The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I enjoy writing in this blog because it gives me a chance to learn about topics that fascinate me - including sociology and history, especially as it relates to religion. But I readily admit that I am no expert, just learning as I go. Oddly, and sadly, I get the impression that all the insights I am gaining were at one time common knowledge and simple common sense, but have been obscured over the last 50 years or so.  For example, in my post on National Conservatism I wrote about the Christian origins of classical liberalism and Western prosperity, something I read about recently in a book by Larry Siedentop that was self-consciously going against the grain of modern scholarship - “to say the least, not fashionable,” as he wrote in the prologue. Here is my summary of the insight, from my previous post :  Christ taught us 2000 years ago that we are all children of God, and therefore spiritual brothers and sisters, no matter what family we come from, what gender, what degree of ...

I’ve been following Kyle Beshears’ Substack  where he is posting chapters of an academic book he is working on about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for a mainstream Christian audience. For some reason I find this kind of thing fascinating, like a chimpanzee might feel about reading Jane Goodall’s notes. As I’ve written before , Kyle Beshears has a deep understanding of his subject and reports it straight, to his great credit. In this post I will comment on his recent chapter, “Where did the Book of Mormon come from?” As with precious chapters, it is very respectful and gets the facts straight. I just want to briefly quibble with his summation of the state of the evidence for the Book of Mormon.  Today, the LDS Church maintains that the Book of Mormon represents ancient history, not merely theology. For this reason, corroborating evidence for or against its historicity has been the focus of many LDS apologists and skeptics seeking to verify or disapprove its a...

I recently read Yoram Hazony's book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery . While I disagree with the author's "National Conservatism" model for government and I question some of his history and theory, it was a book full of food for thought. There are some items that were not core aspects of the book but are worthy of some analysis. One of these items is Hazony's comments on epistemology, or how to identify truth. Remember that much of the book was a diatribe against rationalism and rationalists like John Locke that attempt to use reason to determine truth. (Hazony mistakenly and repeatedly accuses Locke of relying on "reason alone.") Given Hazony's fervent stance against rationalism, how does he propose that we determine what is true and good? Here is a quote from the book (my own transcript taken from the audiobook): We can say that a scheme of ideas is true and that it describes reality if it permits us to recognize the most significant causes operative...

With apologies, this post gets a little more into politics than past posts. I’ve always considered myself a conservative, but the terms liberal and conservative in American politics are becoming more and more confusing. In a recent back and forth discussion of dysgenics, Richard Cocks referred to me as a “liberal Christian” for objecting to the dehumanization of political opponents. I do in fact see myself as a “ classical liberal ,” which is probably what he was referring to, but I couldn’t help feeling that he was using the term as a pejorative. I also read this as part of a broader movement to expel the “classical liberal” conservatives like me from a new harder-hitting 21st century conservatism. In the new version of conservatism, the goal isn’t individual freedom and limiting the scope of government per se , but rather to obtain and use government power to grab back what has been lost in the culture wars, including the status of family and religion. At the heart of this movem...

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...