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Articles

On being a philosopher and a Christian

Bob Harrison is most happy to be both.

When I said I was going to do philosophy for my degree, a horrified friend said, “But you’ll lose your faith!” There does seem to be a tension between philosophy and religion. No doubt it’s because a good philosopher is always asking questions, and sooner or later he will ask questions about God, about his own religious assumptions and eventually whether he still really believes as he used to.

The problems are real enough, and you don’t need to be a philosopher to discover them. Any reasonably intelligent person can see that whilst a firm faith can solve many of life’s problems, it raises some pretty disturbing questions, too. Take, for instance, the ‘problem of evil’.

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