One of the most important and least appreciated virtues of a good (Christian) apologist is epistemic humility. In particular, Christian apologists have a bad reputation for memorizing factoids about fields in which they are ignorant and tacitly claiming an expertise and authority they wholly lack as they build their case for Christianity. A wonderful example […]
epistemic humility
Coming to Terms with Mystery: A Brief Reflection on Cognitive Closure
In this video, I offer a reflection on cognitive closure (the limitations of our minds to grasp reality) and the implications that fact has for epistemic humility. ?
A Quick Word on the Total Evidence for Theism
Occasionally, I hear people make claims about how the “total evidence” does or does not support theism. Those people are incorrect: *nobody* has considered all the expansive evidence for/against that claim. Nor is it feasible that any person ever will. The total evidence includes not only thousands of publicly available arguments and lines of evidence […]
What Does It Mean to be a Tentative Apologist?
It was the summer of 1996 and I was taking my first course in graduate school. The course was taught by Australian New Testament scholar Paul Barnett on the historical Jesus. After class, I was chatting with another student about the reasons we were taking the class. I still recall saying to him, “I’m taking […]
Encountering Mystery at the Summer Waterslide
This article is equal parts summer nostalgia and rumination on mystery. But let’s start with the summer nostalgia. Summer Nostalgia I grew up in the 1980s when land prices were sufficiently low that it made sense to devote a large tract of land to a summertime waterslide. (Sadly, those days are long gone and that […]
