Loren Paulsson

Gentry McKeown has been a friend since we met at a mutual friend's birthday party. We've had some lively discussions about religion, politics, and other stuff, and she graciously agreed to share her story here. So to start off, could you describe your growing up experience, your perspective on life then, and how your perspective started to change? I was born and raised in Oklahoma City, the heart of the Bible Belt, so it’s no surprise I grew up in a Christian household and attended a fairly conservative Southern Baptist church. I went to Sunday school every week, participated in the youth group, and was even saved at the age of six. My sister and I were home-schooled, so our only social interaction was with friends we met at church. Because I was always surrounded by like-minded people, I accepted Christianity without question and believed the Bible was the literal word of god. As I got older, I studied the Bible on my own. I began to question the stories they taught me in Sund...

"Reason, Faith, and Revolution" is based on lectures Terry Eagleton gave at Yale in 2008, and he begins his criticism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—or “Ditchkins” as he refers to them together—by asserting the atheists have made an error of genre. For Christians God is not a “mega-manufacturer” but “the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” God needs nothing for his own existence and creates the world out of nothing. Creation is the ultimate act of an almost reckless generosity. “Because there is no necessity about the cosmos, we cannot deduce the laws which govern it from a priori principles, but need instead to look at how it actually works. This is the task of science.” The scientist starts not only with matter but with the assumption of intelligibility, which means science isn’t talking about the same stuff Christianity is talking about. In a metaphysical sense, science does not go back far enough to explain existence. For Thomas Aquinas, by co...