Here is an interesting list from the best school folks of their 50 leading Theist intellectuals in 2013. While DBH was surprisingly on that list, who I think is still a bit of a hidden jewel, conspicuously missing is six other thinkers I would round off my top 10 with, never mind top 50 (Rene Girard, Rosalind Picard, Tim Keller, Hilary Putnam, John Behr and John D. Barrow). It's also interesting that they have physicists like Chris Isham, Don Page and Michael Heller on the list, but not Nobel laureates like William Phillips, Charles Townes (who is almost 100 by the way), Arno Penzias and Tony Hewish (all very outspoken Christian physicists). At any rate, I love that they took the time to create this list, and hope it becomes an annual thing. You can follow the link here:
http://www.thebestschools.org/blog/2013/01/06/50-smartest-people-faith/
Just for posterity, and b/c there is not much funner than making top 10 lists of anything, my top 10, would, not in order, go:
1) WLC -- if you needed one guy to defend the Theist worldview, it would have to be this guy.
2) Girard. I think he has a chance to change how a lot of fields think about themselves, not just the anthropology of religion.
3) Plantinga. He probably would be the guy you would want to fill in for Craig if Craig was too busy working on that upper body or embarrassing Sam Harris or Peter Atkins
Atkins debacle ->-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIuua7HZRxw
4) Putnam and 5) DBH. Other notable philosophers that would just be outside my list: Bas van Fraasen, who is on their list, Edward Feser, who is a rising star, and Peter van Inwagen, who can tackle the problem of evil, the most credible challenge to Theism, better than anyone I have read.
6) Tim Keller and 7) John Behr would be my theologians/pastors on the list. These guys, because of their trade, are probably grossly underrated as pure thinkers. They both can talk and write about things in ways most people cannot, and, most importantly, take the human tapestry and how it relates to the Sacred in ways that make us understand how Sacred the Sacred is, yet how near it is and can be. I don't always agree with him, but N.T. Wright would have to be a honorable mention. A great, great speaker, and "The Resurrection of the Son of God" is the most important Christian apologetics book written in the last 100 years.
8), 9), and 10) You could pick a lot of scientists. I would add Rosalind Picard, not just because she is obviously brilliant, but because there are so many vocal Christian scientists from MIT today (Hutchinson, Van Vooris, come to mind) that someone from MIT should be on the list. I love John D. Barrow, so he is in. He is also the funniest guy on this list. I would round off with Jennifer Wiseman, an astrophysicist who is at NASA and is in charge at AAAS to better bridge science and religion. Honorable mention to all the nobel laureate scientists that could be on my list and all the other obvious choices like Knuth and Francis Collins. Also, I really think Polkinghorne will go down as one of the best critical thinkers of our time, mostly because he is highly visible and because he has the respect of both honest theologians and honest scientists.
So what's your top 10?
