A Christian philosopher’s path to truth

I came to love reading late as a young adult, and I am still making up for lost time by avidly reading and rereading books in my discipline as a professor—mostly philosophy, apologetics, and cultural criticism. Of the myriad books that have shaped my worldview, these four live in me. I have read them repeatedly and have taught them to university students over many years.

The foundation for worldview

Soon after converting in 1976, I discovered Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There (1968). He was the leading apologist to the counterculture, a movement that fed me many false ideas. Schaeffer set me straight. His insights on how worldviews shaped culture, his broad understanding of the arts, his compassion for the lost, and his intellectual confidence that Christianity was “true truth” captivated me. This book sparked in me a passion for commending and defending the Christian worldview with intellectual confidence. Christianity is the most important truth, and the world must know!

The infinite-personal God of the Bible explains reality better than any rival worldview.

The special role of humanity

Not long after reading Schaeffer, I discovered the apologetics of 17th-century French polymath Blaise Pascal. I was particularly taken by Pascal’s reflections on human nature. Pascal was an accomplished mathematician, inventor, and scientist, but he also set out to write an apologetics treatise. He died before completing it, but he left us with many fragments, which are called the Pensées.

Pascal argued that the Christian view of humanity as “deposed kings” explains both the greatness and misery of humanity better than other worldviews. Human philosophies either exalt greatness at the expense of misery or vice versa. But divine revelation in Scripture explains both. We are incomparably great creatures because we are made in God’s image. We are miserable and sinful because we are fallen. But there is hope for us through the matchless achievements of Jesus Christ. Pascal writes: “Jesus Christ is the object of all things, the center towards which all things tend. Whoever knows him knows the reason for everything.” Although Pascal is one of the most quoted philosophers, his brilliant case for Christianity is often obscured because of mistaken and ignorant interpretations of his work—something I try to rectify in my own work.

The case for morality

The Abolition of Man (1943) is perhaps C.S. Lewis’ most difficult book, but I devoured it my junior year in college, because of its cogent arguments against any naturalistic-atheistic account of morality. To invoke Schaeffer, naturalism is like a thick London fog that cannot be escaped in Western culture, especially at the secular university. As a philosophy student at such an institution, I knew this firsthand.

In Abolition, Lewis does not defend the faith as a whole as he did in Mere Christianity, but rather one feature of it: “the doctrine of objective value” (moral realism). He shows how the denial of an objective moral order is rationally unsupportable and debases humans as mere animals. We’re moral beings who have an innate sense of right and wrong.

Lewis argues that morality cannot be derived from mere statements of scientific natural facts. The “ought” (morality) cannot come from the “is” (mere nature). Moral value needs a transcendent source. Moreover, when objective morality is banished by naturalism, virtue becomes impossible. Power is all that remains. We may then be “conditioned” by the “innovators” according to their whims. If so, the very idea of man as a bearer of unique value is lost, thus “the abolition of man.” He shows what happens when morality is rejected: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests [lacking moral knowledge] and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

I have profitably read The Abolition of Man at least a dozen times and have shared this moral masterpiece with students for decades.

The dangers of distraction

Last is Neil Postman’s astute cultural criticism in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). In any culture, ideas come to us through various media—books, radio, television, the internet—and the medium shapes how we receive the message. Postman observed that the sensibilities of television—the visual orientation, the debasement of print, the need to always entertain—shape our culture, often for the worse. Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” but Postman elucidated this maxim with wit and prophetic insight.

Postman was a cheerful but serious curmudgeon who was not afraid to dispel the illusions of popular culture, especially its devaluing of rational discourse through the flickering images of television. As a Christian philosopher concerned with how Biblical truth is received in culture, I try to follow his lead. Postman’s insights were pre-­internet but can be fruitfully applied to the digital age.

These four books, along with many others and, of course, the Bible, help form the core of my worldview as a Christian philosopher. May you benefit from them as well.

—Douglas Groothuis is an apologetics professor at Cornerstone University and author of 20 books, including Christian Apologetics and Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal