No, I'm not dead. Neither am I incapacitated, unmotivated, or otherwise incapable of blogging. The simple reason for my absence is this: I used to blog during downtime at work. I was promoted in February, and now I have no downtime at work. I want to keep blogging on a regular basis, but I just haven't quite figured out how to do it. To prove my sincerity in this matter, I offer this, an actual post.

Most of you are aware that the unsettling web hegemon known as Google has a Books section wherein the Google masters want to digitize as many books known to man as possible. For practical purposes many of these books are largely worthless, since most are copyrighted and you can only view a few pages. But many of the books have copyrights that have expired (I assume), so Google offers them for free viewing and as downloadable PDFs. The majority of these are older books from previous centuries, and this means that many classic philosophical and theological works are there for the taking. Here I offer downloadable links to some of these that I recently found while browsing through Google Books. Just click and save:

• Augustine, Seventeen Short Treatises of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo


• Augustine, The City of God, vol. II


• Timothy Dwight, Theology: Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons


• A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology


• George Fox, The Works of George Fox


• The Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (1815)


• John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy


• Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza


• Aristotle, The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle


• Aristotle, Aristotle on His Predecessors, Being the First Book of His Metaphysics


• Aristotle, William David Ross, John Alexander Smith, The Works of Aristotle


• Kant, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason


• William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking


• William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy


• Herbert Spencer, Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative


• Berkeley, A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical Writings


• Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, vol. II


• Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume


• Hume, Philosophical Works, Part II


• Locke, The Works of John Locke, vol. VIII


• Thomas Reid, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense

It greatly saddens me tonight to hear that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at age 90. If you, like me, have a robust notion of the Reformed doctrine of common grace, then I think it is safe to say that the cup of such grace was overflowing in Clarke's life. He was a prophet of the imagination, a man whose sole joy in life was to drink the wine of the beauty and mystery of the cosmos, and to share that draught with the rest of humanity. I have not read the majority of his over 100 books, but his major works affected me with a strange force that I can still feel to this day. Books like Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood's End are examples of Clarke's most visionary and inspiring work, and those who are not too uppity to read paperback science fiction will tell you that Clarke raised the medium to new heights. Some might even call it art.

Unlike more "literary" authors, Clarke was not obsessed with the human condition, but with the vast universe with which the human condition must contend. I do not know much about his religious views, but in my mind he was always a naturalist, albeit a naturalist who, like Carl Sagan, looked to the stars for mankind's salvation. He held a lifelong awe at the universe that could almost be called religious. Clarke found a deep and abiding beauty in the mysteries of creation, and when reading him I always got the sense that he regretted being born in what he considered the infancy of human progress. He envisioned futures where men stretched out across the stars, found wonders and terrors there, and ultimately realized that they were at the mercy of greater powers than themselves. But, unlike Sagan, I do not know that Clarke was ever overtly hostile to Christianity. It's true that in some of his books one can detect subtle arguments for atheism, but Clarke was also friends with C. S. Lewis and wrote stories with religious themes. At any rate, he is one of the few members of the human race worthy to bear the overused title of "visionary." He determined how orbital satellites could work decades before they actually did. The most recent novel of Clarke's that I had the pleasure of reading was The Fountains of Paradise, which tells the story of the world's first space elevator. Clarke later wrote an interesting article detailing the challenges and possibilities of building a real space elevator. The idea sounds silly when you first think of it, but contemporary scientists take the idea very seriously and, just as it was with satellites, one day the strange possibility that Clarke envisioned could become a reality.

Clarke will be missed. He was a giant of the human imagination. For Christians interested in how Clarke interacted with Christianity and theism, you might want to pick up the recent volume of his collected short stories and read "The Star" and "The Nine Billion Names of God."

Almost all non-fiction books nowadays have an opening "Acknowledgments" section, wherein the author thanks his dog, his neighbor, his priest, his colleagues, his editor, and perhaps even his family or the Almighty Himself. It is not often that one finds a line of prose in one of these sections that is worth quoting, but these words by J. Budziszewski are surely worthy of some kind of acknowledgment award, if such things existed:

Above all others I thank the triune God, Father of Lights, Kindler of Wisdom, without whom all thought is darkness and all knowledge dusk. Now my mind is smoke; on that Day, O Lord, will it be fire.

