Highways of the Heart

Existential Reasons for Belief in God: A Defense of Desires and Emotions for Faith
by Clifford Williams
IVP Academic, 2011
(188 pages, $22.00, paperback)

reviewed by Louis Markos

It has been two decades now since such writers as Alasdair McIntyre, Mark Noll, and Lesslie Newbigin (and, before them, Francis Schaeffer) alerted us to the fact that we are still living in the Enlightenment. Starting in the eighteenth century, and picking up speed in the nineteenth, Western thinkers began to drive a wedge between reason and emotion, logic and intuition, history and myth, science and religion. For each pair (or binary), the first word was privileged over the second as the proper vehicle for seeking truth. The upshot of this Enlightenment split between empirical facts and spiritual values was to slowly edge Christianity out of the universities and the public square and into a tight, private, self-referential box cut off from the concerns of analysis, research, debate, and “real” life.