The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

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 sort of by accid

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 learn - yes

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. Cocks was very ki

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 highly skeptic

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-Marx

My blogging efforts have given me an excuse to read more broadly and expand my understanding of the world. This has been very enriching for me personally, and I hope others can enjoy the content too. But with respect to the public-facing aspect of blogging, I feel inadequate in my understanding since I only began this part of my intellectual journey a few years ago and only in my spare time (which is not much). And I feel even more inadequate in my capacity to organize my thoughts into words in a way that will be meaningful to anyone but myself.  I am not a connoisseur of poetry, but I happened across a stanza from TS Elliott’s Four Quartets that almost perfectly describes my feelings about writing and even my motivation, and offers consolation in my inadequacies compared to much greater intellects who have written on the same topics so much more eloquently in the past. So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—  Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deu

This is a review of the 2020 book History: Forgotten and Remembered by Andrew Zwerneman. In my process of trying to understand what is going on in the world I've written a time or two on the postmodernist / Critical Theory re-framing the study of history to open the door for an anti-Christian and anti-Western worldview. History: Forgotten and Remembered is the positive antidote to the negative I have hitherto dwelt on. Though Zwerneman clearly recognizes the problems - referring to history as "increasingly under siege," and recognizing "this assault" as "a symptom of the declining study of the humanities," the book stays optimistic and provides teachers (and, I'll add, learners like myself) a positive framework of how history should be taught and experienced, and a reminder that the postmodern way is not the only way.  Note: "Postmodern" and "Critical Theory" are my words; I don't think Zwerneman ever references either.