An Invitation: Christian Philosophy

In lieu of my recent speaking engagements or teachings I want to over a summary of some of my lessons from the university class I offered in Lebanon.

As the title of the blog suggests my first lecture was title An Invitation to Christian Philosophy. Considering that this was a first year class I began by approaching a definition of philosophy in general. To begin, there is no airtight definition. I offered two distinct perspectives: 1) Etymologically the roots of the Greek words in the contraction mean to love (philein) wisdom (sophia). This might loosely define the principles and practices of right thinking and the reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths; and, 2) It might be understood as a second order discipline that studies first order disciplines as a negative check and a positive guide. For example, the philosophy of science may seek to describe right approaches to scientific study based upon perceptions of how we may interpret sense perception and experience or aim to rightly limit the spheres of scientific conjecture considering that as a discipline science is limited to describing tested and observable data and not making metaphysical claims outside its purview (science can tell us the nature of the universe, its age, and the processes of its current development but it cannot tell us what caused it to came into being, i.e. to be created).

Obviously are different ways of defining philosophy but I think that these two broad perspectives allow us a simple means of delineating the Christian study of philosophy into two trajectories. Firstly the Christian philosopher must seek to understand the nature of rational and reasonable thought, the principles of logic, the discipline of knowing with certainty and by causes, learning the methods of making ideas clear, adequately defining words, avoiding unnecessary verbal disputes and the use of argument by reason and evidence expressed through presuppositions and truth claims. Secondly the Christian philosopher must be able to apply all the previously mentioned skills towards answering the fundamental questions of human life including but not limited to: What is real and not just a matter of appearance? What can be known about being, good and evil, motion, the world, humankind and God?

In an effort to lead the students into such a study I broke the class into a series of lectures upon topics which would aid in such an enterprise. Discussions covered the following topics:

• A Christian Justification of Philosophy
• The Relationship between Philosophy and Theology or Reason and Faith
• The Reality and Nature of Truth
• Logic and Argument
• Epistemology
  • Can we know? The Skeptical Challenge?
  • What is Knowledge?
  • What is the structure of Justification?
  • Religious Epistemology.
• Metaphysics
  • What is the Nature of the World?
  • Are there Universals?
  • What is a Particular Thing?
• Philosophy of Religion
  • Does God Exist? (Part 1)
    • The Cosmological Argument
    • The Teleological Argument
    • The Axiological Argument
    • The Ontological Argument
  • What is God like? (Part 2)
    • Necessity
    • Aseity
    • Incorporeality
    • Omnipresence
    • Omnipotence
    • Omniscience
    • Atemporality
    • Emotion
    • Simplicity
    • Immutability
• Philosophical Analysis of Two Christian Doctrines
  • The Incarnation: Is it possible?
  • Particularism: Is Jesus the only way to heaven
• Human Nature
  • Do people have eternal souls?
  • Do people have free-will?
• Ethics
  • The Ethical Question – Is it important?
  • Relativism
  • Natural Objectivism
  • Nonnatural Objectivism
  • Case Study: Article, “Reconciling Normative Tensions in Biomedical Ethics” Ashley Moyse
• Discussion
  • Bertrand Russel
  • The New Atheism
  • Islamic Philosophy
  • The Trinity

In upcoming posts I will address these topics as I did in my course.

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