The line is from his Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, a fine book in its own right. It's just a shame no one knows how to pronounce the author's name.

From my beach reading, Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise:

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

The speaker here is "Starglider," a robotic alien probe that passes through our galaxy on an information-gathering mission. Clarke means Starglider to be an immensely intelligent entity, a sentient logical computer with the accumulated knowledge of a thousand intelligent species at its disposal. As much as I admire Clarke and enjoy his writings, I find it difficult that a super-intelligent being would propound such a sophomoric argument for the non-existence of God (and I assume that Clarke means Starglider to be speaking for himself here). Starglider's statement first jumped out at me because of its conspicuous similarities with Dawkins' 747 argument, against which I have been voluminously blogging lately. Indeed, the argument is downright Dawkinsian in its cheeky assumptions about its own cogency, as if it decisively ends the debate.

Matt of Mere Orthodoxy has reviewed J. P. Moreland's new book, Kingdom Triangle. He says it's the "decade's most important book." Those are strong words, and now I'm looking forward to this book even more than I was before.

I just saw via Nihil Fit that the fine Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland has a new book coming out called Kingdom Triangle that looks to be very interesting. Moreland blogs about it here and you can find more info in this PDF. I've always enjoyed JP's books and I appreciate his passion for the Gospel. In this book he seems to be doing something that the church vitally needs but, strangely, almost no one talks about. The "triangle" refers to Moreland's emphasis on developing the Christian mind, growing the Christian soul, and living in the power of the Holy Spirit. I've always maintained that a proper Christian life will be highly developed in all of these areas, not least because I am so weak in all three. It seems to me that there are huge swathes of the church that swing too far in one of these directions while minimizing the others. Many (not all) charismatics and Pentecostals focus exclusively on spiritual disciplines and the Spirit's power, while rejecting a robust vision for Christian theology and scholarship. On the other side many (not all) theologically-oriented evangelicals, including those in my own Reformed camp, focus too much on right doctrine, and are oblivious to the fact that their ministries are bereft of significant spiritual power. I have no idea if Moreland is going to frame his book in this way or not, but I hope he does. He's a sharp and passionate guy, and we can all learn from this kind of approach to the Christian life. I hope to read the book when it comes out later this summer.

I rarely read Christianity Today, but here is the magazine's list of the "top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals." I think they meant to shock with this one, especially by putting a book that few people have heard of as number one. I'm not surprised that there are a few examples of kitsch mixed in with some profound and important books.

Also at CT is their article on the resurgence of Calvinism. "Young, Restless, and Reformed" says that the new Reformed movement is "shaking up the church." The only time in my life that I actually bought a print issue of CT was a few weeks ago when the original issue that contained this article was released. The article is a balanced look at the movement, I think, although speaking as someone who is a part of this movement (somewhat) I don't think the whole thing is as controversial and "church-shaking" as some people seem to think. Classical five-point Calvinism - especially in the SBC - is still a minority position.

[HT to Denny Burk for the book list.]

Check out Speed Reading Techniques. This is good advice if you have a large amount of material to read, but there are some instances when speed reading just won't cut it. Analytic philosophy is a good example. Often analytic papers or books involve very detailed logical arguments that take time to comprehend and digest. In that sense they are more like complex math problems than reading a biography of Jonathan Edwards. And you can't speed read complex math problems, not if you want to be able to understand the solution anyway.

I was recently thumbing through an overview book of philosophy, and the writers made passing mention of how theism is a viable intellectual option, simply by virtue of the defense of theism that has been mounted by the great Christian thinkers. The author's three examples were Descartes, Reid, and Plantinga. Alvin Plantinga's philosophical work has spanned half a century and has influenced the whole of the philosophical world, among theistic and non-theistic thinkers alike. Books like God and Other Minds, The Nature of Necessity, and God, Freedom, and Evil have not only stood the test of time, but their influence continues to be felt across a variety of disciplines. In The Analytic Theist (hereafter TAT), editor James Sennett has collected the most forceful and significant of his writings.

