John Azzopardi (August 6) keeps insisting that faith and reason are compatible.  He has shown he cannot accept the historical facts I presented on the incompatibility of faith and reason.

Historically, this incompatibility can be traced back to the late Middle Ages, as Will Durant explains in The Age of Faith.

In the age of reason, not only were Christian beliefs found to be incompatible with reason but Christian doctrine itself was undermined - to put it mildly - by the Deists in England and by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Baron d’Holbach and their auxiliaries in 18th century France.

In the 19th century, Christian beliefs about the origin of mankind were put in doubt by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the first textbook of the modern science of geology, in which Lyell argued that all the then current theories of the origin of the earth, including the one in the Bible, were untenable.

The intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries as it relates to Christian beliefs, as well as the scientific discoveries of the 19th century as they impacted on religion, cannot be ignored or swept under the carpet.

To be specific, Christians cannot disregard the discoveries of science in biology (Darwin), psychology (Freud), geology (Lyell), astronomy (Copernicus) and physics (Hawking). Neither can they turn a blind eye to the history of modern philosophy, in which Hume and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche questioned or denied God’s existence.