Pip: J. Michael Jones sits down to do forensic theology — which, if you think about it, is exactly the kind of phrase that makes both detectives and seminarians uncomfortable.

Mara: Today we're working through a post that digs into how Western Christianity lost its footing on reason and evidence — tracing a philosophical fault line from Thomas Aquinas all the way to the epistemological mess we're living in now.

Pip: Big territory. Let's start with the smoking guns.

Forensic Theology: Tracing How Christianity Lost Reason

Mara: The post opens with a definitional move — "forensic" from the Latin forensis, meaning from the forum, a place to examine evidence and assign fault. The frame here is investigative: something went wrong in how Christians think, and the post is going back through history to find where.

Pip: And before the investigation even starts, there's a detour worth noting — Jones says he prefers "philosophy" to "theology" because philosophy means the love of wisdom, the same word Solomon asked for. Theology, in his view, reduces the creator of a ninety-billion-light-year cosmos down to something you can put in a lab.

Mara: He quotes Francis Schaeffer — "There is no difference between philosophy and theology in the questions asked, only in the answers given" — and then pushes back, arguing that plenty of great philosophers have considered God without that making their work theology.

Pip: So he's staking out a position before the history even begins: reason and evidence are not the enemy of faith. They used to be the whole point.

Mara: That's exactly the contrast he builds toward. Thomas Aquinas, he argues, believed reason was one of God's greatest gifts — that the natural world was God's second book, to be reconciled with scripture, not subordinated to it. Aquinas is credited here with laying the groundwork for the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

Pip: And then Kierkegaard walks in and things get complicated.

Mara: Right. By Kierkegaard's time, the Enlightenment was pressing hard on church claims — the age of the earth, evolution, specific miracles called fraudulent. Kierkegaard's response was to relocate truth inward, subjectively, grounded in personal experience rather than the external material world. That's the first smoking gun the post identifies.

Pip: The practical consequence Jones draws is blunt: spend an hour in an evangelical church and you will hear things that are factually untrue. And in the progressive church, he's heard people say it doesn't matter whether God exists or Jesus lived, as long as the spiritual experience is real.

Mara: He's careful to say those are good people, not a moral failure — "I am not making this a moral problem. These are good people who have said this, people better than me. But I do think it is a way-of-thinking problem that will bear real fruit."

Pip: A thinking problem, not a character problem. That distinction is doing a lot of work here.

Mara: It is. And he ties it directly to the present — democracy in danger, politicians rewarded for lying best, a world he calls unsustainable if it runs on falsehood. The post frames this as the downstream consequence of abandoning evidential reasoning, not as a partisan claim but as an epistemological one.

Pip: He also flags that he's now actually reading Kierkegaard firsthand — Fear and Trembling finished, Philosophical Fragments halfway through — after years of relying on secondary sources. That's a small admission that lands with some weight.

Mara: It does. The post ends as a Part One, promising to go deeper into Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling next time, where the argument about irrational faith begins to take formal shape.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is that losing the habit of evidence-based reasoning isn't a recent political problem — it has a long philosophical pedigree, and Jones is trying to trace it back to the source.

Pip: Which means Part Two has a lot to live up to. We'll be watching.