Yesterday, I launched an online seminar in which we will read a bunch of philosophy of religion, as well as the more philosophical and apologetic parts of theology. When I told my wife that there were a lot more people willing to share the news than actually sign up (although we did gain 25 members in the first 24 hours), she responded that reading philosophy is hard. And that is true.
This got me thinking. As society comes to grips with the advent of machines that can do our thinking for us, if we let them, we have also heard renewed complaints that “people simply do not read anymore.” While this can be overstated, reading for pleasure is down.
People are probably doing less philosophy reading as well; the raw numbers of completed philosophy BAs declined from 9,274 in 2010 to 7,091 in 2024, although that was after a massive increase between 2001 and 2010. More relevant, perhaps, is the percentage of BAs that are in philosophy. This has declined from 0.49% in 2001 to 0.36% in 2024.
I don’t have numbers on this, but I have a strong sense that it has never been terribly popular for Christians in particular to read philosophy. This is, doubtless, because both philosophy and religion are popularly perceived as being, primarily, methods of discovering the truth—and Christians prefer Scripture for that. And then, when it comes to reading philosophy of religion, pretty much only the philosophy majors and the occasional pastor do much of that. And they tend to do it—here I am making an educated guess—because such reading helps, at least somewhat, in their apologetics and evangelism.
But the reasons for Christians to read philosophy in general, and philosophy of religion in particular, are very sound—and, for some, surprising. There are two different kinds of reason: for yourself, and for others. Let’s begin with the former.
Philosophy trains the mind with three extremely important skills. The first is critical thinking; it helps us to marshal our thoughts in order, to understand how to clarify concepts, to apply the rules of logic, and, if we practice well, to determine when and whether a difficult, abstract question has actually been answered plausibly. Philosophy is full of arguments, and making sense of it involves both understanding and evaluating those arguments. Doing so practices critical thinking as no other field does.
A second skill that reading philosophy develops is to improve the care and exactness we can bring to all kinds of reading. Understanding and appreciating philosophy absolutely requires that we slow down and consider individual sentences, even individual words, practicing particular habits of parsing, defining, and interpretation. In the process of learning such habits, our eyes are opened to a finer-grained understanding of what difficult texts say (or do not say). Other fields, such as classics and law, inculcate such habits as well, but none better than philosophy.
A third skill stems from attention to the subject matter of philosophy, viz., the hard questions of existence, God, mind, knowledge, truth, goodness, freedom, justice, and beauty. While one is perhaps not made wise by such contemplation (I am sometimes shocked at how foolish some philosophers appear to be), one can become much better able to understand the many and diverse questions that ultimately turn on such fundamental concepts. And these questions are found throughout all other subjects and not infrequently our day-to-day lives. Philosophy studies the concepts that lie at the root of science, scholarship generally, statecraft, citizenship, law, art, and more—including religion.
As it happens, then, reading philosophy—and especially philosophy of religion—can help Christians a great deal indeed. Philosophy can strengthen your faith, if you approach it the right way.
(1) Philosophy equips you to handle the hard questions. The more inquisitive you are, the more that difficult questions about God, the Bible, the Church, and doctrine generally will come naturally to your mind, demanding to be answered. If you do not have the sort of training needed to deal with such questions, they can absolutely cripple your faith. This is why so many people, who have studied philosophy a little, are inclined to “deconstruct” their faith.
By training you to think with more precision, philosophy will help you to dismiss lazy questions (as many skeptical challenges are) and to formulate the genuinely hard questions in more pointed ways—and to boldly explore the best answers. Once, I thought that Christianity simply lacked the intellectual resources to answer my hard questions. I now know otherwise. I would not be encouraging you to study philosophy if I did not think Christianity had the resources to deal with critical questions about doctrine.
