Epistemology

By John Trapasso

This book review was written by John Trapasso. He is a freshman at Lamar University in Beaumont, TX. During his free time, John enjoys studying theology and the philosophy of religion.

Yujin Nagasawa’s The Problem of Evil for Atheists seeks to transform the debate on the problem of evil by demonstrating that it poses a significant challenge to almost all worldviews—not just traditional theism. In addition, Nagasawa claims traditional theists are better equipped to deal with the problem than their competitors.

Part 1 begins with a systematic analysis of the problem of evil for traditional theists. Nagasawa shows the general “scheme” of the problem always consists of three essential variables: (I) God, (II) evil, and (III) an allegedly conflicting relationship between (I) and (II).

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

There are several reasons that apologetics largely died out in the 1900s. Many of these reasons have to do with how postmodern thinking influenced how Christians thought about the role of human reason. In general, postmodern movements in the 1800s and 1900s, which viewed human reason too negatively, were overreactions to the modernism of the 1700s which viewed human reason too positively.

An example of how postmodern thinking influenced how Christians thought about human reason can be seen in the work of the most influential theologian of the twentieth century—Karl Barth.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

In his seminal work After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that our Western society has lost the conceptual context for and foundation within which moral language makes sense. In the premodern world moral judgments were understood as governed by impersonal standards justified by a shared conception of human good. That context was lost in the Enlightenment when Aristotelian Scholasticism and Christian theology were discarded and, with them, the idea of teleology. After teleology was discarded, several conceptual systems attempted to provide a new account of morality which would maintain the status, authority, and justification of moral rules.

Francis Schaeffer was a very influential theologian and philosopher at the beginning of the era of modern Christian apologetics as it was making a comeback in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. He ran the L’Abri ministry in Switzerland from the mid-1950s until his death in 1984 where he helped many people discover and think through the answers to hard questions about Christian faith. What made Schaeffer so influential and able to engage the culture with the truth of Christianity so effectively? What was Schaeffer’s apologetic methodology and how has it shaped the way we do apologetics today? Adam was interviewed on the “Theology Matters” podcast with Devin Pellew to discuss these and other questions about the thought, apologetics, and life of Francis Schaeffer.

By Adam Lloyd Johnson, Ph.D.

During the mid to latter part of the twentieth century, thinkers from various disciplines spoke out against the epistemological conclusions of Modernism. Some of them thought that the modern view of human knowledge had been a major impetus behind the carnage of World War I, World War II, fascism, and communism. One such thinker, Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a world-renowned physical chemist, recognized that this incomplete understanding of knowledge had become especially prevalent in the scientific community. He turned to the study of philosophy in order to explore how these ideas came about and to propose a much needed course correction.