Nov 07 2024 59 mins 3
Episode 23: “Is Christianity Anti-Intellectual?"
Historically there have been many reasons to attack and criticise Christianity - but one of the most popular attacks over the last few centuries has been to challenge it’s intellectual credibility and its ability to accurately understand and make sense of the world. Rather than taking on arguments and attempting to refute them one by one, I wanted to actually sit with the question and acknowledge where that argument has rung true - mainly by putting fundamentalism under the microscope.
Professor Mark Noll is a distinguished historian specialising in American Evangelicalism. He has written over 40 books with one in particular standing out for this conversation. In October 1994 he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind where he offered a critique and explanation of the Christian intellectual climate - and why Christians have been blinkered, parochial, and even hostile to academia and established knowledge. So we’ll be doing a bit of a retrospective on that 30 years on, and I think this will help us understand the history and complexity of Christianity, evangelicalism, fundamentalism and the place of the mind in Christian life.
Other References:
You can shoot Aaron or Amy an email about anything by contacting us at [email protected] - We'd love to hear your brutally honest or delightfully encouraging thoughts on the show and the topics that come up each week. There's a good chance we have stuff on our website at Third Space too.
Feel free to suggest potential guests or topics as well. No doubt there are heaps of important ideas and stories out there worth hearing!
Produced by Production Farm Studios
Historically there have been many reasons to attack and criticise Christianity - but one of the most popular attacks over the last few centuries has been to challenge it’s intellectual credibility and its ability to accurately understand and make sense of the world. Rather than taking on arguments and attempting to refute them one by one, I wanted to actually sit with the question and acknowledge where that argument has rung true - mainly by putting fundamentalism under the microscope.
Professor Mark Noll is a distinguished historian specialising in American Evangelicalism. He has written over 40 books with one in particular standing out for this conversation. In October 1994 he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind where he offered a critique and explanation of the Christian intellectual climate - and why Christians have been blinkered, parochial, and even hostile to academia and established knowledge. So we’ll be doing a bit of a retrospective on that 30 years on, and I think this will help us understand the history and complexity of Christianity, evangelicalism, fundamentalism and the place of the mind in Christian life.
Other References:
- Why I am not a Christian: and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell (1927)
- The Antichrist: A Radical Examination of Religion and Philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006)
- The End of Faith – Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (2005)
- The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications by John Whitcomb & Henry Morris (1961)
- Society of Christian Philosophers
- Francis Collins & BioLogos
- Katherine Hayhoe
- Mark Dever’s talk on Intellectual Suicide
You can shoot Aaron or Amy an email about anything by contacting us at [email protected] - We'd love to hear your brutally honest or delightfully encouraging thoughts on the show and the topics that come up each week. There's a good chance we have stuff on our website at Third Space too.
Feel free to suggest potential guests or topics as well. No doubt there are heaps of important ideas and stories out there worth hearing!
Produced by Production Farm Studios