But this makes sense, after all: for over 1,500 years, Western philosophy developed primarily in the hands of Christian thinkers. Many of the greatest philosophers—Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, and Kierkegaard—were traditionally Christian. The case can be made that Western philosophy developed in Christian hands. Many others regarded themselves as Christian and, if heterodox on some points, took the Bible seriously, including Hobbes, Kant, and Hegel. And both Plato and Aristotle argued famously to the point. Plato argued for a creator god who served as designer; Aristotle argued for a Prime Mover. The simpler sort of skeptics and atheists who maintain that you must be a naïve fool to believe that God exists are simply ignorant of all this history.
(2) Philosophy can also strengthen your exegetical skills. Much of the process of thinking critically about Christian doctrine involves reading Scripture carefully. Indeed, a sufficiently trained student of philosophy can analyze the text in various ways. The skills you learn through reading hard, high-quality philosophy are directly applicable to exegesis of Scripture, the one great text that is the object of our most intense attention.
Such analytical skills include the care given to words and their meaning, context, intertextual references, symbols, and narrative lines—all elements familiar to readers of the history of philosophy. It helps greatly, moreover, to practice grasping foreign concepts and thought-worlds. In the history of philosophy as in the Bible, “the past is a foreign country.” Philosophical training can help reduce the culture shock that the Bible can cause.
When I finally sat down to read the Bible seriously in a period of 100 days, I was forcefully struck by just how similar, in some ways, the process of understanding the text was to understanding philosophy. Of course the subject matter and genres are different: The Bible involves narrative, poetry, prophecy, law, and more. But no matter. Close reading and analytical skill help a lot in dealing with this most important of texts.
(3) Philosophy addresses the same hard questions you bring to the Bible. You ask whether it was just for God to order the death of whole tribes, including children; ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law help here. You wonder whether predestination is incompatible with free will; this is a special topic in metaphysics (or, some say, philosophy of mind). And then, of course, there are all the questions with regard to the existence of God, many of which are explicitly addressed by philosophy of religion. These are, or closely resemble, philosophical questions. By studying philosophy, we become familiar—no, not with Scripture—with the long history of difficult thought on the hardest underlying questions.
You want to say that God was doing justice. I agree. But, we ask in our skeptical moments, why should there be any punishment at all? What is justice? And if God creates our nature and circumstances, does this not mean that he sets the terms of justice? Does this mean that his will is law? Is it, perhaps, above the law? What would that even mean? Surely God could have prevented all evil; why doesn’t he? And again, why does he inflict punishment on us when he sets the terms of justice? These are all philosophical questions that have direct bearing on divine justice in the Bible.
Perhaps you take a stand with the Calvinists or against them, holding that predestination entails a restriction on what is called free will. But what is free will? And what would it mean for our very decisions to be determined by prior circumstances, or predestined by God? These too are hard questions philosophers take up, and some of the theological debate here recapitulates the philosophical one.
Of course, you can take up questions about the existence of God; the idea of a creator outside of the spacetime continuum; the design of laws, constants, initial conditions, and emergent phenomena; again, the relationship between the very phenomena of life, or of right and wrong, and a purported creator of such things; and whether such a creator would have to be personal, or would be likely to communicate with human beings. These are questions examined independently of Scripture, and I have discovered to my own surprise that Scripture comments on all of these questions in fine-grained ways. As a result, philosophy sheds interesting light on those bits of Scripture.
But more importantly, for this and all such philosophical questions, the more familiar you are with the history of philosophizing about them, the more able you are to deal with them intelligently. And that leads us to the last topic.
Let us take a step back now. If you are prepared to deal with the big scary questions using the tools of critical thinking; if reading really difficult texts does not bother you; and if you are familiar with the history of thought about many fundamental issues; then you will be much less likely to be shaken by those questions. Indeed, if you are like me, you will seek them out to settle them properly, in a way that is perfectly in line with Scripture, yet also perfectly coherent and defensible from a philosophical point of view.