One of the benefits of such an anthology is that it shows the development of a philopher's thought over time. Here are the roots of the movement now known as Reformed Epistemology, from Plantinga's argument that belief in God is no more unjustified than belief in other minds to his monumental essay, "Reason and Belief in God," where he begins laying the groundwork for his later work on why theistic belief has legitimate epistemic warrant.

But there is more to Plantinga than epistemology. Sennett includes his "free will defense" on the problem of evil, his modal version of the ontological argument for God's existence, a few chapters on philosophical theology, and even a review of a book of New Testament criticism. In all of these selections Plantinga's trademarks are evident: his sharp wit, his use of humor, his lucid writing style and, most importantly, a weighty clear-headedness that is the mark of any good analytic philosopher. For those unfamiliar with analytic philosophy or the type of meticulous logical argumentation that Plantinga utilizes, there will be some chapters that will seem difficult, if not downright opaque. As is the case in any highly specialized academic field, this is to be expected, but the general reader - and especially the general Christian reader - should not be turned off by Plantinga's rigor. There are other selections in TAT that are much easier going for the casual reader but are as equally important as some of the more technical chapters.

The only potential complaint I have about TAT is that it contains no chapters on Plantinga's work in the area of epistemic warrant, either from Warrant: The Current Debate or Warrant and Proper Function, both of which were published five years prior to TAT. No study of Plantinga is complete if it ignores his notion of warrant, but that is a minor quibble. TAT is essential reading for any Christian who endeavors to be an intellectual of faith. There is something here for not only Christians in academia but for every believer. Most Christian scholars and writers - if they are worth their weight in paper - are already familiar with Plantinga, but it's a shame that many Christian leaders and teachers seem not to have discovered his inestimable value. Pastors, knuckle down and pick up anything by Alvin Plantinga. Begin either with The Analytic Theist or Warranted Christian Belief. It's time to move into the big leagues.

[Update: Jeremy Pierce points out in the comments that TAT doesn't include anything from the first two Warrant books because Plantinga isn't dealing specifically with philosophy of religion in those works. This would make sense since Sennett's anthology focuses primarily on Plantinga's theistic writing.]

[Christian Thinker's note: I've been reading a lot of Plantinga lately, so I thought I'd post this review of his Warranted Christian Belief that I wrote last year for a seminary class. If I were writing this review now I would probably not have written it in the same way. After more detailed study of Christian philosophy (and Plantinga in particular), I think now I would be a bit more critical toward Plantinga's version of Reformed Epistemology. But as it stands I steel feel generally the same about Warranted Christian Belief and Reformed Epistemology as I did when I wrote this.]

Alvin Plantinga is the most important and influential evangelical philosopher of the last half-century, and Warranted Christian Belief (hereafter WCB) will probably end up being seen as his most important work, especially when taken along with the two earlier works in his "Warrant" trilogy, Warrant and Proper Function and Warrant: The Current Debate. But WCB is important not because it is some sort of magnum opus of proof that Christian belief is true (these would fall under what Plantinga calls the "de facto question") but because it provides a defense of Christian belief as being rational, justified, and warranted (the "de jure question"). Plantinga goes to great pains to define these terms. What does it mean, for example, when someone says a belief is irrational? Here he is at his best, as he is essentially defining the terms of the debate. Plantinga is an epistemologist, and thus his primary task as a philosopher has been the study of knowledge: what it is and how we get it. The Warrant trilogy has dealt with the idea of what actually constitutes a justified belief. In other words, it has dealt with the question of under what conditions an individual has an epistemic right to hold a certain belief or belief system. Thus you will find no defenses of the empty tomb here, nor any complex argument for God's existence. These are answers to the de facto question, but not the de jure question.

The main tenets of WCB are two: (1) the sort of claims that Christianity makes are candidates for real knowledge on the basis of the fact that they are no more irrational, or unjustified, or unwarranted than many other types of beliefs we hold, such as the reality of other minds and (2) if Christianity is true, then there is a way in which such beliefs could be warranted for an individual, even in the face of a lack of hard proof. Indeed, one of Plantinga's main goals is to show that Christian belief is warranted without such proofs. He goes about this task with humor and wit, and I think he largely succeeds. He also tackles the difficult corollary questions of whether finite beings can even have real knowledge of an infinite, personal God and whether or not higher biblical criticism and the existence of evil constitute defeaters for classical Christian theism.

