Episode 23: “Is Christianity Anti-Intellectual?"

Historically there have been many reasons to attack and criticise Christianity - but one of the most popular attacks over the last few centuries has been to challenge Christianity's intellectual credibility and its ability to accurately understand and make sense of the world. Rather than taking on arguments and attempting to refute them one by one, I wanted to actually sit with the question and acknowledge where that argument has rung true - mainly by putting fundamentalism under the microscope.

Professor Mark Noll is a distinguished historian specialising in American Evangelicalism. He has written over 40 books with one in particular standing out for this conversation. In October 1994 he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind where he offered a critique and explanation of the Christian intellectual climate - and why Christians have been blinkered, parochial, and even hostile to academia and established knowledge. So we’ll be doing a bit of a retrospective on that 30 years on, and I think this will help us understand the history and complexity of Christianity, evangelicalism, fundamentalism and the place of the mind in Christian life.

Other References:

• Why I am not a Christian: and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell (1927)
• The Antichrist: A Radical Examination of Religion and Philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006)
• The End of Faith – Religion, Terror and the Future of...