John Tucker used to be a literalist Christian, but says he has now rejected the ‘belief paradigm’ to move beyond either accepting or rejecting the claims of religion.
In this conversation with Bart Campolo, John lays out how he sees truth now, and says that he thinks religious claims should be expressed only as catch-22s. An example of a catch-22: “The only acceptable evidence for religious belief is evidence that is unacceptable.” Confused by this, Bart explores what John means by it.
Along the way, John and Bart talk about how works of fiction can be ‘mined’ for profound insight, and that Christianity can be too, how there are differences between pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking, how we are stuck in the ‘correspondence theory of truth’, how virulent forms of religion can be ‘tamed’ and used beneficially, how John was devastated when he first realized that Adam and Eve were not historical figures, the future of Christianity and how following generations will come to relate to it, why John refutes the context of a question like, ‘Did Jesus rise from the dead?’, the philosophy of how words are used, how Bart can’t figure out why John doesn’t just become a straight-up humanist like him, and an analogy about stained glass windows.
John’s book on these topics, Zero Theology, can be found on Amazon.
