On Obstinacy In Belief – Faith and Evidence

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This podcast covers one of my favorite essays by Lewis, titled “On Obstinacy In Belief“. It’s original title was “Faith and Evidence” and actually I like that better, but we’ll use the published title in podcast. It has been included in several collections of essays by Lewis and is well worth your time to read. It covers differences between faith, belief and knowledge and it was written to answer the question why Christians hold on to their beliefs in the face of strong contrary evidence.

The essay was originally delivered to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1953 under the title Faith and Evidence and then was republished in 1955 under the current title. Since the “target audience” was a group of Oxford professors and students, Jack included several allusions and quotations in languages other than English (such as French, Italian, and Latin). Fortunately we do not have to know these languages to get the main points of this essay. In addition, a gentleman in the Netherlands has compiled a helpful explanation of these allusions and you can obtain that via the link below.

http://www.lewisiana.nl/essayquotes/index.htm

The show notes for this podcast are found here.