Pilgrim’s Progress

April 5, 2019 – 2:30 pm
This entry is part 1 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

As I get older (I will be sixty-three in a week or so) it becomes harder and harder for me to accept the Universe as a “brute fact”: a thing that just is, and that cannot, even in principle, be accounted for. It’s difficult for everyone, of course, not just me, and so people who […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Religion | Comments (51)

The Suffering Of The Innocent

May 14, 2019 – 11:56 am
This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a new post up on what I consider the most difficult challenge to belief in God: the arbitrary suffering that is such a conspicuous feature of the world that He created and sustains. How could a God that combines the triple perfections of omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (12)

All Sail, No Ballast

June 3, 2019 – 11:57 pm
This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction, Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Religion | Comments (3)

The Parallel Postulate

December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Religion, Ruminations | Comments (26)

Keep It Simple

January 4, 2020 – 8:13 pm
This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world: To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (14)

Bill Vallicella On Reason, Faith, And Doubt

February 6, 2022 – 12:12 am
This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Readers who have been coming around here for a while will know that in recent years I have felt the need to re-examine all that I once believed about scientism, philosophical materialism, and the existence of God. It began as a grudging acceptance, even as an unbeliever myself, that atheism and secularism might have a […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (3)

A Mathematician’s Case For Belief In God

August 22, 2023 – 6:13 pm
This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Here is a brief and almost impossibly concise rationalist apologia for Christian belief, given by the Oxford mathematician John Lennox. I’ll quote just two little gems from his speech. The first: “People are so desperate now to show that the universe created itself from nothing – which seems to me to be an immediate oxymoron: […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Inner Work, Religion | Comments (9)

Believe It, Or Not

February 5, 2024 – 11:12 pm
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill. Bill asks: why are […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (8)