Category: Faith and Reason
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Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method
August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of…
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Life in Time
A life in time is a paltry substitute for eternal life, but at least we know we are alive, and in time, whereas we don't know much if anything about eternal life. On rare occasions, however, some of us catch a glimpse of something that seems to fits the description. These occasional glimpses fuel a…
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Étienne Gilson on the Jewish Philosophers He Knew
Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) writing in 1962 about his experiences as a student at the Sorbonne circa 1900: . . . instead of resorting to philosophy for a better understanding of their religious faith, as Christian philosophers do, the Jews I have known have used philosophy to liberate themselves from their religion. Christians philosophize to identify…
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Athens and Jerusalem, Disagreement and Dogmatism: The Case of Gilson
Elliot in a comment from an earlier thread writes, . . . I mentioned negligence about the truth. Something similar seems to be the case regarding reasons and arguments. Folks might be interested in them (and even in weak ones) if they support a belief already held. But the same folks might turn away from…
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Christianity and Intelligibility: A Response to Flood
Anthony Flood writes, Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word. Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard,…
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The Sun Also Rises: On Solar and Christian Belief
A reader sends us to an article that begins like this: The need for a return to God is clearly evident in today’s deranged and dysfunctional world. It is a need, exceeding all others, that must be fulfilled in order to keep enemies of God from interfering with human life. And then a little later…
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Faith: Life-Enhancing Only if True?
In July of 2022 I published a post entitled Faith's Immanent Value. Here are the opening paragraphs slightly redacted: Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably. My question is…
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Is Belief in God Rationally Required? Response to a Critic
S. L. writes, I will just tell you three quick things about myself in an effort to get your kind response to my question. 1. I am a 70-year-old "evangelical", conservative (in every way), protestant, Christian believer. I put evangelical in quotes because I don't subscribe to all ideas that fit under the rubric of…
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Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man
Substack latest.
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God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him." I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In…
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Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion
Substack latest. One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works…
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Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method
Top o' the Stack. August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at…