The Narrow Path Ministries

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NORTH, you seem to be arguing that since there are intelligent and rational people in the church then theism must be rational by implication. Dawkins has stated that Christians like John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins impress him so it's not genuine for him to say theists are not rational. He knows otherwise. But I don't find Mr. Dawkins to be an honest man and Christopher Hitchens probably even less so. Hitchens' own brother, for example, a very intelligent man in his own right, is a theist. They even publically debated one another on the topic of theism.

So it's not as though these men are unaware of rational Christians, they'd just prefer to believe such people don't exist.

In case anyone is still reading this subject, I would just point out that (not meaning to sound like Greg Bahnsen here) the real question is whether atheism is even compatible with reason. The atheist uses evidence and arguments to support atheism, or to undermine theism, yet nobody has ever been able to show how the laws of logic (immaterial as they are and governing proper reasoning) could even exist in the first place in an atheistic universe. If the universe contains nothing but material things moving around in space then there is no room for laws of logic, which are needed for all of the atheist's arguments.

So the issue of rationality is really the ultimate argument for Christian theism, because the need of both sides to rely upon it demonstrates that the atheists' own worldview renders the grounds for it unsupportable. (Of course, the evidence and rational inquiry uniformly demonstrates the truth of Christian theism in any event.)

Best regards,

CThomas