What is real? What is right? What is lovely? Human beings ask these kinds of questions because we long for at least three things: truth, goodness, and beauty. Prominent philosophers through the centuries have called these three cosmic values transcendentals. A transcendental refers to something that exists beyond the time-space-matter world. It is a universal reality that extends beyond our everyday sensory experiences and is…
Most Christians want their light to shine among other people, to serve as a signpost to the truth that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. But just how does a believer go about being a good witness? Sometimes the virtuous qualities and characteristics we strive hard to live out in life earn us a unique opportunity to reach others—for as…
An implication of being made in God’s image is that human beings have a unique awareness of reality. That reality is wide and deep and extends to four basic philosophical spheres or dimensions of life. The awareness of and interaction with these spheres illustrates humankind’s uniqueness and makes the discovery of four critical truths possible. Sphere 1: The Intellectual Human…
A man can’t always be defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it. —C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, (London, UK: Collins, 1975), 7.
Calvin understood that God created human beings to hunt and gather truth, and that, as a matter of fact, the capacity for doing so amounts to one feature of the image of God in them.
— Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), x.
I first heard the expression “renaissance Christian” from apologist and attorney John Warwick Montgomery in the early 1980s. Montgomery gave a lecture at the former Simon Greenleaf School of Law on the importance of developing the Christian mind. The lecture left a deep impression on me.
But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error. —Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1992), bk. 1, 20.
Growing up in the 1960s, one of my favorite characters on Star Trek was Mr. Spock. Half Vulcan and half human, First Officer Spock pursued the logical path to problem-solving tenaciously throughout the U.S.S. Enterprise’s travels in the vast cosmos. Journey with me on a trek of our own: a series on critical thinking. In this first article I will…
