Series
Doubt and Belief in the Modern Age
January 22, 2021
All Articles (10)
The Meaning of “God”
Modernity, Pluralism, and Doubt Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age was the simple observation that modern believers and unbelievers experience the world in much the same way. Whether raised by a homeschooling family who taught you to be a six-day creationist, or the child of an irreligious couple in San […]
What Does It Mean to Ask if God Exists?
In the previous post, I discussed how modern people tend to think of God as something like the “first gear” in the cosmic series of gears. This gestures toward a truth, but one has more closely approximated the classical vision of God when we see that God is that in virtue of which there is […]
Yahweh and the God of the Philosophers
Having clarified what we’re really asking when we ask if God exists, some may understandably be concerned that we risk replacing the God of Abraham with the God of the philosophers. That is to say, once the decision is made to wed biblical and philosophical descriptions of God, the inevitable result is that all the […]
The Phenomenon of Divine Absence
Most Christians who enjoy a healthy life of the mind have some acquaintance with doubt. It is not always very pronounced, and perhaps some get over it entirely. But for the majority of us mortals, occasional bouts of doubt (sometimes substantial) remain a stubborn feature of religious life. Occasionally, there is an attempt to dignify […]
Interpreting Divine Absence
In the previous essay, I introduced the problem of divine absence. That is, why does God, who should presumably be obvious, seem so much less obvious than we might hope for Him to be? Or recalling Taylor’s set-up, why is it that it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 AD, and […]
Responding to Divine Absence
Having discussed the phenomenon of divine absence, and given some account of that phenomenon, we are now in a place to respond to divine absence in its contemporary form. If the argument of my previous essay has purchase, then many people within the late modern West will inevitably tend to have some doubts about God’s […]
