Christianity holds that it is by faith that people are reconciled to God. Faith, according to Christianity, is more than a virtue; it is necessary for salvation.

These days, the word “faith” is often used to mean something essentially irrational. Faith, in this sense, is belief in the absence of (or even in the face of) evidence. It is, by definition, unfounded.

This understanding of faith opens Christianity up to ridicule. Why would anyone embrace a religion than flies in the face of reason in this way? (more…)

Richard Dawkins, for all his ability as a scientist, often gets out of his depth when he writes about religion.

Lest people forget that the Oxford Professor is not an expert on theology, here’s an example, taken from the point in The God Delusion where Dawkins is considering two possible explanations of our origins — respectively natural selection and God — and arguing that natural selection is the simpler of the two and therefore the more likely to be true.

There Dawkins suggests that Keith Ward is inconsistent on the question of whether the hypothesis that God exists is a simple hypothesis. In fact, Ward is perfectly consistent, but Dawkins doesn’t have the background knowledge to understand him, despite Ward’s clarity. (more…)

I’ve recently been re-reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and one question keeps gnawing away at me: Why does Dawkins think that he’s qualified to write about philosophical theology?

Dawkins is, no doubt, a good evolutionary biologist, and he’s certainly a very good communicator of science to the masses. But that doesn’t mean that he knows anything about theology.

And as a scientist, Dawkins must know a bit about logic; interpreting evidence requires an ability to think carefully about what conclusions can be drawn from it, and with what degree of certainty. But that doesn’t mean that Dawkins knows anything about philosophy.

Yet Dawkins does, for some reason, feel qualified to write about philosophical theology. Why? (more…)

For a lot of Christians, biblical inerrancy (the view that the Bible, as God’s word, is infallible and so free from error) is a big deal. There seems to be this idea that in order to be a proper Christian, one who is passionately committed to following God, you have to believe that he inspired the Bible in such a way as to protect its authors from error.

This idea has become important enough to Christianity that some people now reject Christianity on the ground that the Bible contains errors. I think that this is a mistake. I don’t think that biblical inerrancy is central to Christianity, and I don’t think that biblical errancy (the view that the Bible does contain errors) is a good reason to reject Christianity. (more…)