Engaging with the world’s leading atheists and skeptics can have an impact on your own beliefs. How so? Let’s ask Justin Brierley! Back from across the pond, our favorite British radio host and atheist whisperer describes how repeated run-ins with Richard Dawkins and other prominent skeptics have affected his faith. Plus Christians indulge in fake news and Orthodox Jews indulge in chicken swinging. Which is worse? We can’t say. On the podcast!
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Good to hear Justin back on the Podcast. There were so many interesting parts of the conversation.
1. I think Tolkien belongs among that group of Christian intellectuals if only for his Christianity as the true myth argument, which was instrumental in Lewis’s conversion.
2. I have always had a mixed relationship with apologetics. I grew up in a Fundamentalist leaning church and apologetics there meant Ken Ham and such. That put a pour taste in my mouth for the term. It came to mean something equivalent to the mental gymnastics I must do to maintain my faith. Being introduced to things like “Unbelievable” has helped to redeem the concept but even now I only have a limited taste for such arguments. (Though I am currently reading both “Mere Christianity” and “Orthodoxy.”)
3. In apologetics, the line of thought that Phil has mentioned before (and that Chesterton opens with in “Orthodoxy”) that materialism provides a complete answer to questions that have been significantly shrunk in their scope is the most compelling to me. Though I would never call it convincing. I simply struggle to swallow the “why” question and replace it with “how.”
4. Young English Christian intellectual worth mentioning: Alastair Roberts.
5. The jokes about the last Christian in England hit me close. I’m a Yankee (from SW Michigan) but my wife and I are currently fundraising as missionaries headed to North East England. The process of talking about why we are going to England is such a tricky one. Communicating the need for missionaries with deprecating the great work of English Christians is difficult. It’s made really awkward by the fact that several of the most influential thinkers in my own Christian walk are Englishmen who have spent significant time in life and ministry in the very area I am going to.
Anyway.
Love the show.