Jul 9, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
The Killing of History needs to be read by every Christian who cares about defending our faith in a hostile secular culture. This from the Amazon introduction tells us why:
For 2,500 years, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, historians have sought to record the truth about the past. Today, however, the discipline is suffering a potentially lethal attack from the rise to prominence of an array of French-inspired literary and social theories, each of which denies that truth and knowledge about the past are possible. These theories claim the central point on which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction between history and myth or between history and fiction.
If truth and knowledge about the past are not possible, then Christianity is not possible. Christianity is rooted in historical claims, but just as important as these claims are is the assumption that underlies them, that we can have real, objective historical knowledge. As Christians we claim we can know what happened in the past, even thousands of years in the past, with a reasonable degree of certainty. While our knowledge of the past is never exhaustive, it is real, and on it we can depend. Not so, claim these theorists.
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May 29, 2017 | Culture, Epistemology - Trust
Given I’m a fan of popular culture, and a student of it’s influence on, and reflection of, the worldview of the people in that culture, I was very eager to read a piece titled Questioning the Gods: How TV’s Tackling Belief and Religion. The article perfectly captures a certain epistemology that is at the heart of how people understand the world in our secular, post-modern relativist culture.
When Keeping Your Kids Christian gets published, you will see that I’m a big fan of identifying assumptions within the culture, in discussions with others, and in our own thinking. Unexamined assumptions are an epidemic today. While everyone knows what assumptions are, most people don’t think they have any! Many Christians think this way too. But once we learn to question assumptions, many things become clear that once seemed opaque. As we uncover hidden assumptions we clarify thoughts and arguments to see if the logic holds up under scrutiny.
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May 23, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
In researching, reading, and thinking about writing a book about keeping my kids Christian, I was kind of surprised to discover how important questions of epistemology began to emerge. I even decided to write an entire chapter on epistemology—in a book on raising kids! I can understand why a lot of Christians would think that’s a bit nutty, in many cases because they wouldn’t even know what epistemology is. I’m hoping in some small way that my book might help change that. Every Christian in our postmodern, relativistic, secular age needs to know not only what epistemology is, but how important are the implications for their faith.
Simply, epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, and it has been vigorously debated among philosophers in Western civilization since at least Rene Descartes (1596-1650). The reason religious faith is so problematic in the modern West is because skepticism about metaphysical ideas and historical facts is the default epistemology of the culture. Which is why I was so surprised when I saw an article at the reliably liberal and secular NPR website titled, “Skepticism about Skepticism.” I instantly thought of a quote by C.S. Lewis in his book Christian Reflections (p. 164) (more…)
Feb 5, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
On a recent trip home to see family and friends, I got into interesting conversations with two gentlemen who are self-described agnostics. I realized something as I thought about these conversations. My interlocutors seemed to believe they could not know the religious stuff I was talking about with any certainty, so why bother with it at all. As we talked it hit me: Their objection to Christianity is rooted in epistemology! They probably wouldn’t even know the word, but there is it nonetheless.
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Feb 3, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
In my last post, I defined faith, correctly, as trust based on adequate evidence, contrasting it with our secular, postmodern culture’s definition as what you need when there isn’t enough evidence. Big difference. In this post I will take a brief look at how we experience faith and doubt in daily life, and in our relationship with God. While the objects are different, the nature of the thing remains the same. Religious “faith” and everyday “faith” are the same because absolute certainty doesn’t exist, and we must act, or not, based evidence presented to us.
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Jan 31, 2017 | Epistemology - Trust
Sociologist Peter Berger has been an influential thinker and writer in my development as a Christian apologist. I have an entire chapter in my book on plausibility, something rare in apologetics circles, inspired by his books The Sacred Canopy and The Social Construction of Reality. I heard of a more recent book (those are from the 60’s) of Berger’s from the great Albert Mohler in his excellent Thinking in Public podcast. The book, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic, has some excellent insights, but it’s also the kind of book I often want to throw against the wall.
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