Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age > Status Update
Andrew Meredith
is on page 111 of 488
The Reformers reacted strongly to the Roman Church's understanding of "implicit faith" (for good reasons) and set out to re-Christen Christiandom with explicit knowledge of true doctrine. In so doing, however, they both individualized and intellectualized the concept of true faith, setting off a chain reaction that is still reverberating today.
— Mar 27, 2026 11:34AM
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Andrew’s Previous Updates
Andrew Meredith
is on page 406 of 488
"If we are prepared to countenance the prospect that our religiously inclined forebears, the myriad adherents of religious traditions, and the vast bulk of past philosophers, are not our intellectual inferiors, we have good grounds for questioning our present naturalistic commitments."
— Apr 10, 2026 06:09PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 346 of 488
A secular myth: Humanity is inevitably, successively progressing away from it's dark, animalistic origins toward a golden age of universal science, reason, prosperity, and felicity, but to do so, it must collectively learn to throw off the shackles of ignorance especially characterized by superstition (both primitive animism and religion).
— Apr 09, 2026 03:58PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 217 of 488
Harrison traces the philosophical rise of methodological naturalism (assuming for the sake of neutrality and natural science that God is not involved).
— Apr 03, 2026 06:43AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 198 of 488
A long, interesting, but kind of rambly chapter about the classic apologetic "proofs" for God's existence.
— Apr 01, 2026 07:03PM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 156 of 488
"For those who regarded reason as an instrument of calculation – reason as ratiocination – rational religion might be understood as a minimalist religion consisting only in those truths that were rationally comprehensible and supported by argument." This led to the rise of the "Deists" and to a new, very rational form of Christianity.
— Mar 30, 2026 11:19AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 135 of 488
For the Church Fathers (channeling Platonism), reason and true knowledge came about by the soul being taught by God (the Sun's illumination of the soul, in Augustine's famous analogy). "When the mind makes a true judgment, it is in contact with something that is eternal and unchanging." Thus reason, as with any other source of knowledge, was seen as both intertwined with and subordinate to revelation.
— Mar 29, 2026 11:39AM
Andrew Meredith
is on page 94 of 488
Harrison traces the meaning of "pistis" (Greek) / "credo" (Latin) through Church and philosophical history to explain how and why the word(s) changed meaning from "trust/allegiance" to "belief/faith" (to be understood in the modern parlance of "assent to spiritual propositional truths").
He places the blame primarily with the introduction of Aristotle and his logical definition of true knowledge in the Middle Ages.
— Mar 25, 2026 12:02PM
He places the blame primarily with the introduction of Aristotle and his logical definition of true knowledge in the Middle Ages.
Andrew Meredith
is on page 50 of 488
Past the intro and the first chapter.
I'm going to enjoy this book. It's speaking my heart language.
— Mar 24, 2026 02:49PM
I'm going to enjoy this book. It's speaking my heart language.
The priesthood of all believers was rediscovered, but also reconfigured with an individualized bent. Whereas it had historically meant that believers in Christ stood as mediators/intercessors between God and the unbelieving world, it came to mean that every individual believer was to read and interpret Scripture and formulate doctrinal convictions for themselves. The Church's authority on the matter meant nothing next to the individual's conscience (see Luther's final response at the Diet of Worms). This led to all different kinds of schism and inventive new forms of church polity.
"This marks the inauguration of what has become a distinctive characteristic of the modern West – the principle that individuals ought to take responsibility for what they believe. This means not only being able to articulate the precise content of what is believed but, equally importantly, being able to offer a justification for what is held to be true. One of the major drivers of this new attitude to belief, as noted above, was the concerted Protestant campaign against implicit belief."
(Philosophers now call this ‘the ethics of belief’ – the idea that we have a moral duty to be able to provide good evidence for holding the beliefs we do.)
To do this, we must use "reason" (some might say "Scripture," but all sides had the same Scriptures and yet weren't agreeing) but with the Enlightenment the nature of reason itself was changing rapidly:
At the start, "genuine religion was understood as more or less continuous with the cultivation of reason; hence the involvement of reason with matters of faith was imagined to be entirely natural and was justified on theological grounds.
At the end, we encounter a narrower and more instrumental conception of reason, one that equates it with a calculative faculty of ratiocination that is capable of analysis but has no substantive content of its own.
This established the conditions for a rather different relationship between faith and reason in which reason comes to act as a kind of independent arbiter of religious truth."
How we got from one definition of reason to the other is the subject of the next section.