A Shot of Faith to the Head: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists is a 2012 philosophy-based Christian apologetic by Mitch Stokes, a philosophy professor with an engineering background. It is largely based on the philosophy of Alvin Plantinga, and is intended to help Christians hold their own in discussions with atheists.
The book is divided into three sections, each one addressing
a different argument for atheism: that belief in God is irrational, that
science has shown that God doesn’t exist, and that the existence of evil in the
world shows that God doesn’t exist.
One of Stokes’s central tasks here is deconstructing
evidentialism – the argument that any belief must be supported by sufficient
evidence to be rational, and which is used to criticize belief in God. This is
probably the highlight of the book. In fact, Stokes generally does an excellent
job of picking apart atheistic arguments. He doesn’t do near as good a job, however,
on his pro-Christian arguments, which are often too cursory. That this book was
put together solely with Christians in mind makes this understandable (Stokes
explicitly assumes a Christian worldview on the part of the reader), but it
also means that this isn’t really a book you can hand to your atheist friend to
read.
While he covers a wide range of atheist scientists and
philosophers in his discussions, Stokes leans too heavily on Plantinga for his
pro-Christian arguments. A Shot of Faith to the Head thusly serves
well enough as an introduction to Plantinga, but it would have been nice to get
some other perspectives. However, Plantinga is always Stokes’s go-to guy.
A Shot of Faith to the Head will be accessible to any
reasonably educated person without a philosophy degree, but it may prove a
great deal of work for the reader, as the philosophical and logical concepts
here tend to be complex. The summaries at the end of each chapter are helpful
in this regard, but the reader will still have a great deal of cognitive
processing to do.
On the whole, Stokes’s refutation of various atheistic
arguments and defense of a rational belief are solid, and A Shot of Faith to
the Head is a challenging but worthwhile book.
RECOMMENDED
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