It is Compatible!

Abstract

There is no doubt that Mr. MacIntyre has given us a very intelligent paper to discuss. It brings up a key problem of our contemporary pluralistic culture, that of mutual understanding between believers and non-believers in a living religion (specifically the Christian religion for our culture) and the possibility of intelligent discussion between them, and it presents a type of answer, clothed in sophisticated terms, which is not merely private to the author but perhaps the one most widely accepted or lived implicitly in our day by intelligent non-believers (or sceptics, as the author more accurately calls them, to distinguish them from simply disinterested agnostics). In my own comments I would like first to summarize briefly the essentials of the author’s position taken in the paper and then assay the strength of its challenge to the reasonableness of Christian belief. I intend to do this by making fully explicit the hidden or not fully expressed premises of his argument from analogy, which I find both partially illumines and partially obscures the issue.