About

(Note: I have a secondary blog on specifically Christian topics found here: https://pspruett.home.blog/)

Welcome to my blog!  My name is Paul Scott Pruett.

I am an Information Technology professional who engages in Christian Apologetics as a hobby. I think many come to the About page looking for motivations and qualifications. I would like to think my arguments can stand on their own, but here’s a little about myself for the curious.

My formal education is not in this area. I was not even aware of the rich intellectual tradition of Christianity until mid-life. My diverse interests and my experience with logical thinking (I am a programmer, after all) seem to be a good fit. I’ve since read many books and essays on the subject, listened to many lectures and debates, and have engaged in a number of online dialogs with non-Christians of all sorts. I used to be quite a bit more active before work demands and age caught up with me. I’ve recently recommitted myself to blogging periodically. Any who are interested can see my prior writings here: pspruett.blogspot.com Unfortunately, several of the links there reference the old apologetics area of the lifeway.com website, where I used to be a contributing editor. Perhaps I’ll republish these on one of the two blogs when I get a chance.

For any who may be interested, here is a summary of my own journey to “classical” Christianity:

I was raised in, what I remember as, liberal Christian churches. To give you a sense of the theological tone, lighting candles and singing “Pass it on” was high spirituality, Cat Stevens and James Taylor were in the playlist for the youth groups, at campouts we literally sang “Kum Ba Ya” around the campfire, and the play “Godspell” was considered a good presentation of the Gospel.

While I found Jesus to be an attractive character, my takeaway was that His death on the cross demonstrated (in some vague way) God’s love for us all.  “All” being the operative word, and since hell wasn’t on the menu, active Christianity held a sort of net irrelevance for me.  By mid/late High School I was out of the church.

I passed through various phases after that, which included New Age spirituality and general deism.  I’ve always had an interest in science and developed many naturalistic assumptions about it, however, learning something about the origin of the universe and the problems of abiogenesis left room in my thinking for divine intervention.  So long as the deity was impersonal I didn’t mind too much.

One day it finally occurred to me that I’d been willing to read about any sort of spurious book, but I never actually considered reading the Bible.  It may have been a dusty old thing, and I was pretty sure I already knew what was in it, but it was important literature after all.  Out of intellectual honesty I finally read the whole thing cover to cover (note that I had no conservative preconceptions about it at this time).  I then realized that the Bible didn’t support what the mystics and liberal Christians claimed of it, and I got enamored with a portrait of Jesus that I’d never truly seen before.

I let this simmer for about 5 years with some light church attendance until I met my first conservative Christian who was serious about his faith and engaged me in deep intellectual conversations.  He challenged me to read some books, starting with one by the Christian astronomer Hugh Ross.  Ross’s observations were consistent with what I’d learned about physics and astronomy (in my own reading and college classes), but underscored the beauty and remarkable design of the cosmos.  This opened the door, in my mind, to the idea of a personal and intentional God.

This friend also recommended some theological teachings found in certain radio shows, like R.C. Sproul’s “Renewing Your Mind.”  Sproul was both a trained theologian and philosopher, and made sense of Christianity as both internally consistent and at an intellectual level.  What I learned from such classical theologians was consistent with my isolated impression of Scripture, and the theologians helped to bring the whole Bible together in a sensible, systematic way.  It finally all clicked, and I found that it resonated with my deepest intuitions about myself (who by that time had accrued an impressive sin resume) and the world around me at a psychological, philosophical, historical, and scientific level.

After that, I began devouring books, articles, lectures, and debates on theology and apologetics.  The ministry, “Stand to Reason,” was very influential in shaping the way I thought about the defense of the faith.  I have since come to the conclusion that there is no competing worldview that is as coherent and explanatory as classical Christianity.  As the late Greg Bahnsen stated it, I believe in the impossibility of the contrary.