Recently it was my twenty-first birthday. Back then, I started writing a list of twenty-one things that I’m very grateful for – things that I enjoy at the moment, are important to me, or have shaped who I am in various ways. Here are the first seven in my Top 21 – the rest will hopefully follow soon!

21. My birthday cards and presents!
A big thank you to all my family and friends who’ve been so kind to send me cards and presents and stuff.

20. Wales
“Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi” – even though it isn’t really the “land of my fathers”, it’s still very dear to me. I’m very glad of the country of Wales: the land, culture and language.

19. Discussion and Debate
I really enjoy the whole process of thinking things through, taking on board different ideas, understanding other people and trying to discover the truth. The Debating Society is one place where I do this, and I enjoy having a mind that enjoys thinking things through – I thank God for being a rational being (albeit a finite and fallen rationality).

18. The Internet
Yes, it can be a time-waster, but having so much information at my fingertips and such easy instant communication with people across the globe is truly amazing.

17. Language
What wonderful, fascinating and varied things languages are. From the ecletic mongrel variety of English to the ancient beauty of Welsh, the fascinating and wholly different character script of Chinese and the unique flavour of each and every tongue, I find language fascinating. I love the wonderful variety of words and expression in the English language, from “gallimaufery” to “scrumptious”, from “rumpus” to “sussuration”!

16. Flushing toilets
And all the other home comforts of living in a prosperous technological society at the beginning of the twenty-first century! Globally and historically, most of humanity lives in toil and hardship: for me to have all the leisure and comfort that I do is to be incredibly priviledged, and I pray I will neither take it for granted nor forget the majority who do not have such priviledge.

15. Cinema
Arguably the greatest artistic development of the twentieth century was the creation of the moving image as a medium. The sheer beauty and power of vast image, sound and story all combined together on the big screen is something I am immensly pleased to be able to experience in my lifetime.

More on the same theme as the previous post, this time taken from a discussion on Ship of Fools on whether Fundamentalism is the Grandmother of Atheism. I ended up writing quite a long post which I think is worth reposting here.

I think there probably is a connection [between fundamentalism and atheism]. I suspect fundamentalism [see caveat on usage in my previous post] and Western secularism are two sides of the same coin, where the coin is disconnecting reason and faith from each other.

Both make the same mistake, and so it’s relatively easy to move from one form of that mistake to another. As has been raised already [in the forum discussion], it cuts both ways, and you get people leaping from one ditch to another. It’s easier to change what you believe (the content of your beliefs) than the way in which you believe (your epistemological framework). Evolutionists like Dawkins and creationists like Ken Ham seem to have an awful lot in common in the way that they think.

When people divide faith and reason, they usually end up basing their beliefs on one without the other.

One form of fundamentalism is to insist that you have The One True Way, which every right-thinking person ought to be able to see if presented with the right evidence (or if we don’t have it yet, it’s just a matter of finding the right evidence to produce absolute certainty) – essentially reducing belief down to reason alone. So if someone doesn’t respond to a simple presentation of, say, the Four Spiritual Laws and a historical apologetic for the truth of the Gospels, or a scientific lecture on the evidence of evolution and why this makes God unnecessary, or any other magic-bullet rational “proof”, then that person is obviously stupid, mad or being wilfully stubborn. This neglects that there is no neutral position free of preconceptions and faith-commitments (many of which those holding them are not consciously aware they hold and are unexamined). We humans are supposedly able to discover the truth by our own autonomous reason.

Another form of fundamentalism is one that has faith alone against reason. We aren’t supposed to question – just accept! Often “God’s revelation” (or a substitute for it) will be invoked as the answer to the problem of how we know the truth – he’s told us, so we just have to accept unquestioningly his Word, no matter what our mere human reason may tell us.

(I think Marx and Engels fall into this trap in The Communist Manifesto. They say that no religious, philosophical or ideological arguments against Communism are of any merit because all ideas are the product of man’s material conditions. Logically, if we dismiss beliefs on the grounds they are determined by material conditions, we should include Communism – but Communism is justified by “deep intuition”, a clear case of special pleading which pretty much amounts to “you gotta have faith!”)

Funnily enough, people can hold beliefs they base on reason against faith, and on faith against reason, at the same time. They can still do this while treating the two things are seperate. One manifestation of this is a division between “rational knowledge” (things known with Cartesian certainty), and you have “irrational faith” (things believed subjectively and against the evidence).

Secularism assumes this division of reason and faith. Religious belief is thought to be based on blind faith, faith divided from reason, and so should be excluded from public discourse. It’s fine to believe it, but you have no grounds to impose it on everyone else. Scientific facts, however, are based on neutral, objective reason, and so are binding on everyone.

