Since the Enlightenment some have felt that reason is primarily about skepticism. Of course skepticism does have great value to the reasonable man. It helps us escape dogmatic slumber. It helps us avoid intellectual faddishness and frauds. Most importantly, it also helps the thinker frame useful questions. Fundamentally, it can induce a sense of intellectual interest or joy in the journey of discovery that would be impossible without a sense of questioning. For all its virtues, skepticism is merely a... Read more

Belief in miracles is ubiquitous in the West, but many Christian academics are shamed faced about their commitment. If God has acted out of His personal will, then it means that not all of the past will be explainable without the knowledge of that Divine will. It might even present an insuperable barrier to understanding exactly how past events occurred. If God used divine power to open the Red Sea, then no scientific account that relies only on natural forces... Read more

William James in the Variety of Religious Experience carefully describes the nature, limitations, and importance of religious experience. At the very least, James argues that religious experience suggests that the materialists are wrong. There is more than matter and energy in the cosmos. Religious experience is of limited use in an apologetic, but of great use in living one’s life. Nobody can crawl inside my mind and know the quality and intensity of my religious experience. No human can know... Read more

It should be obvious to all Christians that Pascal was right. We do have to take the heart into account. I would suggest that just as elegance is valued in a proof of logic, so we can and should value beauty and elegance in a general view of reality. Science itself is not the problem, of course. With all the problems, it has been more a blessing than a curse to mankind. The misuse of science or of the speculations... Read more

The twentieth century loved to speak of “revolutions” . . . even in the area of thought. The outcome was not promising. In the history of ideas, I think it better to think of development as “biological” instead of as revolutionary. Ideas build on each other. In fact, if anything evolves, human thought evolves. The story of intellectual development is less the story of Kuhn-like paradigm shifts, then it is the tale of slow and gradual growth in understanding with... Read more

As C.S. Lewis wrote in his prophetic novel That Hideous Strength we are witnessing the end of man as he has been. On the one hand, we have the antichrist spirit that despises Christianity. Voltaire’s disciples have declined in intellectual rigor from Bertrand Russell to Sam Harris, but have retained the old Enlightenment skeptic’s willingness to substitute forcefulness of expression for argument. More and more of their leaders are willing to advocate profaning religious symbols. The hostility to Evangelical forms... Read more