James Anderson reviews Mitch Stokes’s A Shot of Faith (to the Head): Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists (Thomas Nelson, 2012).
Here’s the opening:
Mitch Stokes and I have a number of things in common. We were both engineers before taking a left-turn (or perhaps a right-turn) into philosophical theology. We’re both conservative Reformed believers. We both think highly of the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. We both want to take the New Atheism seriously, but not too seriously. And we both think that A Shot of Faith (to the Head) provides powerful ammunition for believers who want to respond to outspoken critics and skeptics. There is, however, one regrettable difference between us: Stokes wrote the book, whereas I can only wish I’d written it.
A Shot of Faith (to the Head) essentially distills and popularizes Plantingan apologetics. Plantinga doesn’t style himself as a Christian apologist, or present his writings as primarily apologetical, yet he has devoted much of his career over the last five decades to defending the rationality of Christian faith. His books, while analytically rigorous and profound, are also remarkably lucid, accessible, and witty. Until now, however, no work has condensed and synthesized Plantinga’s arguments into one coherent apologetic targeted at the New Atheists and their ilk. Stokes’s book does exactly that, and with the same relaxed and playful humor that one finds in Plantinga’s writings.
You can read the whole review here.
Here’s a book trailer:
