The modern age and today

The age of reason

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century set reason up as the judge of all things. Many educated people still believed in a God who made the world, but doubted revelation, miracles and prophecy: this was deism. Its background, and Kant's criticism of the proofs, are in the Theology course's The Enlightenment and modern theology. In 1736 Joseph Butler, later bishop of Durham, answered the deists in The Analogy of Religion. The nature they accept as God's work, he argued, holds the same kinds of difficulty they stumble over in Scripture, so such difficulties are no reason to reject revelation. And since in almost everything we act on likelihoods rather than proofs, "probability is the very guide of life" Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion.

In 1802 William Paley opened his Natural Theology with a walk across a heath. Strike your foot against a stone, and you might suppose it had always lain there; find a watch, and you could not. Its parts are framed for a purpose, telling the time, so "the watch must have had a maker". The eye and the other contrivances of living things, Paley argued, are far finer than any watch, and point to a designer William Paley, Natural Theology. The psalmist sings:

How many are Your works, O LORD! In wisdom You have made them all; the earth is full of Your creatures.

Psalm 104:24

David Hume had already criticised the design argument in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, after his death. The likeness between the world and a human machine is weak, he argued, and even granting a designer, nothing shows that he is one, or good, or infinite David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. His argument that reports of miracles cannot be believed David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 10 is weighed in Are miracles possible? In 1859 Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species explained the fitness of living things by natural selection, and Darwin himself judged that Paley's argument no longer held. Christians divided: some saw God's design in nature's laws and processes themselves, others rejected Darwin's theory (see Science and faith).

Princeton and Amsterdam

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Reformed spoke with two voices about apologetics' place. B. B. Warfield of Princeton Seminary, a leading evidential (some say classical) apologist, held that apologetics stands at the head of theology and lays its foundations: right reason can weigh the evidences for Christianity, and the Spirit works faith not apart from them but along with them B. B. Warfield, Apologetics. Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands put the stress elsewhere. In lectures given at Princeton itself in 1898, he said that the regenerate and the unregenerate do science from different starting points Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism 4. Because of this antithesis, he held, defending the faith from ground shared with unbelief gets nowhere: in his first lecture he said apologetics had not advanced the church a single step, and that one ‘life-system’ must be set against another Lectures on Calvinism 1. Yet by common grace, by which God restrains sin and gives good gifts to all, unbelievers achieve much that is true and good in learning and culture Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace. God "causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good" (Matthew 5:45).

J. Gresham Machen of Princeton held that Christianity rests on events in history, defended that history as a scholar, and argued in Christianity and Liberalism (1923) that liberalism is not a form of Christianity but a different religion J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism; the controversy is told in Liberalism and fundamentalism. Cornelius Van Til, who taught for decades at Westminster Seminary, founded by Machen in 1929, pressed Kuyper's antithesis further. There is no neutral ground between belief and unbelief, he held, and apologetics shows that thought and knowledge are possible only if the God of Scripture is presupposed Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith. He faulted Old Princeton's method for seating the unbeliever's reason as judge, yet with Warfield, rather than Kuyper, he held that apologetics must not only defend the faith but take the offensive against unbelief. Presuppositional apologists often turn to Paul's words about Christ:

in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Colossians 2:3

The twentieth century and today

In the twentieth-century English-speaking world, lay writers became the great voices of apologetics. In Orthodoxy (1908) G. K. Chesterton told how "I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy", and found in Christianity the key that fits the riddles of the world and of man G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. The Oxford scholar C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, set his readers before a choice about Jesus: a mere man who said what Jesus said would be no great moral teacher but a lunatic or something far worse, so that either he was and is the Son of God, or a madman or worse C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; in Miracles he argued that naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, undermines trust in reason itself C. S. Lewis, Miracles. Francis Schaeffer, who welcomed questioning young people at L'Abri in Switzerland, urged in The God Who Is There (1968) that we follow an unbeliever's presuppositions to the point where they break down, and lead on from there to Christ Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There.

In the later twentieth century Christian philosophers found a strong voice again in the universities. Alvin Plantinga argued that belief in God can be rational without arguments Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief. William Lane Craig refined the kalam argument, from the universe's beginning, and the historical case for the resurrection, and debated atheists in public on university campuses William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith. Timothy Keller, who founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, took the common objections of the city's doubters in turn in The Reason for God (2008), and then built up the reasons for believing Timothy Keller, The Reason for God. Long before, in East Asia, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci of the Catholic Church had published The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven in 1603, dialogues between a Chinese scholar and a Western one that Korean scholars also read, a story taken up in Before Korea's religions and culture Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven.

In conversation

The apologists of these three centuries answered along different roads: Butler with probability, Paley with design, Warfield with evidence, Van Til with presuppositions, Chesterton and Lewis with story and imagination, Plantinga and Craig with philosophy, Keller with the questions of the city. The five roads met in the first lesson grew out of this story.

When a friend brings up an objection she has seen in a video, we can hear it in its strongest form, as Hume's deserves to be heard, and think with her, as Butler did, about how much of life we settle not by proof but by trust with reasons. Lewis's own road to Christ ran through a long night's talk with his friend Tolkien. Apologetics often bears fruit less in a won debate than in a long friendship. From the next lesson, Classical and evidential apologetics, the course walks these roads one by one.

Practice