Faith Interface

Advice to Christian Philosophers - Dr Alvin Plantinga

The Christian philosophical community need not devote all of its efforts to attempting to refute opposing claims and or to arguing for its own claims, in each case from premises accepted by the bulk of the philosophical community at large. It ought to do this, indeed, but it ought to do more. For if it [...]

Materialism and Its Discontents

By Keith Ward.
 
The clear facts of consciously valued experience and of freely chosen purpose, the intelligibility and elegance of the deep structure of the physical world, the visions of transcendent value in art, the categorical demands of duty and of the search for truth, and the testimony of so many to a felt power making [...]

The Intellectual Option of Theism

It is possible to have insight into the world as a realm in which goodness, beauty and truth exist as ideals to be followed, though self-will makes their pursuit difficult. Human experience may show traces of such ideals, in the intelligibility and beauty of nature, in the sense of human significance and dignity, in the [...]

The God Hypothesis - Keith Ward

The God Hypothesis is a construct of reason that claims to have explanatory power in terms of ultimate necessity, ultimate causative power, and ultimate value. The God Hypothesis is put forward as the most compelling integrating postulate that provides a rational interpretive scheme for all diverse forms of human experience, and that justifies belief, when [...]

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

By Douglas Groothuis
Blaise Pascal was many things - a theological controversialist, a superb French stylist, an inventor, a scientist, and a mathematician. But he is most known for being a philosopher of the heart. “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing; we know this in countless ways,” he wrote in Pensées (or Thoughts, 1670), [...]

Can Atheists Trust Their Own Thinking?

Darwin expressed this doubt in a letter to William Graham, July 3rd, 1881, when he wrote:

“With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of [...]

Human - All Too Human

Human, All Too Human is a three-part 1999 documentary television series produced by the BBC. It follows the lives of three prominent philosophers; Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The theme of this documentary revolves heavily around the school of philosophical thought known as existentialism, although the term had not been coined at the [...]

The Influence of Jerusalem and Athens on Christianity

Christianity in the East and the West formed cultures that had roots both in the classical world of Greece and Rome and in the faiths of Jerusalem, Christianity and (less comfortably) Judaism. This is true in the Christian West, where both Greek and Jewish thought shaped the architectural ideas that produced the cathedrals of Paris. [...]

Why is God Hidden? (Pascal)

God has willed to redeem men and to open salvation to those who seek it. But men render themselves so unworthy of it that it is right that God should refuse to some, because of their obduracy, what He grants others from a compassion which is not due to them. If He had willed to [...]

A Philosopher Without Gods - Louise Antony