Christian apologetics and the challenge of science
ALISTER McGrath, a scientist and theologian, is clear that no war exists between science and religion. However, the problem many of us face in our own communities is that this myth has been peddled so successfully by Richard Dawkins and other leading neo-atheists that a great many people feel justified in avoiding any serious engagement with the Christian faith safe in the knowledge that science has not only won the war but has become the great hope for salvation – in this world, if not the next! Kindly agnostics may concede that they “enjoy the traditions around Christmas – for children, of course”. They may also concede that some sort of love ethic must be a good thing – “but I don’t have to believe all the superstitious stuff or go to church to be a good person”. The nub of the problem for many lay people is this: science deals with observable data and Christian faith is concerned, in large part, with unobservable data. Thus there is no evidence for Christian faith and so Christianity cannot be true. QED. The attempt by Christians to defend the truth or reasonableness of Christian faith through explanation and argumentation is called ‘apologetics’. Anglican apologetics in the later 20th century For much of the twentieth century theologians in the west were struggling to come to terms with the intellectual challenge posed by logical positivism. Such was the hostility of the intellectual climate for faith in Oxford that Christian thinkers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein made their apology for Christianity through the writing of elaborate parables: The Narnia Chronicles and The Lord of the Rings trilogy respectively. Importantly, Lewis and Tolkein were attempting to defend an orthodox understanding of Christianity. A generation later, a different approach was taken by prominent Anglican theologians John A. T. Robinson and Don Cupitt. Cupitt’s work proved to be hugely influential for a sizeable minority of Anglican clergy who came under his influence through the 1970s and 1980s. The legacy of the so-called ‘Sea of Faith’ movement extended around the Global North of the Anglican Communion, most notably in the thinking of Bishop Jack Spong of The Episcopal Church, who hailed the Jesus Seminar as North America’s own expression of the Sea of Faith. At the same time, Bishop David Jenkins and Archbishop John Habgood sought to take seriously these more ‘radical’ accounts of Christianity whilst also allowing for the intellectual credibility of a more recognisably orthodox faith in God.
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William Olhausen
is rector of Killiney Ballybrack (Dublin), national coordinator for CME, hon sec of the Dublin and Glendalough diocesan councils, and a member of the standing committee to the General Synod.