The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science – theology – with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for [...]
Continue Reading...That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer. I have in mind such questions as: How did everything begin? What are we all here for? What is the point of [...]
Continue Reading...1. Christians need to start using cognitive language and not just faith language. Christians need to use terms relating to knowledge, evidence, reason, learning and thought, in addition to language about a tender heart and about faith. The Bible uses the word “knowledge” more than it does the word “faith”. Christians must become comfortable with the [...]
Continue Reading...The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning, circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secular West. So long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and [...]
Continue Reading...For centuries philosophy has asserted it’s legitimacy by asking and answering questions inherited from the Socratics and pre-Socratics: how to distinguish the real from the unreal, true from false, good from evil. There came a point, however, when philosophers had to confront a simple, painfully undeniable fact: that of the questions which have sustained European [...]
Continue Reading...By Alister McGrath The new atheism is a superb example of a modern metanarrative – a totalizing view of things, locked into the worldview of the Enlightenment. The new atheism wants to take us back to what it portrays as the cool rationalism and sanity of the Enlightenment. Yet it fails to confront even a [...]
Continue Reading...Now assume that there is no God, or immortality of the soul. Now tell me, why should I live righteously and do good deeds, if I am to die entirely on earth? And if that is so, why shouldn’t I (as long as I can rely on my cleverness and agility to avoid being caught [...]
Continue Reading...No thinking person can escape some sort of metaphysics [1]. The question of metaphysics is important and unavoidable — and I think the reason why many people are materialists [2] is that they do not take the metaphysical question seriously enough. [Existing and thinking] is a bit like riding a bicycle. If you just keep [...]
Continue Reading...‘I am Ramandu. But I see that you stare at one another and have not heard this name. And no wonder, for the days when I was a star had ceased long before any of you knew this world, and all the constellations have changed.’ ‘Golly,’ said Edmund under his breath. ‘He’s a retired star.’ [...]
Continue Reading...Christianity does not separate itself from knowledge. In fact historic Christianity, in contrast to modern theology, must bear the weight of believing and teaching that all truth is one. Occasionally some people will ask is it ‘spiritual’ to talk of such things? Are you really considering with the work of the Holy Spirit when dealing [...]
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