Although this book is aimed at an intellectual audience and is written in many areas using the tools of the analytic philosopher, there is something else here of great value for Christian believers: a proposal for how Christian beliefs are actually developed. This was a great help to me. I was powerfully converted to Christ at age 19, but since then I have struggled much with whether or not Christian belief (and the Bible, in particular) are true. According to evidence, I may be able to form a strong belief based on probability that, for example, the Easter tomb was really empty and the disciples really did believe that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead since they were willing to die for that belief. Then, based on that knowledge, I could come to a belief that it would then be probable that Jesus was who He said He was, the Son of God, and then by that knowledge to come to a belief that it would then be probable that the Christian doctrines of the Trinity, justification by faith, the exclusivity of salvation through Christ, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, etc. are all true. But all of this is based only on probability and not certainty, and Plantinga shows (using the probability calculus) that it wouldn't make much sense to form beliefs in this way since a probable belief based upon another probable belief based upon yet another probable belief (and ad infinitum...) does not constitute a belief system that, in the end, is very probable at all.

Thus Christian belief, if true, is most likely formed in another way. This is not to say that evidentialism (the view that Christianity can be proven based on evidence) does not have value, because it certainly does. But we all know that those who adhere to classical Christianity never came to believe those tenets in this way. Plantinga posits something called the "A/C Model" for the way in which Christian belief is formed. "A" stands for Aquinas and "C" stands for Calvin. The model begins with the sensus divinitatis of Aquinas and Calvin, the idea that God built in a sort of spiritual sixth sense that alerts us to His presence and significance. The sensus divinitatis exerts itself when we see a sunset over the mountains, for example, or when we ponder the vastness of the cosmos. But according to the A/C model, the sensus divinitatis is only a beginning point, a starter, for Christian belief. The real work is done by the Holy Spirit, who affects the mind of the believer (overcoming the damaging effects of human sin on the mind), causing him or her to believe the great doctrines of the faith.

Plantinga's point is that the classical Christian view does provide a way in which knowledge of God and the plan of salvation can be communicated to man, and it is not a way which necessarily involves proof or evidence.

"But wait a minute," says the critic, "what if I don't believe in the Holy Spirit or the sensus divinitatis? That wrecks the whole system, doesn't it?" If someone asks that question, they do not understand what Plantinga is claiming. His claim is not that his model is some sort of proof of Christian theism, but that the de facto question can not be separated from the de jure question. In other words, you can't claim that you're agnostic to whether Christian belief is actually true but that you know it isn't rational, or justified, or warranted.

Taken as it is, WCB is very effective. Plantinga is essentially providing the supreme negative apologetic for Christian belief - in other words, a defense of believing in Christianity against intellectual attack - instead of a positive apologetic that attempts to prove that Christianity is true.

Can it be? Are there contemporary Christian writers of science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) who write quality fiction for the secular market and bring the Christian worldview to their work? Over at Cranach, Gene Veith brings attention to the novels of Lars Walker, a Lutheran who writes SF&F. But most importantly, Veith says that Walker is good. This is astonishing to me. I thought good Christian SF&F writers in the mainstream market had, like Lewis and Tolkien, gone the way of the red-crested dodo. I don't often read the pulp SF&F that crowds bookstore shelves - I prefer the classic authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert - but after Veith's recommendation I may give Walker a try.

Thanks to Rhett Smith I discovered Library Thing, a site where you can catalog all of the books you own in your personal library. I don't think I'll be taking the time to do this myself, but one thing that interested me was the site's page that lists the top books and authors based on users' libraries. There were a few surprises on the list. Writer of comedic fantasy Terry Pratchett is number two, behind only J. K. Rowling and ahead of Stephen King. And C. S. Lewis beats out his fellow inkling J. R. R. Tolkien. I know this isn't some kind of scientific study into the most popular authors of all time, but I found it interesting that these two Christian writers were in the top ten.

