Believing Philosophy

A Guide to Becoming a Christian Philosopher

Dolores G. Morris

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310109549
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Believing Philosophy introduces Christians to philosophy and the tools itprovides believers, helping them understand, articulate, and defend their faith in an age of unbelief.

Philosophy has been a part of Christianity since its earliest days, and theistic philosophy predates Christianity by thousands of years. But Christians today often don't realize or are skeptical of all that philosophy can offer them.

In Part 1, author Dolores G. Morris explains why Christians should read and study philosophy. She begins with a historical overview of Christian philosophy from the church fathers to contemporary philosophers and then introduces the basic resources of philosophical reasoning: the role and aim of reason, distinctions between truth and reason and provability, and learning to read like a philosopher. These chapters address three foundational questions:

• What is philosophy?
• Why should a Christian study philosophy?
• How should a Christian study philosophy?

In Part 2, Morris introduces students to philosophical arguments and questions relevant to Christians. She presents arguments by three key branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and practical philosophy. Building on concepts introduced in Part 1, she explains what philosophical arguments are and how they ought to be evaluated from a philosophical and Christian perspective. The following chapters examine specific questions most pressing for Christians today:

• The problem of evil
• Rationality and faith
• Free will
• Skeptical theism
• The moral argument for the existence of God
• Reformed epistemology

Each chapter introduces the problem, explains Christian responses, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each response, and leaves the final verdict to the reader. Finally, each chapter concludes with a list of recommended further readings.

PART 1

Christian
Philosophy

What, Why, and How?

1

Why Philosophy?

Mamaw was dead, and without a church or anything to anchor me to the faith of my youth, I slid from devout to nominal, and then to something very much less. By the time I left the Marines in 2007 and began college at The Ohio State University, I read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and called myself an atheist. I won’t belabor the story of how I got there, because it is both conventional and boring. A lot of it had to do with a feeling of irrelevance: increasingly, the religious leaders I turned to tended to argue that if you prayed hard enough and believed hard enough, God would reward your faith with earthly riches. But I knew many people who believed and prayed a lot without any riches to show for it.

—J. D. Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance”¹

If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.

—Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion²

It is a story that has become alarmingly familiar: a young Christian, raised in the church, discovers the work of a popular atheistic author with some philosophical training. Typically, this begins with one of the “four horsemen of new atheism”: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, or Richard Dawkins. Before long, this Christian is reading that her belief in God is foolish and irrational—the intellectual equivalent of believing in Zeus, fairies, or a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Dawkins decries belief in God as “a pernicious delusion.”³ Hitchens blithely claims that “the incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries.”⁴ Sam Harris describes religion as “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”⁵ Dennett agrees, writing that “I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.”⁶ The message is clear: belief in God is akin to a particularly dangerous form of mental illness, wholly irrational and utterly harmful to all involved. These are weighty, emotionally charged accusations. Is it any wonder that Dawkins’s goal is so often successful? Many religious readers who open his book, or books like it, do indeed find themselves atheists at the end of their inquiries.

What is happening? Why, after a lifetime in the church, do some Christians find these writings so persuasive? Well, part of what is happening is that inquisitive Christian congregants are discovering philosophy without the help and guidance of the Christian philosophical community. In reading the “new atheists,” they are introduced to the basic ideas of logically structured thought and the critical evaluation of fundamental beliefs. (That is, they are introduced to philosophical thinking.) Because they have had no experience with Christian philosophy, they come to associate careful thinking and rational evaluation with atheism. Perhaps they will talk to their parents and friends about the challenges raised in these arguments; if they are particularly diligent, they may consult their pastors. Unfortunately, unless their parents, friends, or pastors have the conceptual resources fostered by philosophy, they may have a difficult time explaining where and why they disagree with the atheists’ arguments. That they disagree is clear; articulating the reasons for their disagreement can be a substantial challenge. As a result, these intellectually curious Christians conclude that atheism is the thoughtful and intelligent choice and that Christianity is the stuff of blind faith.

In reality, Christianity and the discipline of philosophy have a long, rich, shared history. The apostle Paul makes frequent references to the Greek philosophy of his time; many of the early church fathers were themselves philosophers. For a long time philosophy was, by default, at least theistic, if not explicitly Christian in nature. That is, for quite a lot of the history of philosophy, most philosophers believed in the existence of God and the reality of his creative activity in our world. In the last three centuries, all of that changed. This is not to say that all philosophers ceased believing in God, or even that all Christians abandoned the field of philosophy—not at all! But the general attitude toward the existence of God became increasingly skeptical as the intellectual attitudes of the Enlightenment took hold.⁷ As a result, many Christians today are suspicious of the discipline of philosophy.

Philosophy and the Church

What exactly is philosophy? I will say more about this in chapter 2, for an adequate answer to this question requires more than a brief definition. Still, the word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” and that is as good a place to start as any. The study of philosophy is, or ought to be, the pursuit of wisdom. The method of philosophy is the asking of big questions: Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a God? If so, what is God like? Do people have souls? How should we live? What makes one choice good and another bad? What is a good life, and how can I best achieve it? This is just a small sampling of the questions of philosophy. At the same time, philosophy demands that you do more than merely ask these questions. Instead, philosophical reasoning requires that you spend some time determining not only what you believe but also why you believe it, and whether or not your reasons are good reasons for that belief. Very simply stated, philosophy asks you to think more carefully about what you believe. This is the core of philosophy.

