EPS Blog

In the Winter 2018 issue of Philosophia Christi, Jonathan Mark Threlfall's lead article addresses "The imago Dei and Blaise Pascal’s Abductive Anthropological Argument." Jonathan is Pastor of Preaching and Teaching at Trinity Baptist Church in Concord, New Hampshire.

Here's the abstract from the article:

Blaise Pascal argued abductively for Christianity by presenting Christian anthropology as the best explanation for the existential paradoxes of human greatness and wretchedness. Surprisingly, however, the doctrine of the imago Dei never surfaces in his Pensées. I argue that considerations arising from the doctrine of the imago Dei strengthen Pascal’s abductive argument by providing more details for and encompassing more instances of humans’ paradoxical duality. Specifically, the imago Dei helps explain the existential paradoxes of happiness and misery, certainty and uncertainty, and human greatness and smallness within the cosmos. Further, its explanatory scope encompasses perplexing behavior and beliefs, including Freud’s Todestriebe, false altruism, conflicting beliefs about the divine, and our search for self-knowledge.

Readers may also be interested in the special issue of Philosophia Christi on "Ramified Natural Theological" and Clifford Williams' book Existential Reasons for Belief in God and his interview at the EPS website.

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Labels: 20:2, abductive anthropological argument, arguments for the existence of God, clifford williams, existential, imago Dei, jonathan mark threlfall, pascal