The validity of the Christian tradition rests upon the efficacy of theology as a valid human intellectual endeavour. That is coming under growing question not only by history itself, but by a successful atheist publishing assult, but even more profound and unexpected, by the first testable proof for faith. One now confirmed by this contributor.
Three essays on the future of Christianity, including an introduction and download links. thefinalfreeedoms.blogspot.com/
I tend to think that the future of Christianity lies in it’s past. What atheists are criticizing in Christianity are largely the results of the Protestant reformation. Since atheism as it exists in response to Christianity is relying on what it inherited from the Protestant-led Enlightenment, Christianity will prevail either by using those same assumptions in a better way (which I still knock my head against now and then), or acknowledging the mistakes it has made and getting back to it’s roots.
I would interested in hearing why you feel this is so. My own feeling is that Christianity was even worse before the Reformation.
Depends, depends, depends. The reformers were certainly reacting to some serious problems within the Church, and I grant you that they fixed many ills. But I think their philosophy got even worse. See, Luther responded to the selling of indulgences and so on with a wholesale rejection of the notion of apostolic authority, regarding the Church as a Church corrupt to it’s foundations, and only redeemable through what the New Testament had in ink and nothing more. That’s when Christianity because a ‘religion of the book’, as it were. It was the beginning of the attitude that I mentioned to Xunzian in a discussion between you and he.
Essentially, Protestantism became hyper-rational. It focused all it’s energy on assent and examination of certain propositions which exist and stand only in relation to each other, and include those things said explicitly in the Bible, and a few others. The notion that one is saved through certain things one believes in their heart is a Protestant notion that describes what I’m talking about. This attitude is why the West had an Enlightenment, and that’s why atheistic arguments are what they are- they begin with the concept of God as the Ultimate Proposition which is proposed to explain some X, or maybe every X. They then rightly ask “why suppose it in the first place?” As I’ve argued in other places, there is no reason to suppose it abstracted from the traditions of the Church and the mystery of Christ, which is precisely the error the Reformers made.
So Protestantism right now is reaping what it has sown. Take a look at the arguments I laid out in The Case For Theism. Every single one of them is ‘defeated’ in the same way - even when theism is the better explanation for a thing, say philosophy, say the origins of the universe, say the existence of rationality, there’s still something missing from the perspective of a skeptic, who would rather just not have a certain answer, who would rather re-work the definition of truth to include permanent doubt as a safety switch, rather than propose a being like God.
That’s what it boils down to- you can’t have a deductive argument for a discrete entity, so those are ruled out. An inductive argument for the existence of God can work in the sense that it really can show (and I feel I have shown) that theism is a better explanation than atheism for this and that. But on any odds short of 100%, the atheist is going to see the existence of God as ad hoc, since it has no place in what they know.
So, what makes God a live option and not an ad hoc proposition? The long answer is my first post in that The Case for Theism thread. The short answer is, "the active life and traditional reality of the Church" - which is [i]lived[/i], as opposed to argued for.
If that sounds anti-philosophical, let me say that I think of it as [i]ante[/i]-philosophical. By way of analogy, empiricism is basically a sacramental view of nature. i.e., it delivers it's truth through our focused and repetitive taking part in it. Theism has an analogous core, and it is precisely the Baby the Reformation threw out with the bathwater.
Make sense?
Whoa, easy big fella! 
That’s going a bit far afield from the topic. I appreciate the insight into your thought process, though. 
I think the criticisms by the most militant atheists, your Dawkins and Hitchens, are criticisms of the very notion of the supernatural, not things stemming from the reformation. I’ve read only a bit of the former, but if you were to ever read God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Hitchens you’d see where his objections actually lie. Me, I’m a kinder, gentler kind of atheist.
Phaedrus
Sorry for venting a bit, there. What I would say is that the very idea that “the supernatural” is this discrete body of things that can be discussed conceptually is a product of the Reformation, too. Of course Dawkins criticizes “The supernatural” - the word has no meaning other than “That stuff materialists don’t believe in”, so what would you expect?
If you have 13 minutes sometime, listen to this:
ancientfaith.com/podcasts/freeman/
It will put what I’m saying in perspective.
“Supernatural” has a cultural & linguistic connotation that has little to do with any Western Christian notions. It’s a shorthand that encapsulates, well, things materialists don’t believe in. But much more than that. Dennett speaks of the supernatural only in terms of its contrast with the naturalistic; it’s the notion that perhaps we really can explain reality within the framework of nature, with no need to resort to facts not in evidence. I guess if we were debating the natural thing would be to carefully comb thru each sentence looking for any errror or misstatement, but I present no argument to you. I merely mean to clarify what I feel is a misunderstanding of modern atheism.
Btw, that’s the second time I’ve used that phrase- I need to copyright it. 
Nothing is supernatural.
The fact that many of the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment (Descartes, Newton, Kant etc) were Christian is irrelevant; they were born in an age where these beliefs were assumed, hence even they were brainwashed from an early age, and thought was policed. They had to remain/appear conservative if they were to survive and get their ideas published at a time when a boy in France as late as 1766 could be and was brutally beaten, tortured, decapitated and burned merely for having a book by Voltaire being found in his house.
In the end the Protestant revolution, whilst giving rise to liberalism, was wrong for Christianity. The Catholic Church rightly wanted a united religion so as to avoid the endemic bloodshed and war that would follow a Protestant reformation, and also the then possible and now inevitable and irreversible decline of Christianity caused by this segregation and internal conflict. The fact that the scientific revolution, that would replace religion and superstion with rational thought, was triggered by devout Christians such as Newton is a coincidental irony.
James,
I think you’ve missed my point. The significance of the Enlightenment being led by Protestants is that Protestantism became a strictly rationalist enterprise cut off from tradition. In other words, the atheists of today are responding (quite well) to the version of Christianity they know best. Atheism is a better fit with rational empiricism than Protestantism is, it’s an evolution of it, after all, and so that’s why it does better in arguments from that framework.
Right, that’s all I was saying. Consequently, the past 200 years of atheistic argument and presentation has largely been a red-herring, in the sense that it’s been directed at the least-defensible version of Christianity I know of.
Mm, don’t forget 1054. I mean, you’re basically right, except that the split that lead to the war and bloodshed was way before the Protestant reformation. But yes, keeping a united Church would have been the right idea then, and all along the way.