A redated post.
A lot of debate on this site is between people of one world-view and those of another. People like Keith Parsons have a naturalistic world-view, people like myself have a Christian theistic world-view. We tend to think that this is the great debate of our culture. But is it? There seem to be a lot of people in our culture today who seem to make no effort to develop a consistent world-view, and grab from here, there, and everywhere to meet their needs until next Friday night. How many of you run into people like this, say, in undergraduate classrooms? This is from an essay entitled Babel Undone by Richard Mouw.
This syndrome was brought home to me in a poignant manner a while back when I was a guest on a radio talk show. It was during a time when two major newsmagazines had just run feature articles about "the historical Jesus," and the host was quite eager to discuss the topic. My fellow guest was a church leader of liberal bent, and he expressed strong skepticism about the reliability of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus—an assessment with which I strongly disagreed. When we opened the discussion to questions from our listening audience, one of our callers was a young woman who was identified as Heather from Glendale. "I’m not what you would call, like, a Christian," Heather began. "Actually, right now I am sort of into—you know, witchcraft and stuff like that? But I agree with the guy from Fuller Seminary. I’m just shocked that someone would, like, say that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead!"
Now this has to be Glendale CA, not its namesake in AZ, where no one (I hope) is that confused. This sort of thing, of course, often leaves us philosophers, atheist or Christian, tearing our hair out. Is there something that the Richard Dawkinses and William Lane Craigs of the world have in common (wow!) which is being lost be the culture at large?