By: Steve Hays
I'm Glad You Asked!
Contents
1. Epistemology:
(i)
God-Talk
(ii) Divine
Silence
(iii)
Coherence of Theism:
(a)
Divine Attributes
(b)
Trinity
(c)
Incarnation
(iv)
Freudian faith
2. Bible Criticism:
(i)
Miracles
(ii)
Mythology
(iii)
Contradictions
3. Science:
(i)
Creation
(ii) Flood
(iii)
Physicalism
4. Ethics:
(i) Problem
of Evil
(ii) Hell
(iii) Holy
War
(iv)
Original Sin
(v)
Predestination
(vi)
Euthyphro Dilemma
(vii)
Crimes of Christianity
(viii)
Christian Chauvinism
Preface
In Why I Believe,
I presented a personal and positive case for my Christian faith. This essay is
a sequel to that one, for here I field the major objections to Christian
faith—some traditional, others of more modern vintage. But as before, I'm
confining myself to the answers I favor, even though that does not exhaust all
the good answers. Interested readers are
still encouraged to check out the bibliographies in the complementary essay.
I.
Epistemology
1. God-Talk
Both inside and outside the Church there is often felt to be
a peculiar difficulty with religious language.
This apparent problem has both an epistemic and ontological dimension.
At the epistemic level, it is felt that if our knowledge derives from
experience in general, and sensory perception in particular, and if God is not
a sensible object, then whatever we may say or think or believe about God is a
figurative extension of mundane concepts.
At the ontological level, it is felt that if God is in a
class by himself and apart from the creative order, then all our statements
about God are vitiated by a systematic equivocation inasmuch as there is no
longer any common ground between the human subject and divine object of
knowledge.
What are we to say to these considerations? Regarding the
epistemic issue, the first thing to be said is that this assumes a particular
theory of knowledge. So if this is a
problem, it is not a problem peculiar to religious epistemology, but goes back
to the ancient debates between empiricism and rationalism, nominalism and
realism. If you are a Thomist, then this is a problem generated by your chosen
theory of knowledge. But if, say, you
are an Augustinian, then you don't believe that all knowledge derives from the
senses. Abstract objects are objects of knowledge without being perceived by
the senses—at least on an Augustinian theory of knowledge.
