The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

This blog takes its name from a work by John Locke defending Christianity from the misuse of reason alone without the requisite foundation in Revelation (see   my review  of The Reasonableness of Christianity ). Thus, it is disheartening to see various writers in recent years mischaracterizing John Locke as one of those Enlightenment Rationalists who helped form Modernity by elevating reason to a pedestal and rejecting religion from the public discourse.  This supposed legacy of John Locke has been portrayed as incredibly destructive or as foundational to the American way. On the negative side, in an article at VoegelinView, Henry George discusses the “dark paths we can travel when we revere reason to the exclusion of all other moral influences,” asserting that “Liberals from Locke to Rawls hailed reason alone as the means by which we can ascertain the correct answers on how to live.” George cites Yoram Hazony who also associates of Locke with the nihilism of “reas...

I should really call this the "silver lining" of hypocrisy, rather than a defense of hypocrisy itself. But it is true that I am mildly encouraged by the fact that we live in a society that includes outrageous hypocrites. Let my explain by illustrating the hypothetical alternatives. As I see it, there are two.  The first hypothetical hypocrisy-free society is a celestial world in which everyone lives transparently virtuous lives, with Truth understood and every action consistent with that Truth. I hope that you and I will find ourselves in such a society after the Resurrection, thanks to the grace of Christ. But given the nature of mortality I would suggest that my second hypothetical is more plausible. That second alternative to hypocrisy is world of complete relativity. In that world, morality is an aesthetic preference that varies from person to person based on nothing more than internal tastes and desires.  From this perspective, I prefer to see a state of affairs where hy...

It can be difficult for people with different religious beliefs to have rational discussions about their faith. For one, it is natural and human to get emotional when deeply-held beliefs are challenged. Additionally, we may feel that holding true beliefs is a prerequisite for salvation. When the stakes of our rhetoric seem this high, it may be tempting to take shortcuts in our efforts at persuasion. But if we argue from false premises we are not following the example of Christ, and if we argue from an incomplete understanding our efforts will likely backfire.  Previously , I wrote about a very bad example of faith-related disagreement in which an Evangelical pastor grossly mischaracterized the beliefs of my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter "the Church"), in a video titled “How to Talk to a Mormon.” Today I want to highlight a very good example of inter-faith dialogue. Well, actually both of these cases are Evangelicals writing about the Chu...

A meeting of the Royal Society in London This discussion was originally included as part of  Physicalism and Transcendence , but it made more sense to pull it out as a separate post. Physicalism, similar to materialism, is the belief that the physical world is all there is. As in, there can be no transcendent religious experience, no eternal soul, no God, no afterlife. Turning a blind eye to the fact that half of all Americans have had a religious or mystical experience, academia has adopted physicalism as the dominant paradigm for at least 100 years or so. That attitude has trickled down through the university and education systems into the rest of society, where faith has been in steep decline in recent generations. The rise of physicalism among scholars English historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) had an interesting hypothesis for how physicalism rose to prominence among scientists and scholars. He suggests in  Christianity and History  (1949) 1 , that it was so...

This is a post about science and religion. As someone who believes in Jesus Christ and a scientist, I am concerned about the physicalist tendencies of the modern scientific world. Physicalism , the belief that the physical world we can measure and understand through science is the only reality, is the dominant worldview of academics, especially in the hard sciences. Physicalism explicitly denies any spiritual reality that transcends the material world.  Religious experience is extremely common. By one measure, about half the US population claims to have had a religious or mystical experience. Academically minded people generally ignore or dismiss this extremely common phenomenon, presumably because it doesn’t fit their scientific worldview. But how scientific is it, really, to dismiss a whole aspect of human experience, a whole field of data points, just because you don’t like the data? A more reasonable approach would treat religious experiences as data from which we can le...

In the last post I addressed dysgenics as presented by Edward Dutton in his most recent book, Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West . He argued that reduced evolutionary selection pressures since the late 1800s has weakened average cognitive ability, resulting in lower fitness individuals who push for self-destructive societal beliefs and behaviors. I found no evidence for the central claim that intelligence has been in decline since the Industrial Revolution, and dismissed his argument. Here I will try to address a more reasonable framing of the dysgenics hypothesis. I am learning as I go from a fairly naïve position, so please let me know if my ideas have already been debunked elsewhere, or discussed in greater detail previously. My investigation of Dutton was in response to a  VoegelinView  article and  Orthosphere  follow-up essay by Dr. Richard Cocks, both of which treated Dutton's ideas as scientifically credible. Despite my difference of opinion, Dr. Co...

I have in my head a framework for a multi-post series on rationality and Christianity, building in part on insights from a couple of books I am reading, including  Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop (2020) (I commented on his refreshing historical approach in my last post ) and Christianity and History by Herbert Butterfield (1949). But my time is short and I get distracted. But this is at least tangentially related. Earlier this week a book recommendation came up on Amazon for a book with the provocative title  Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West , by Edward Dutton. The cover was a picture of a woman being burned at the stake with flames rising all around her. My wife saw this recommendation come up and jokingly expressed some concern about what I must have been reading that would prompt such a suggestion. She read the overview on Amazon out of curiosity. From the summary, we agreed with Dutton that there has been a decline in our culture, but we were highl...

I. 8 months ago I wrote in my post The Return of Civilization that I was looking forward to reading Larry Siedentop's book Inventing the Individual.  I was excited about it because it looked like a return to old times when academics were able to talk about how values and beliefs impacted historical developments. [C'mon man! Of course beliefs and values will impact societies! Why are we pretending otherwise?] Well, I finally got around to starting Inventing the Individual , and so far it has not disappointed. I will surely reference this book in future posts, but today I will just share a couple of thoughts from the Prologue, in which Siedentop expresses his philosophy of history and motivations for writing this book.  First of all, Siedentop echoes Andrew Zwerneman's concerns about the loss of a narrative origin story for the West, and connects it with a loss of unity and morality. This loss of narrative and belief in historiography is, of course, a result of the neo-Ma...