Knowing With The Heart

This is the study guide site for  Knowing With The Heart : religious experience & belief in God, by Roy Clouser.  The new edition may also be purchased HERE.

Knowing With The Heart was previously published by InterVarsity Press HERE.  That older edition may also be purchased HERE.

Written in clear and nontechnical language, in the style of a conversation, Knowing with the Heart is intended both for Christians concerned with the intellectual credentials of their faith and for those who don’t believe in God but are willing to investigate and reconsider.

Clouser shows how religious belief is unavoidable –however "secular" or "nonreligious" some people may think themselves to be. And he invigoratingly displays the ultimate reasonableness of Christian faith, demonstrating that belief in God is not belief beyond the evidence but genuine knowledge.

Read a review of the book HERE.

The purpose of this study guide is to help orthodox Reformed Christian students more adequately understand and defend their biblical faith through reading Knowing With The Heart. In a few sections, this guide is critical of certain claims in the book. However, these few criticisms are made in terms of an overall high estimation of the book’s basic approach, and they do not detract from the indespensibility of the author’s central presentation.

This guide is a working document. If any one has any comments, questions, criticisms, or suggestions please make them in the comments of this entry.

Roy Clouser is professor emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College). He holds an B.A. from Gordon College, a B.D. from Reformed Episcopal Seminary, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. In his graduate years he studied with Herman Dooyeweerd at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

In addition to Knowing with the Heart (Wipf and Stock, 2007), Dr. Clouser is the author of The Myth of Religious Neutrality (University of Notre Dame Press, revised 2005 *), and numerous articles. His forthcoming book from University of Notre Dame Press is entitled Belief In God And Strategies For Theories.

Dr. Clouser has taught several classes including Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Seminar in Modern Philosophy, Introductory and Intermediate Logic, Political Philosophy, Comparative Religion and Science, and others. He also chaired the Philosophy and Religion Department for a number of years.

Other than being a scholar of religion and philosophy, Dr. Clouser played the trombone on a coast-to-coast radio show, and in a symphony orchestra for eight years. He also sang with the Pennsylvania Ballet.

"The subject of this book is the question whether we can know God is real. The answer it gives is yes… Neither the question posed nor the answer given is considered a topic for polite conversation these days. Religion has changed places with sex as a taboo subject in public. It’s all right to acknowledge that there are such things as religious beliefs, but only so long as we go into no further detail. The least acceptable form of going into further detail would be a discussion such as the one that takes place here –that is, a consideration of how to tell which, if any, of those beliefs are true and which are false."

"This book shows how clarifying the nature of religious belief allows us to see that under the right circumstances it can be a basic belief grounded on the same kind of justification enjoyed by beliefs traditionally regarded as among the most certain we have. Thus if justified certainty warrents us in saying we have knowledge, then belief in God can also be knowledge."

–from the Introduction, pages 9-10 

 
A. faith is not
    1. blind
    2. wishful thinking
    3. acceptance without knowing

B. religion is not
    1. private "true for just me"
    2. scare story to support ethics

C. rather, religious belief is
    1. “publicly” either true or false for everyone equally
    2. inevitable / unavoidable
        a. perhaps unconscious
        b. perhaps under different name
    3. connected to all other knowledge

D. knowledge: justified belief, cf. p.152, Chapter 5