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Religious skeptics question religious authority and are not necessarily antireligious/clerical but rather are skeptical of either specific or all religious beliefs and/or practices. Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the ...
Biblical criticism, in particular higher criticism, covers a variety of methods which have been used since the Enlightenment in the early 18th century as scholars began to apply the same methods and perspectives which had already been applied to other literary and philosophical texts to biblical documents. [9]
Camus wrote his thesis in order to complete his studies at the University of Algiers.The thesis is a historical study, in which Camus attempts to elucidate the relationships between evangelical Christianity, the Greek philosophy of the first few centuries anno domini, and the dogmatic Christianism established by Augustine of Hippo.
See Origen Against Plato by Mark J. Edwards and the introduction to Origen: On First Principles translated and introduced by John Behr as two prominent examples of this history of a specifically Christian philosophy and metaphysics. From the 11th century onwards, Christian philosophy was manifested through Scholasticism.
Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christian theology throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the East, and sometimes in the West as well. In the East, major Greek Fathers like Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus were influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism, but also Stoicism often leading towards asceticism and harsh treatment of the body, for example stylite asceticism.
A close parallel just before Pascal's time occurred in the Jesuit Antoine Sirmond's On the Immortality of the Soul (1635), which explicitly compared the choice of religion to playing dice and argued "However long and happy the space of this life may be, while ever you place it in the other pan of the balance against a blessed and flourishing ...
The Renaissance had fairly swept away the later scholasticism and with it, very largely, the constructive philosophy of the Middle Ages. The Protestant Reformation, in its open revolt against the authority of the Catholic Church, had inaugurated a slow revolution, in which all religious pretensions were to be involved.
The argument from reason is a transcendental argument against metaphysical naturalism and for the existence of God (or at least a supernatural being that is the source of human reason). The best-known defender of the argument is C. S. Lewis.