reorientation of the individual so that pride and selfishness can be replaced by humility
and love, thereby repairing the cognitive damage done by sin.
I believe that it is for these reasons that Kierkegaard insists that genuine faith involves
belief in that which is “against” the human understanding. For him, Christian faith is faith
in the incarnation, and he thinks that the idea of God becoming a human being is
paradoxical to the human mind. God's supreme revelation then takes the form of the
paradoxical “God-man” (1985, 23–36). Moved by pure love for the human race, God has
put aside his divine powers to become one of us for our salvation. Because we humans
have no experience of this kind of love and no understanding of it apart from God's self-
revelation, unaided human reason can only judge this to be “the most improbable thing”
or “strangest of all things” (52, 101). If human reason insists on its own self-sufficiency
and refuses to admit it own limitations, it will be offended by the Christian claims.
When the “offended consciousness” asserts that the incarnation is absurd, Kierkegaard
actually takes this as an indirect sign of the genuineness of the incarnation (1985, 49–54).
To attempt to prove or demonstrate the truth of the incarnation to such human beings
would be to ignore the effects of sin on human cognitive powers. No effort should be
made to make Christianity appear attractive to its “cultured despisers.” Rather,
Kierkegaard says that the response of concrete human reason is exactly what we would
predict would happen if Christianity is true, and he insists that the “possibility of offense”
is a necessary element of true Christian proclamation.
What appears to be an attack on “reason” is therefore in this case not motivated by a lack
of concern for truth. Kierkegaard is not affirming that faith may legitimately believe what
we know to be false. Rather, he is claiming that the practices that constitute concrete
human reason are not aimed at truth at all. Turning on its head the common charge that
religious belief involves wish-fulfillment, he charges that human reason resists the truth
because it is offended by the unflattering character of the truth about its own limitations.
We would rather believe a pleasant illusion than face up to our need for divine assistance
(1980, 42–44).
It could be argued that it is a mistake on the part of Kierkegaard to make a present of the
term “reason” to the opponents of religion by identifying reason with what I have termed
a damaged “concrete reason.” For by doing so he invites confusion and suggests to some
that religious belief is rooted in a lack of concern for truth and a resulting lack of personal
integrity. Perhaps Kierkegaard would have been better off emphasizing that Christian
beliefs appear absurd to sinful human beings, and highlighting what we might call the
perspectival character of human thinking. I believe he did not do so because he was
anxious to preserve the insight that the truth about the human condition is one that can be
grasped only when the condition of faith is present; there is no “higher reason” that is
capable of leaving faith behind, at least in this life.
Claims of the kind that Kierkegaard (and philosophers such as Plantinga as well) make
can be frustrating to philosophers. Philosophers would like to be able to settle the issues
once and for all, come up with arguments that show that religious belief is true or false.
However, if the no-neutrality thesis is true, it may not be possible to realize such
ambitions. Plantinga argues that if Christianity is true, then it seems probable that
Christianity can be known to be true by faith, understood as a new condition of the
person made possible by God's spirit, a condition that is both made possible by God's
revelatory activity and that makes possible a positive response to the content of that
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