Paul Doland critiques Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith.
Sustained philosophical inquiry into matters of faith was essentially absent from my religious education growing up.
I had, and still have, the impression that my religious education teachers had no perspective outside of their religious faith. That is, they gave every indication of seeing the world through religious belief as opposed to using critical tools with which to arrive at faith.
They gave no indication that scholarly or scientific perspectives might exist that could shed light on what they so readily believed to be true.
The possibility that tenets of belief might sit atop various degrees of intellectual confidence or might be subject to doubt at all was never, to my recollection, ever seriously entertained.
Religious education was implicitly viewed at possibly the lowest rung of pedagogy - a primitive transmission, in which nothing more than rote repetition and assimilation was expected.
Because of this and for other reasons I've come to have a profound skepticism about the role of (most) religion in human affairs.
If you eventually arrive at a set of values that prioritizes, among other things, continuous learning, evidence based reasoning, multidisciplinary perspective taking, broadness of learning, skepticism as a general orientation, scientific method (however we define this), probabilistic reasoning, systems thinking, openness to jettisoning prior belief, and so forth, it's hard to view much religious belief as much more than a kind of inherited crippled meaning making system primarily kept around for purposes of assuaging existential needs and fears.
This doesn't mean that there's no need to ignore religious debates. Just the opposite. The more is known, the greater the need for applying this knowledge to extant beliefs of all kinds.