So why would philosophy be good for the Christian church? At the most basic level, it is good for the church to be equipped with believers who know what they believe! It is good for believers to develop the skills of thinking clearly, reading clearly, and working through the reasons they have for the beliefs they hold. In my own life, the study of philosophy absolutely transformed my ability to read Scripture with a careful eye. Furthermore, the long history of Christian philosophical writings provides a rich resource for believers. Many of the doctrines central to Christianity are rooted in the philosophical writings of Augustine, Aquinas, or other early philosophers. At the same time, the last fifty years have seen a tremendous resurgence of Christian philosophers. You do not need to turn to Medieval thinkers to find thoughtful Christians giving careful reflections on core Christian doctrines; such reflections abound today.

Still, it cannot be denied that a great deal of recent philosophical writing is explicitly designed to undermine the Christian faith. (Dawkins wasn’t joking; his aim really is to make atheists out of theists.) The last twenty years have given rise to this new kind of atheistic philosophy—the so-called new atheists referenced above. The newness of the new-atheist movement is largely a matter of style. Where the “old” atheistic philosophers wrote largely for other philosophers, the “new” ones write and speak primarily to a popular audience. Their approach has been quite successful. New atheism sets out to convert philosophically curious religious believers into atheists, and it manages to do so far more often than it should. In response, the church must rise to the challenge—encouraging and equipping philosophically capable, prepared, intellectually resilient believers.

The Antiphilosophical Response

Of course, I am a philosopher. It is perhaps not surprising that I would respond to a problem generated by philosophy with the prescription “more philosophy!” In contrast, a very common response to the worrying trend instigated by the new atheists is to blame philosophy itself. (“That’s what happens when you read worldly philosophy!”) I believe that this is a mistake, and a dangerous one at that. It is a mistake for at least three reasons: it comes from a place of fear, it is almost never effective, and we can do better. What message do we send when we tell people that the answer to their doubts is to stop asking questions? I will tell you what message that sends: it says, “We don’t have the answers. If you must insist on finding them, you will have to look elsewhere.”

To illustrate, consider this online review of The God Delusion:

I had been a Christian for many years in my youth, but began to question things and was told not to seek answers basically. But I was not ok with that and so I set out to educate myself. Long story short I went from Christian to agnostic and finally atheist. This book was wonderful and the last little nudge I needed to complete my transition into the logical and rational world I now live in. Highly recommend this book.⁸

Note the tragic trajectory of this reader’s life. As a longtime believer, she found herself asking some hard questions. Rather than working alongside her to understand and address those questions, her Christian community urged her simply not to think about them. Unwilling or unable to ignore her concerns, she turned to the one community that she knew of that was willing to address them—the new atheists.

Perhaps some of you are thinking something like the following: “Yes, well, let that be a warning to the rest of us! She should not have spent so much time asking hard questions and should have just trusted God. She should have ‘believed harder.’ She replaced faith with philosophy and is now paying the price.” The first thing to note about this response is that it often comes from a place of fear, not faith. The very notion that asking questions will lead a believer away from God rests on the presumption that Christian answers to these questions are not available. This is not faith in the truth of Christianity; it is fear that Christianity won’t hold up to intellectual scrutiny.

The second problem with the antiphilosophical response is that it almost never works; telling a person to ignore her concerns does very little to alleviate those concerns. Here is an analogous story from my own life. In the thirty-fifth week of pregnancy with my first child, I developed preeclampsia, a very serious complication involving, among other things, dangerously high blood pressure. The baby and I both made it through all right, but because there is a risk of recurrence, I was cautious during my second pregnancy. Naturally, when my blood pressure began to rise in the thirty-fifth week of that pregnancy, I raised my concerns with my doctor. She responded by telling me to stop checking my blood pressure. In my doctor’s mind, I was worrying too much, and worrying can increase blood pressure. Far better, she thought, to just stop checking and stop worrying about it! I hope that you can see that this was foolish advice. When my blood pressure readings were normal, I was not worried. When they began to rise, I was worried, but I was worried for a reason. I was worried because I had encountered some troubling evidence; telling me not to worry was essentially telling me to ignore that evidence. This was the wrong response for a lot of reasons, and my daughter was indeed born (early, but healthy) within the week. The Christian concerned with hard questions has already encountered some troubling evidence; telling her to stop thinking about that evidence is unwise and ineffective.

What kind of evidence am I referring to here? Perhaps she has begun to worry about the prevalence of evil and suffering in this world, the spiritual fate of those born into cultures with little knowledge of Christianity, or how it can be true that God is in control and yet people have free will. In short, perhaps she has begun to grapple with a philosophical question. Each of these questions brings with it some worrying piece of evidence: this world contains a great deal of suffering and evil; a lot of people live without access to or knowledge of the gospel; the concept of freedom is difficult to understand, particularly in light of the sovereignty of God. The Christian who has encountered and been moved by this evidence is unlikely simply to forget about it.

Fortunately, the third problem with the antiphilosophical attitude under discussion is one that ought to give us hope: we can do better! We can do better than to tell our fellow Christians not to worry about intellectual challenges to their faith; we can do better than to tell them to avoid philosophy. Instead, we can work with them and alongside them to work through these questions in ways that will strengthen their faith and our own. We can choose to engage these challenges together, seeking insight and guidance from our shared experiences, from the Bible, from the church fathers, and from a source that is, I think, currently neglected in the church worldwide: the vast, rich network of Christian philosophers.

The Case of J. D. Vance

We can see the spiritual benefits of philosophical study by turning to the story of author J. D. Vance, quoted in the epigraph above. Vance’s life followed a path similar to the one described at the beginning of the chapter, but where I have characterized this trend as “alarmingly common,” Vance decries his experience as “both conventional and boring.” We can learn a lot from Vance’s account, for his path did not end in atheism. Instead, he persisted in the pursuit of truth, continuing to examine what he believed, why he believed it, and whether or not those beliefs seemed to match the world as he knew it. On this last question, Vance describes readin...