Over the past few years I've been reading through Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I've been doing this as part of an ongoing goal I have to read through many of the classic science fiction and fantasy books ever written. It all began with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, but since then I've chewed through the likes of Ursula LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, and contemporary authors such as Orson Scott Card, George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan. See my reviews of some of these books here. The Dark Tower series has already become a legend in its own right as a strange amalgam of sci-fi, fantasy, and King's trademark, horror.

What to say of Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book of the seven volume series? Some complain that this volume doesn't live up to the previous four, but I couldn't disagree more. Wolves is as robust and wildly interesting an addition to the series as the previous four, and despite some off-the-wall criticisms, it most certainly does contribute to the overall Dark Tower story arc. What is that story arc? I will try to summarize this vast tale in a few sentences: In the world of the Tower there exist many, if not infinite, worlds. Indeed there are multiple versions of our own world, some where the divergence is as minute as a difference in the name of a professional baseball team. These worlds are held together by a metaphysical lynchpin: the Dark Tower. Our hero is Roland the gunslinger of Gilead, a mythic warrior from one of these worlds who has discovered that there is something terribly wrong with the Tower. Its supports - "Beams" - are under attack and failing. Thus the very fabric of reality is weakening. Some worlds, like Roland's, have "moved on." They are running down: time itself doesn't behave correctly, and one day north becomes east and then corrects itself. As a part of this weakening of reality, doorways between these worlds are opened up through various means, allowing our heroes to pass back and forth.

The quest of Roland is for the Dark Tower itself. The ancient caste of gunslingers, of which he is the last, has always had some veiled knowledge of the Tower, but as a young man Roland had a mystical experience of it. The quest to find and repair the Tower has become an obsession for him. Due to the strange behavior of time, he has been seeking a way to get to the Tower, and the dark beings that now assail it, for over a thousand years. In Wolves we find Roland and his little band of up-and-coming gunslingers, exiles from our own world that he has "drawn" into his own, continuing on their quest. They are caught up in events in the rural town of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where creatures wearing wolf-masks ride into town on grey horses every generation or so and steal some of the town's children, only to return them as mental invalids who need constant care and die painfully by the age of thirty. After hundreds of years the "folken" of Calla Bryn Sturgis have decided to stand up to the wolves and fight, even though their enemies carry weaponry far more advanced than their crossbows. As gunslingers Roland's band are morally required to help this town in need.

Thus the tale of Wolves of the Calla unfolds. The whole plot follows the classic pattern of such films as Seven Samurai and The Thirteenth Warrior, where a small band of heroes is recruited to defend a helpless town from ruthless invaders. But of course with King, nothing is cliched, even when he's working with an established narrative formula. I've never read stories quite like the ones in the Dark Tower series, where everything is determined by what Roland calls ka, the rough equivalent of what we would call destiny. Thus while the protection of the Calla may seem like a side quest, all things serve ka, and in reality it is a crucial component of Roland's long journey to the Tower.

The actual preparation and defense of the Calla is the most interesting part of the book. The revelation of what the wolves are, who they serve and why they take the children every twenty or thirty years is a mystery that King holds until the very end. In a long tale of over 3,000 pages an author has plenty of time for characterization, and King takes the opportunity to grow his characters in interesting and strange ways. Volume 4, Wizard and Glass, consists almost entirely of a flashback into Roland's youth that shows the reader how and why he has become the remarkable man that he has. We see his baptism of fire into the hard life of being a gunslinger, and we also see how personal tragedy has shaped his psyche. The same is true in Wolves to an extent, but this time the baptism of fire is not Roland's but Jake's, the twelve year old boy from the New York City of 1977. Like Roland, here Jake must make some difficult and tragic choices, and through those tragedies we see his dramatic metamorphosis from a confused boy into a hardened warrior.

