubting myself is sometimes just good common sense. It’s thinking rightly about my own limitations in light of the distorting effects of sin.
The Wisdom of the Christian Faith
Although typically separated, philosophy and New Testament theology are mutually beneficial for the understanding of the distinctive wisdom that guides Christian thought and life. The Wisdom of the Christian Faith fills a major gap in the literature on the philosophy of religion. It is the first book on the philosophy of religion to be authored entirely by philosophers while directly engaging themes of wisdom in the Christian tradition. The book consists of all new essays, with contributions from John Cottingham, Paul Gooch, Gordon Graham, John Hare, Michael T. McFall, Paul K. Moser, Andrew Pinsent, Robert Roberts, Charles Taliaferro, William Wainwright, Jerry Walls, Sylvia Walsh, Paul Weithman, and Merold Westphal.
Faith, Rationality and the Passions
Faith, Rationality and the Passions presents a fresh examination of the relation of religious faith, philosophical rationality and the passions, by bringing together the insights of leading scholars in philosophy, theology, history of science, psychology and neuroscience. The book re-examines some notable pre-modern accounts of the relation of passion, reason and faith, and from there goes on to overturn the widely-held presumption that it was the Enlightenment that was responsible for creating a gulf between reason and passion. Contributors reveal that the later creation of a stereotype of “Enlightenment reason” obscured the manifold differences and riches of thinking in a period in which ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ were viewed as significant, positive forces with which reason had to do, and ‘emotions’ were yet to be invented. Presenting innovative research on several fronts, the book argues that the separation between reason and passion is more truly the effect of the invention of the category of ‘emotion’ in the latter part of the 19th century, and contributions outline its striking difference from classic ideas of passion. In formulating this new approach, the book brings together the work of contemporary philosophers, theologians and scientists who creatively collaborate in their efforts to seek a new integration of belief, reason and ‘emotion’. ~ Back Cover
Who Made God?
If you have been looking for a thoughtful, cogent and accessible counterpoint to the recent flurry of publications by the so-called New Atheists, you need look no further than Edgar Andrews’ Who Made God?. Rather than offering an ad hoc response to the assertions made by Richard Dawkins and the like, Dr. Andrews instead asks us to consider a different way in to the conversation to approach belief in the biblical God as a thesis in and of itself, one that is worthy of our thoughtful consideration. He asks us to apply the methodology of hypothesis to the question of God to see how it fits and, in fact, it proves to fit remarkably well. With great clarity and rousing humour, Dr. Andrews applies the thesis of God to questions like the problem of time, the nature of humanity and the question of morality and demonstrates how belief in God has both simple elegance and far-reaching explanatory power. ~ Michael Haykin
Come Let Us Reason
Come Let Us Reason is the third book in a series on modern Christian apologetics that began with the popular Passionate Conviction and Contending with Christianity’s Critics. The nineteen essays here raise classical philosophical questions in fresh ways, address contemporary challenges for the church, and will deepen the thinking of the next generation of apologists. Packed with dynamic topical discussions and informed by the latest scholarship, the book’s major sections are: Apologetics, Culture, and the Kingdom of God; The God Question; The Gospels and the Historical Jesus; Ancient Israel and Other Religions; Christian Uniqueness and the World’s Religions. Contributors include J. P. Moreland (“Four Degrees of Postmodernism”), William Lane Craig (“Objections So Bad That I Couldn’t Have Made Them Up”), Gary R. Habermas (“How to Respond When God Gives You the Silent Treatment”), Craig Keener (“Gospel Truth: The Historical Reliability of the Gospels”), and Paul Copan (“Does the Old Testament Endorse Slavery?”).
Twofold Truth
This is a long but exceptionally eloquent and learned dialogue between a group of thoughtful friends in the late 19th century. Dr. Trevor poses the question “whether what is demonstrably true in one subject or from one point of view can be false in another or from a different standpoint?” Their dialogue bookends Trevor’s formal paper, where he argues that whatever may be the case in reality, at least within our own deliberations, “we cannot without the most gratuitous mental suicide allow the subjective co-existence of antagonistic convictions both claiming to be true at the same time”. Trevor begins by noting the severe limits of our knowledge. “The thinker rightly regards himself and his knowledge as a small islet in the immeasurable ocean of the unknown.” He unsparingly traces a history of the ecclesiastic autocracy of theological dogma until reason got its foot in the door and began an insurrection, asserting itself against the “Roman” church as the singular arbiter of truth. Nonetheless, he argues, the phenomenon of competing considerations is not just a byproduct of religious authority, but rather an inescapable aspect of being human, coming at us from many angles: “the Known and the Unknown, individual man and collective humanity, Intellect and Emotion”. Trevor therefore commends the thinker who has “double vision”, the ability to see and integrate various sources of evidence, who is always reticent and reflective, even in conviction. Though it requires treading through some rather dense prose, the discussion of these “Christian skeptics” is a feast of language and thought. At times it captures the spirit of Afterall.net better than I ever could have in my own words. ~ Nate
Moral Apologetics for Contemporary Christians
Have Christians grown accustomed to those who defame the Church? Whether it’s a best-selling author who claims “religion poisons everything” or an atheist comedian whose punch lines aren’t hassled by the burden of proof, foes of the faith continue to declare Christianity morally deficient without much resistance. In Moral Apologetics for Contemporary Christians, Mark Coppenger mixes compelling references — from classic philosophers to modern entertainers — to reasonably push back against both harsh critics and less intense cultural relativists, contending that Christianity is morally superior to its competitors as well as true. Coppenger doesn’t avoid uncomfortable realities like the misbehavior of many Christians and false teachers, but he sets the book’s course in defense of his faith with evidence that a Christian approach to life makes people and societies flourish, while those who turn their backs on genuine Christianity are more liable to behave wickedly. ~ Book Description