Peter Karl Koritansky, Engaging the Skeptic: Essays Addressing the Modern Secularist’s Objections to a Catholic Worldview. Ottawa, Justin Press, 2018, 13.5 × 21 cm, 181 p., ISBN 978-1-988165-11-0

One might go into Peter Karl Koritansky’s Engaging the Skeptic expecting it to be a late addition to the apologetics movement that began in response to New Atheism. However, the book’s subtitle, Essays Addressing the Modern Secularist’s Objections to a Catholic Worldview, gives one a more accurate indication of Koritansky’s intended audience: it is modern secularists and their objections to a Catholic worldview that Koritansky aims at addressing. Engaging the Skeptic is written for upper-high-school and university students (and others of similar capabilities) who are concerned with the common prevailing doctrines of scientism, materialism, atheism, and secularism (pp. 11-12); by “concerned” I mean both those who are convinced of these doctrines to one degree or another, as well as those who reject them, but who are, nonetheless, confronted by them through their peers and who find themselves struggling to answer them. Thus, in Engaging the Skeptic, one will not find a tight, rigorous, academic treatment of the issues at hand, but rather an easier and lighter exposition of the issues and some replies. What is evident from the book itself is that Koritansky is treating themes and lines of thought that he himself has wrestled with (p. 11). And while some of these themes and objections are in reality quite new (here I am thinking especially of Chapter Seven), those readers who have even only a passing acquaintance with philosophy will recognize very old and very weathered objections to the theistic worldview. The Catholic label in the book’s subtitle might strike some as something of a misnomer, as at first blush it would appear that the arguments Koritansky tackles are decidedly against theism, in general. While this is true, it is Koritansky’s treatment of these anti-theistic arguments that gives the book its Catholic character; throughout Engaging the Skeptic Koritansky relies upon Church Fathers and Doctors for support, most notably St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as various Church documents. Each chapter in Engaging the Skeptic can be characterized as being against some doctrine or philosophical position that undermines the theistic worldview. For example, the first chapter considers the challenge of scientism, which Koritansky treats in the form of the fact/value distinction. This is a distinction which, when drawn, purports that “Facts can be known. Values cannot” (p. 19), and is often used to reduce ethical and religious claims to nothing more than subjective opinion which cannot, even in principle, be facts in any meaningful sense. What counts as “facts”, so says the proponent of scientism, are scientific facts that can be verified or falsified, measured, tested, and so forth – thus, facts alone can be known. Koritansky summarizes this view as follows: Yet, as Koritansky points out, the fact/value distinction is itself notoriously self-undermining. One must ask: Is the fact/value distinction itself a fact or a value? If it is simply just a value, then, according to its own proponents, it may safely be ignored. But surely the fact/value distinction is not a fact, as it would be absurd to claim that it can itself be tested, measured, or found in things. Speaking more broadly of scientism as a whole, Koritansky writes: “in order to persuade us that empirical or scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is, the proponent of the fact/value distinction must provide empirical or scientific evidence that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge there is” (p. 21). This does not appear plausible – indeed, it is not even clear what such evidence would look like; on the contrary, it would seem patently impossible to provide such evidence, given the natures …