I was an unbeliever for over 35 years because I thought it was impossible to deal with all the hard questions about doctrine, the text, and the philosophical underpinnings of religion. I was wrong. I thought skeptics were able to raise many questions about doctrine that would show it to be mere tradition without any coherence. But when I finally studied theology, I was shocked to learn how coherent the Christian system really is. I thought that, armed with my vaunted analytical reading tools, I could poke holes in the text. I was taken aback by the discovery that thousands of brilliant thinkers had preceded me in reading Scripture closely, that they had asked all my questions and many more, and they had answered them in ways that were sometimes unobvious, but plausible and even brilliant. And I thought that Christian philosophers, while evidently of the highest intelligence, simply made excuses for what they believed by tradition. I simply did not understand much of what they had to say.
But what does this have to do with the study of philosophy? This: It was precisely my study of philosophy that allowed me, once I had unencumbered myself of a series of mistaken and bigoted assumptions, to appreciate this grand theological and philosophical tradition. My philosophical training did not prevent me from gaining a true faith. Rather, it allowed me to deal with the questions that a skeptically inclined person, such as myself, is likely to confront. What I am telling you, in case you didn’t know, is that by studying philosophy, I rescued the faith of my childhood. Or rather, as I sometimes put it to myself, the Lord punished my youthful pride by an extended season of exile from all awareness of this entire world—the grand intellectual tradition of Christendom—only late in life to use the very tools on which I prided myself to open my eyes to the tradition and welcome me back home.
But the greatest and best reason for a Christian to read philosophy is not with regard to ourselves, but with regard to others.
Those skills, of critical thinking, close reading, and philosophical depth, will prepare Christian philosophers to become the indispensable defenders of the faith. Perhaps, if someone had actually patiently answered the skeptical questions of my youth, or had at least persuaded me that there is a tradition of answers that is serious enough to deserve study, I would have never fallen away.
After all, the questions I had are hardly unusual. Nor are they merely the product of the New Atheism or of modern materialism. They are questions we all, sooner or later, naturally entertain as intelligent, mature human beings. Our pastors and priests, and the philosophically inclined in our congregations, should be ready to answer them confidently. This requires a great deal of time and labor, and special training can help. But the ability to deal with doubts—both our own and those of others—is worth it.
I am not advocating for what goes under the name of “apologetics,” nor am I criticizing it. I only wish to say this: Mounting what are ultimately philosophical arguments with the aim of defending the faith without adequate philosophical training and background can be a disaster. I remember looking down my nose at “apologists” as a young philosopher, easily poking holes in their arguments, which they were not able to deal with properly. This phenomenon made it easy for me, as a skeptic, to rest comfortably in my false belief that the tradition they represented was weak and shallow. But now I know: The poor rhetorical skill of such apologists was no reflection on the strength of the grand intellectual tradition of Christendom. I would maintain that anyone properly trained in apologetics should have the equivalent of at least a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.
More importantly, our pastors, priests, and seminary professors should—as necessary, if the cap fits—rethink any bias and suspicion they harbor against philosophy as such. Christian doctrine is an expression of Scripture, of course, but it was developed in the crucible of philosophy, even as philosophy as a discipline was maturing.
But what about those verses that express contempt for worldly wisdom—and which are sometimes trotted out to critique philosophy as such?
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Eccl 1:17–18)
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. (Col 2:8)
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. (1 Cor 3:19)
I wouldn’t be much of a philosopher if I had nothing to say about these. But the target of the Preacher and of Paul in such verses is not all of philosophy, or of philosophy as such. The target, rather, is “wisdom” that is celebrated by the “worldly wise,” i.e., those who concern themselves with mere “vain” cleverness, and with wealth, fame, and power. Such philosophizing really is foolish. I am advocating for a focus on the better sort of philosophy, and especially that sort that is consistent with Scripture. There is no shortage of such, and while it might not make one wise with godly wisdom, it does provide the logical, analytical, and conceptual tools that Christian leaders today are much in need of.
I hope I have motivated Christians to study philosophy and to ask and answer some hard questions about the underpinnings of our belief in the existence of the Lord God, whom we as Christians worship.
If you want to do a deep dive into the classic works of the philosophy of religion and of philosophical theology, covering most aspects of the defense of the existence of God, please join my new seminar.
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