Why Make Intellectual Defenses of the Faith?

Carl Olson has answers. Excerpts follow:

...The heart, let me emphasize, that speaks to other hearts. The man who loves something wants to know about it. He wants, as far as the subject allows, to think about it, to analyze it, to understand it deeply. He will use that knowledge to come to its defense when it is misunderstood or misinterpreted or publicly derided or denied. This is even truer when he loves someone. If he doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t truly love.

That is where the new anti-apologists go wrong. They are right that argument mostly begets argument, and that arguments by themselves rarely change anyone’s mind. But they are wrong to dismiss apologetics for that reason. They’re not thinking clearly about what people who believe do, and how people come to believe. People want answers, and for some, as far as we mortals can tell, the answers make or break the sale.

Read the entire column, "The Reason the Heart Wants".

Having been involved in apologetics for many years now, I've come to the startling (ahem!) conclusion that some people—including a few well-meaning apologists-in-the-rough—are fairly clueless about what apologetics are; some people dislike apologetics for what they (mistakenly) think apologetics are; and a few people do indeed dislike apologetics because they involve a combination of argument, logic, debate, and so forth. I've discovered that there is a huge swath of Catholics who feel that offering up any arguments or defense in favor of Catholicism smacks of triumphalism and arrogance; such folks, when pressed, usually hold to a vaguely indifferent form of "faith" that is heavily reliant on secularized understandings of "tolerance" and "equality". Many will argue that arguing is bad, and will do so without any recognition of the contradiction between their actions and their worlds. Granted, some apologists can be combative and even obnoxious, but that hardly does away with the need for apologetics...