Roughly ten years ago is when I discovered my joy of writing. After my first year of university which included a couple of writing-heavy classes I realized that I liked the process of writing down my thoughts. I also enjoyed writing the somewhat lengthy social media post or group chat when there was an idea that I wanted to flesh-out. I didn’t give much thought to it at the time, but retrospectively it also could have been an indicator that I like putting my thoughts down in writing and sharing them with others. So why not start a blog, right?
In fact, I have tried starting a blog before. Three times actually, and none of them really stuck with me or got far off the ground. The first blog consisted of a handful of Christian living posts during my college years, and I ended up dropping it as I got busy with other involvements. The second was to be a general theology/apologetics blog to help me process what I was reading at the time, and I only did one post before I decided that just keeping private notes was good enough for me. I did not want to have another generic apologetics blog. There are plenty out there, and many are written by people more credentialed than I.
My third blog attempt was to still be a theology/apologetics blog, but I wanted it to be more gospel-centered as I was actively involved with campus ministry at the time. I was also going deeper into apologetics (and its critics) more than I have before. As a result I wanted a blog that would be heavily researched and that would accurately depict critical voices without any straw-manning or overselling of arguments (two things for which the world of Christian apologetics will often be critiqued.) This project came to an end as I entered into fatherhood and lost the time and energy required to do the quality of work I wanted.
The first time I wrote about anything related to apologetics would have been a highschool paper I wrote on the importance of having a Christian worldview. (A very big topic for many of us conservative homeschoolers!) Outside of personal vignettes, however, you will not be seeing much – if anything – on here about a comparative-worldview-analysis-apologetic. However, the concept that each one of us has a certain “lens” or pair of glasses through which we see the world is a great springboard for the direction of this current blogging project.
Teachings on worldview will relay that every person has a unique way that they view the world. It is much like putting on a pair of tinted glasses. Red tinted glasses make everything look red, and green glasses make everything look a little green. So on and so forth. Likewise, we can put on a pair of “Christian”, “Naturalistic”, or “transcendental” glasses; and those will affect how we see the world. As we look at the world through the variety of lenses, however, only one pair will bring the world into proper focus. The others will leave the world looking a bit blurry and unclear.
Up through my mid-twenties I internalized this and unapologetically proclaimed Christianity as the one and only lens that would bring the world into clear focus. I then started flirting with skepticism. (Or perhaps more appropriately, skepticism flirted with me. More on that later.) People who view the world through a different lens than I would also be as confident in their claim of having a clear vision of the world.
Without becoming pluralistic I begun to think that competing worldviews may have at least near equal – if not actual equal – claim on vision clarity. If I could view the world through different lenses without losing vision clarity, how would I determine which one was more accurate? How would I decide which pair of glasses to wear? Why was I adamantly sold on the idea that Christianity is the correct lens? What if I’m wrong? How did I end up with these glasses, and where did they come from?
Future posts will share my story in more detail, but for now it will suffice to say that after going through some strong seasons of doubt and skepticism I became more interested in the formation of beliefs than the defense of them. As I’ll share later, I am not as into apologetics as I once was, though I do still think it has value. Later in life I may want to return to writing about it; however, for right now writing about how to defend one’s belief is no longer the direction that I want to take. I am currently more interested in the formation of one’s belief.
More specifically, I am interested in the formation of my own beliefs. This blog will be more like an in-depth journal. I will be going through different seasons and events in my life that have had notable impact on what and how I think. I also want to accompany these personal stories with academic insights from epistemology, psychology, cognitive science, and sociology (as well as whatever else I discover). Looking both inside of and outside of myself I want to explore the reasons for why I reason the way that I do.
Reasons For My Reason 