Is Belief Believable?

[Michie]

I love to teach a course called “The God of Faith and Reason.” It is always a pleasure to speak with college students about some of the most significant questions people can ask. What can we know? Does God exist? How do faith and reason relate? I teach an ideologically diverse group of students, ranging from Catholics who attend Mass every day to atheists with blue hair. Ninety percent of my students are in neither category. But almost all my students think that faith and reason are opposed to each other. They think we must choose either faith or reason. Questioning this dogma is a central theme of the course. Because my classroom only holds twenty-eight seats, I’ve written a new book called Is Belief Believable?: Reasoning About God from Plato and Aquinas to C. S. Lewis and Jordan Peterson to share what we talk about with a wider audience.

This book considers various impediments to thinking about faith, such as the radical skepticism that we cannot know anything about anything. Kant thought we could know the truths of mathematics and of morality but that we could not know anything about the divine. Was he right? I also consider the claim that religion is the opium of the masses (Marx) and the claim that faith is just wishful thinking (Freud).

Continued below.

Is Belief Believable? - Word on Fire

Some think we must choose faith or reason, spiritual life or intellectual life. My book advocates for reasonable faith and faithful reason.

www.wordonfire.org