Alexander wrote:
I agree that Reasonable Faith and The Son Rises are good books, but I would still give preference to a book like The Everlasting Man which gives a better overall image of Christianity. Some modern apologists give the impression to be a Christian you have to be either (1) a life-long specialist in physics, philosophy, and historical criticism, or else (2) accept everything by blind faith. Chesterton always portrays Christian faith and conversion in a way that is far more true to life - reasonable, but not in such a way that only an intellectual could know it.
I haven't read The Everlasting Man, but I'd agree that this is an important distinction. There are historical arguments for the Resurrection, and there are what might be called aesthetic arguments for Christianity. The latter show what Christianity comes to, in (for example) the lives of the saints throughout history.
Somewhat relatedly, there is another wide class of arguments that deal with the epistemology of faith. I like David Johnson's Hume, Holism, and Miracles, which argues that Hume's On Miracles, and all riffs thereon by subsequent philosophers, inevitably begs the question against a holistic view according to which someone might have justified belief in miracles on the basis of (say) someone else's testimony. That is a theme that Catholic thinkers have sometimes touched on. See, for instance, a few of Elizabeth Anscombe's essays on believing people; James Ross's chapter on the religious belief of ordinary people in his book on the philosophy of religion; and Linda Zagzebski's Epistemic Authority. Of course there are also the reformed epistemologists like Plantinga, allowing that belief in God might be properly basic and therefore justified, even if most people cannot give explicit justifications. None of these arguments are attempts to show the truth of Christianity, or theism for that matter, but they are attempts to show that belief in Christianity can be rational. But even if they don't reach the truth of Christianity, what makes them noteworthy in juxtaposition with natural theological arguments is that it is (often) the rationality of Christianity and not mere theism at which they aim.