Dec 14, 2016 | Epistemology - Trust
In you’re not familiar with it, “Nones” is a term the media has given to those who walk away from religious faith. They are not atheists (only 3% of American are self-professed atheists), but they’re just not into religion. The term comes from the growing number of people in America, especially young people, who when asked for their religious affiliation pick “none” or “none of the above.” There have always been irreligious people, but the startling growth of this demographic has caused much glee in secular circles, and much hand wringing in religious communities. It is also a demographic ripe for study; people want to know why this is happening.
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Dec 9, 2016 | Truth
Eric Metaxas, famous Evangelical author and speaker, went off to college like many Christian kids, naive and ignorant about the environment he would encounter there. He learned about something there called relativism, a concept every Christian parent needs to be familiar with, and needs to guard their kids against. I’ll let him explain what it means:
I first encountered relativism when I went to college at Yale. Before that I had lived in a working-class world where truth was a real concept. In my parents’ world, truth was something noble and beautiful; it was something that people lived and died for, like freedom. To be an enemy of the truth was to be about the worst thing there was. Since Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas—Latin for “Light and Truth”—I was eager to get there so that I could begin learning what truth really was. I was genuinely excited about the idea of searching for it.
But by the time I got there—in the 1980s—Yale had abandoned the outdated notion that truth was something real, something to be sought after and discovered and treasured. That onetime seminary had instead espoused a winking, postmodern attitude, in which the notion of a singular truth had been replaced by the relativistic theory that there are many “truths” . . . which is to say no truths at all.
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Dec 3, 2016 | Epistemology - Trust
I have a feeling that most Christian parents (and the churches they attend) don’t often get into conversation with their kids about epistemology. Since most people have never heard the word before, that’s not surprising. The concept is simple, though the answers often are not. It’s a branch of philosophy that deals with how we come to know things, or the study of knowledge (episteme is one of the Greek words for knowledge).
One of the reasons epistemology is so important in the 21st Century West is that the secular culture’s default epistemology is skepticism. A recent blog post by Sean McDowell reminded me how easy skepticism is in an age where we are flooded with information every day. He starts it this way:
Recently I was speaking to a group of pastors, youth pastors, and other church workers in Idaho. One pastor asked a question that, in my experience, perfectly captures the thinking process of many students today. He said, “My younger brother, a Millennial, is constantly on his cell phone. When I try to talk to him about God, he says that people disagree and so we simply can’t have any confidence at all in our beliefs.” How would you respond? Can we know things or are we lost in a sea of endless information?
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