Challenges to Christian belief in the 21st Century

In a previous blog post John Loftus has been prognosticating about an imminent resurgence in scholarly unbelief, and says that he feels pity for those who have taken on themselves to defend evangelical Christianity. Triumphalist rhetoric aside, any intellectually honest apologist (whether religious or secular) will face up to the evolving nature of challenges to a particular belief system. Ever since Kuhn it has been widely recognized that the most difficult choice which any adherent of a particular intellectual paradigm has to face is whether the theoretical and evidential difficulties of that paradigm warrant abandoning it altogether, or these difficulties are merely apparent and the advantages of that paradigm outweigh the disadvantages. There is no hard and fast rule for deciding this. Obviously some people, like Loftus, have reached the former conclusion, while others like myself and the rest of CADRE still think that the evangelical Christian paradigm is worthy of adherence. That does not preclude identifying particularly cogent challenges, however. Here I want to just briefly list some of the issues which I feel are the most pressing, and which I will be devoting my future career to investigating (P.S. I think the best concise summary of the challenges to belief in the 21st Century is Philip Kitcher, "The Many-Sided Conflict Between Science and Religion" in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion):

1) The fragmentation (and some would say dissolution) of biblical studies. On the one hand there is a widespread postmodern suspicion of any claims to a 'rational' or 'objective' method of biblical inquiry. On the other there is a secular suspicion that much scholarship on the historical Jesus or the historicity of the Bible, for example, is driven by a covert theological agenda. In Old Testament studies minimalists such as Niels P. Lemche, Thomas L. Thompson and Philip R. Davies are proclaiming the demise of biblical history and heap scorn on the sophisticated efforts of evangelical scholars like James K. Hoffmeier, Kenneth Kitchen or V. Phillips Long to respond to the varied critiques of the OT's historical accuracy. On the New Testament front things are slightly more congenial to evangelicals as many of the universally acknowledged top historical Jesus and NT scholars are practicing believers who have produced substantial work defending the orthodox interpretation of Christian origins (i.e. James Dunn, John P. Meier, N.T. Wright, Raymond Brown, etc.) But this in itself leads to the suspicion, noted above, that there is a 'guild' of theological interests which promotes the orthodox view and tries to suppress dissenting voices. A recent articulation and defense of this many-faceted challenge is Hector Avalos's The End of Biblical Studies.

2) Philosophical theologians have not come to any sort of consensus on the best way to deal with the problem of evil. Philip Kitcher goes so far as to describe recent work on this problem by Plantinga, Van Inwagen or Adams as "the last gasp of a desperate scholasticism".

3) The rise of a so-called 'third culture' in which philosophically and culturally literate scientists constitute the new intelligentsia with little concern for or interest in traditional theological questions. Fundamental advances in cosmology, computer science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence promise to radically transform our vision of reality in ways which theologians may not be prepared for.

4) Increasingly detailed knowledge of the workings of belief systems around the world make functional explanations of religion seem more plausible. A fundamental assumption of the rapidly advancing field of the cognitive science of religion is that religious ideas are by-products of mental tools evolved for social living among other human beings. In the view of many skeptics the best way to explain the immense, bewildering variety of belief systems is that they reflect changing social circumstances and needs, without postulating a transcendent referent.

5) While the 20th Century saw an astonishing resurgence of Christian philosophical theology, the philosophy of unbelief and naturalism has become increasingly sophisticated as well. New and powerful ways of articulating basic naturalistic intuitions make it an increasingly serious contender in the marketplace of ideas.

So much for the bad news. The good news is that evangelical scholarship is experiencing a renaissance, with ever more evangelicals having taking up Mark Noll's challenge in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and being accepted at top universities around the world as researchers and professors, and scholarly work is becoming ever more sophisticated. To give some examples in the relevant fields, Michael F. Bird, a rising star in NT studies, self-consciously works to integrate historical and theological concerns in the study of early Christianity, and has taken full account of the various competing paradigms (a forthcoming book will be a collaboration with James Crossley presenting a believing and a secular perspective on the rise of Christianity). One of the pioneers of the cognitive science of religion, Justin Barrett, is an evangelical Christian and is working to integrate the results of the new science with a Christian worldview via Reformed epistemology, as are Michael J. Murray and Kelly James Clark. Scholars such as Noreen Herzfeld have begun to investigate the relevance of advances in artificial intelligence for theology. And then of course there's me and CADRE:) Seriously, though, there are challenges to be faced but I am more than confident that increasingly sophisticated Christian scholarship will give the Church the resources to meet them, so that Christian theism can continue to give the world a vision of hope and redemption in this troubled world.