Gegenschlag, Gegenschlag?, Gegenschlag!

"Now, if pop apologetics — which is fine as far as it goes but is unable to speak to the deepest issues or to the most sophisticated opponents of Christianity — if that is not what I am saying we need to return to, and if I have criticized as ineffective or irrelevant the moralizing, aesthetic, or pseudo-scientific appeals made by many contemporary churchmen and theologians, what exactly is it that I would recommend? What is it to which I am saying we need to return if the human element in the Church is to be restored to its full intellectual vigor and fighting strength?

I am going to take the remainder of my time this evening to answer that question, but I can begin by summing the answer up in one word: Scholasticism. It’s a word that will raise hackles on the backs of some Catholic necks, and not only liberal ones. Some years ago, at an initially friendly dinner after an academic conference, I sat next to a fellow Catholic academic, to whom I mildly expressed the opinion that it had been a mistake for Catholic theologians to move away from the arguments of natural theology that had been so vigorously championed by Neo-Scholastic writers. He responded in something like a paroxysm of fury, sputtering bromides of the sort familiar from personalist and nouvelle theologie criticisms of Neo-Scholasticism. Taken aback by this sudden change in the tone of our conversation, I tried to reassure him that I was not denying that the approaches he preferred had their place, and reminded him that belief in the philosophical demonstrability of God’s existence was, after all, just part of Catholic doctrine. But it was no use. Nothing I said in response could mollify him. It was like he’d seen a ghost he thought had been exorcised long ago, and couldn’t pull out of the subsequent panic attack.

...

Now there have of course been times when the significance of nature, reason, and philosophy have been overemphasized — when the claims of grace, faith, and revelation have been deemphasized and religion reduced to a rationalist skeleton. But the pressing danger today comes from the opposite direction. Talk of “faith” has been bastardized, so that many believers and skeptics alike wrongly take it to refer essentially to a kind of subjective feeling or irrational will to believe. Too much popular preaching and piety has been reduced to trashy self-help sentimentality or vague moralizing. Too many philosophers of religion have for too long been playing defense — maintaining, not that theism is in a position rationally and evidentially superior to atheism, but instead conceding the evidential issue and pleading merely that religious belief not be regarded as less rational for that. Too many theologians have turned their attention away from questions of objective, metaphysical truth to matters of aesthetics, or moral sentiment, or psychology, culture, or history."

Dr. Edward Feser, "What we owe the New Atheists", http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/lecture-dr-edward-feser-what-we-owe-new-atheists