It is the idea of ka, more than anything else, that drives Roland and his companions on their quest. The gunslinger has a monumental sense of personal destiny. He was meant to find the Tower, and he is willing to sacrifice everything dear to him to find it. One reason I continue to read these books - despite the sheer darkness and obscenity that occasionally show up - is because Roland's quest is, in some sense, a quest for God. In the first book, The Gunslinger, the question comes up of who or what has the right or the ability to sit in the top level of the Tower. The obvious answer is: only God. He is the one who is ultimately in control of all worlds, and I assume that it is He who is behind ka. The idea of God's controlling sovereignty faded through some of the earlier volumes, but here it returns in force. Roland, although not a Christian, increasingly refers to the will of God in Wolves, and indeed it becomes almost interchangeable with the idea of ka. There is also some existential questioning in Wolves, as some of the characters begin to question if the top room of the Tower is actually empty. But I suspect that it is not.

It is in this sense that I see the Dark Tower series as an inherently philosophical, even religious, tale. Roland's quest is not simply a journey to save the world. There is also the desire to find what really lies at the heart of existence. What is there, really? This is a metaphysical question. No, it is the metaphysical question. I also see in Roland's quest a desire to find his identity. Roland knows why he is here. Ka has determined that he should find the Tower, the lightning rod of all extant worlds. But yet there is also a sense in which he doesn't know why he is here. He doesn't know why he was chosen for this task, and in coming to that great field of roses in which the Tower stands, he hopes that he can find out. The answer that he ultimately seeks is to the question: who is God? I'm not sure if this is what King is thinking, or even if he would have the ability to articulate it in these terms, but I think that in finding the answer to that all important question, Roland is essentially in a search for the meaning of life. Wolves of the Calla is only one episode in his long search for the answer to that question, and it sure is a fun ride.

I’ve consumed a few introductory philosophy texts in my time. There are two varieties. One is the “history of western philosophy” type that is organized by philosopher. These usually begin with the pre-Socratics and end with later thinkers such as Sartre or Rorty. The second type is the “topical” philosophy type that is organized by different areas of philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, etc. I recently read through books that represent each of these camps: Samuel E. Stumpf’s Socrates to Sartre and Ron Nash’s Life’s Ultimate Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy.

Stumpf’s text is widely used in Introduction to Philosophy courses, a fact in no doubt due to the book's brevity and clarity. Teaching philosophy is a tricky business. It is easy to make ideas that ought to be exhilarating into dreadfully boring subjects but, on the other hand, a good philosophy teacher can take some dry and boring philosophical idea and breathe life into it so that it becomes interesting to anyone, even the casual reader. Stumpf is this latter type. He excels at clearly communicating the fundamental ideas of the major thinkers in the history of western philosophy, but more important is the efficiency with which he does it. Overview philosophy texts can often fall into one of two traps: either they bog themselves down so much with a philosopher’s canon of thought that the book becomes too bloated for the average student, or for the sake of being concise they boil down that canon until what remains is only a bare bones structure of a philosopher’s body of thought. Stumpf avoids both extremes, and when the economy with which he writes is paired with his keen understanding of philosophy, the result is an extremely effective philosophy text that comes in at a fighting weight of about 500 pages.

My only criticism of Stumpf would be his choice of philosophers to include. I am not all that concerned with August Comte, for example, and in my mind the inclusion of Reid or Paley would have better represented the Enlightenment debates on epistemology. But each philosopher has a different band of thinkers that he thinks is more important than others, and I guess it’s inevitable that I as a Christian would want any philosophy text to include those two. Setting that gripe in the ditch for a moment, I would heartily recommend Socrates to Sartre to anyone interested in western philosophy.

Nash’s book is a different animal. Nash is first and foremost a Christian philosopher, and he approaches all subjects from that angle, even an introductory text such as Life’s Ultimate Questions. This is all well and good, but it means that this text is really only appropriate for use in Christian colleges and seminaries, which is obviously what Nash has in mind.

With that out of the way, I have to give Nash the same praise I gave Stumpf. Decades of teaching philosophy have honed his writing and communication skills to a degree where he can make complex concepts sound simple. The structure of the book is interesting as well. In the first half, Nash defines and critiques the conceptual systems of six major philosophers: Democritus (naturalism), Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus (Neoplatonism), Augustine, and Aquinas. The second half deals with specific philosophical topics and problems, and here Nash moves into recent philosophy with discussions of analytic philosophy, postmodernism, and the like. This structure is very effective, as it achieves more of a balance between the history of philosophy approach and the topical approach, while leaning more toward the topical when it comes to philosophical movements and questions that are representative of contemporary philosophers.

