In his guest post at The Gospel Coalition a couple days ago, Jason Helopoulos wrote on Evangelism, Reason, and Faith.
I enjoy reading Helopoulos, so I was surprised to find him setting up the false dichotomy between reason and faith. His article revealed a mystical approach to what knowledge is and to why we have faith in Jesus. My mission includes helping people value their own reason. I have to argue against Helopoulos on this topic.
In this blog I advocate the principle that “if we will live,” we must choose to value our own lives, our reason, and our faith. I seek to reproduce my philosophical convictions in other people. For the sake of clarity, I’ve created an outline of my system. This and future posts will expound my system.
A philosophical system must answer three basic kinds of questions: What kind of world is it? Why am I able to know it? How will I act? The central tenets of my philosophy are epistemological objectivism and a Christian morality of rational self-interest.
Where are we headed? Today I want to show a brief outline of the philosophic system I advocate, which I call Inductionism.
My philosophy has three main normative principles:
1) Seek your own life by gaining knowledge.
2) Gain knowledge by inductive reason.
3) Base your faith on facts.
Here are my favorite principles of logic and reasoning, collected from Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
While these do stand on their own, they become most useful if you study them individually and in depth. For that, I recommend Peikoff’s book.
One of the most important questions for the Christian thinker is:
How does the truth of Scripture relate to the truth of philosophy, or science, or history?
If we put it in terms of “revelation,” it becomes: How does special revelation relate to general revelation?