(Incidentally, this division of reason and faith is the epistemological error that has taken us up the blind alley of modernism and postmodernism. Very broadly, modernism believes truth can be known by autonomous neutral reason without faith; while postmodernism believes our only “knowledge” is faith without reason, and so Truth is an arbitary personal preference).

So what do I think is the answer? An epistemology and practice that reconnects faith and reason, and recognises that all knowledge, not just religious knowledge, comes about through “faith seeking understanding”. I think we really need to explain to people the true nature of faith, as something that should work in harmony with our reason, and have church practices that encourage thought and intellectual engagement as well as personal commitment and relational experience, all as overlapping parts of the Christian life. There’s lots more that could be said on this!

When I get chance, I’ll post my notes from the CHUMS (Christians in Humanities) session on engaging with Modernism and Postmodernism, which covers some of the same ground, with a bit of historical analysis drawn from the likes of Francis Schaeffer thrown in for good measure.

Normal blogging service will hopefully be resumed as the end of term approaches and I’m hopefully a little less busy. I’ve got a long post I started writing on my birthday listing 21 things I’m thankful for that I’ll hopefully finish for. I want to comment on each one, so it’s taking a while to write!

In the meantime, I submitted a comment about an article on the BBC website arguing the merits of agnosticism: God. Who knows? My comment doesn’t seem to have been posted (“not all emails will be published”), but I’ll reprint my response here, with a couple of additional footnotes:

We don’t need to make a choice between fundamentalism[1] and agnosticism, between faith and reason, between confidence and openness to questions and new evidence.

I have faith the Christian Gospel is absolute truth. When I say “absolute truth”, I mean I take it to be true in reality and universally, regardless of human opinion or understanding. By “I have faith”, I don’t mean that I believe this blindly. I do not claim knowledge on an absolutely certain basis which makes faith unnecessary, but knowledge on a sufficiently certain basis that makes trust well-placed.

The Christian worldview explains and makes sense of the world in a satisfying way, and the historical event of the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus give me good grounds for faith, for trust in it as a system of belief. But while I am confident in my belief, it is not beyond questioning – I am happy to go back and re-examine my trust-commitments in light of new information.

We need to recognise that reason (what we believe on the basis of working it out for ourselves) and faith (what we believe on trust from sources outside ourselves[2]) work together. Reason depends on this faith to operate, and this trust should be granted on the basis of good reason rather than placed blindly. This protects us both from the shallow certainties of fundamentalism, and the crippling uncertainties of relativism and postmodernism.

[1] I’m using “fundamentalism” in a general sense of a position that holds not only that absolute truth exists, but that it can be known with absolute certainty, rather than fundamentalism in the historical sense of the movement in North American Protestantism in reaction to modernism in the early 20th century.

[2] The other element in the knowledge equation that I didn’t go into here for reasons of brevity is “revelation”, both in the general epistemological sense of information from outside ourselves, whether experiential or propositional, and in the special sense of God’s revelation of himself to us.

Here are some of the webpages I’ve been reading over the last week or so:

• Under Torch Wood – a very funny spoof of Torchwood (which I’m now going to give up on, I think), which Claire sent me a link to.
• I recently bemoaned the dumbing-down of Horizon with their “Are chimps people too?” edition, and last week’s “Human 2.0” episode was even sillier, and you can read an entertaining account of why here.
• Inhabitents of Maidenhead beware! Maidenhead is actually my home town (from long, long ago… I’m definitely a Welshman by now!) so I was entertained to read of it being menaced by a Dalek earlier this year. Thankfully, all my relatives down there seem to have all survived…
• I discovered a very good Christian analysis of Philip Pullman’s wonderful but flawed His Dark Materials trilogy. (The link wasn’t working when I tried to visit it again just now to check the site name, but hopefully the site will be up again soon.) I also read a not-so-good analysis which claimed “It’s all about sex“, and that Philip Pullman wrote the books specifically against Christian sexual morality, a claim I’ve discussed in the Comments of that piece.
• It was Reformation Day on 31st October. Celebrate by singing The Reformation Polka, to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialadocious”. Better yet, celebrate it by nailing 95 ways to reform the Church in the twenty-first century to the door of your nearest church building.
• Dan Edelen just written a very good series on Being the Body (part one, two, three, four, five). I’d really recommend his thought on what being the body of Christ should look like in practical terms, especially for us at Mack as we think about where the church is going.
• Oh, and my gair rhydd article on the filming of Doctor Who at Cardiff University is now online, though without the accompanying photo of David Tennant and Freema Agyeman. I’ll have to see if I can get that picture uploaded to the website…