Nash sprinkles his discussion of these topics with criticisms from the standpoint of a Christian worldview. Again, this is fine, as all philosophers are working from a specific perspective, but a text that claims to be "An Introduction to Philosophy" probably ought to be a little less partisan. Consider something like Millard Erickson’s Systematic Theology. Erickson is a premier evangelical theologian, but in his introductory texts he lays out the different viewpoints on different subjects always using the same structure: he defines a certain view, follows with positive aspects of that view and finishes with criticisms. In other words, he presents all sides while making clear what his own position is. Contrast Nash, who is a bit more heavy-handed. Contrast also Stumpf, whose own philosophical position is indeterminable within the pages of Socrates to Sartre.

Both Socrates to Sartre and Life’s Ultimate Questions are effective and readable introductions to philosophy, even while using different methods and coming from different perspectives. A believer who wants an introduction to specifically Christian philosophy can’t go wrong with Nash, but for an overview with a broader view of western philosophy, Stump might be preferable.

The below post about books reminded me of a cool thing I recently found at Amazon. In many cases you can view a book's "text stats," which indicates how complex of a read it is. Not all books have text stats available, but for the ones that do, you can find the link under the "Inside This Book" section on the book's main page. Here's an example, showing that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a pretty hefty read.

There has been much talk recently about the Christian allegory in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series of children's books. But Lewis preferred to see the purpose of his Narnia stories as one of "baptizing the imagination" in preparation for hearing the real gospel story. And if there is such a thing as a baptism of the imagination, Christian writers ought to take a lesson from Lewis in how it's done.

Prince Caspian is the fourth chronological book in the series and one of my favorites thus far. I read through all the Chronicles when I was a kid, but I decided to re-read them as a result of all the hubbub about the recent Narnia movie. I had forgotten how the books had the strange quality of being both beautifully simple and deeply complex. In one sense they are simple stories of good and evil. But in another sense they are so entrenched in the Christian story that the mysteries of Christian theology are emphasized.

Take the character of Aslan, who is both the heart of the books and the heart of Narnia itself. Lewis has this wonderful way of imbuing him with both the terror and the wonder of the Christian God. In Aslan we see a figure of light and beauty, a figure of almost limitless wonder that revives the soul in a single encounter with him. But we also see the terrible judge of all things, that being of infinite power and wrath that holds the divine right to execute eternal justice.

I am also enamored with the different ways in which Aslan is presented in the different books. In The Magician's Nephew he is the benevolent Creator. In The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe he is the suffering Messiah. In The Horse and His Boy he is the Judge of wickedness. But in Prince Caspian we see something wholly different: Aslan as the divine Giver of life, the God who makes all things new.

For example, contrast Aslan's involvement in the battle of Wardrobe with his uninvolvement in the major battle of Caspian. In Caspian he is content to organize the necessary elements to win the battle, while he goes on a parade with Bacchus and Silenus and the children of Narnia, spreading life and beauty, healing the sick, and having an all-around divine celebration of the return of Aslan and freedom to Narnia. For all the variation in modern sci-fi/fantasy films, novels, and comic books, I never see in them a scene like this. That is because the art and popular culture of modern humanity has excised God from the picture. The heavens are silent, and man is left to himself to create his own significance. The vision of Aslan restoring life to his world is an exhilarating experience like nothing else I've read, except for the biblical story itself.

But while it is exhilarating, it is also depressing because there is no one like Lewis around today to write these kinds of sophisticated children's novels from a Christian worldview. There have certainly been writers who have tried, but none of them have come close to Lewis. And the bestsellers in Christian fiction are still Christified pop versions of romance novels and thrillers.

But time in Narnia is time well-spent. Lewis is an author that understands both theology and mythology, and can wrap them up together in an unusual but sublime package.

Christianity Today has a great article on the influence of C. S. Lewis on evangelicals. Saw that via The Prosblogion.