For most of the church's history, people have seen Christian ethics as normative and universally applicable. Recently, however, this view has been lost, thanks to naturalism and relativism. R. Scott Smith argues that Christians need to overcome Kant's fact-value dichotomy and recover the possibility of genuine moral and theological knowledge.
"Scott Smith has done an admirable job of surveying the ethical landscape both past and present. And he both challenges various forms of relativism and naturalism that are so corrosive to moral knowledge and quite effectively dismantles the commonly assumed arguments for the fact-value split. Also, he carefully constructs a case for the foundations of moral knowledge. In doing so, he offers much-needed wise guidance in an era that increasingly calls such knowledge into question."
Paul Copan, Palm Beach Atlantic University
"Scott Smith, carefully and consciously, with philosophical rigor and clarity of word, offers a defense of moral knowledge that is tightly tethered to more ancient, and Christian, understandings of the good, the true and the beautiful. The result is a compelling case for why philosophical naturalism, including its cousin, nominalism, must be rejected by anyone who sincerely seeks after moral knowledge. Smith's greatest accomplishment in this book, however, is the way in which he interacts, at a high level, with contemporary philosophical schools of thought and ancient traditions in a way fully accessible to the educated layman and college student."
