Brother Jamey,
How did you get into philosophy so deeply? I've pieced together your story a bit over the years and find you to be an interesting brother. I admire you, friend!
I admire you as well my brother. But I try very hard not to be pretentious. I was actually a druggy back in highschool and not surprisingly I did horrible in school (or just enough to pass is better).
My drug dealer got me into Einstein and relativity theory, as well as quantum mechanics. I quickly, again no pretension on my part, began to out do him. So I had a math teacher in highschool who I would bother after class with math questions about that stuff.
He made a deal with me, that if did my homework and did good on the tests he would take as much time as I wanted to answer my questions. So I did, I would finish the quizzes and tests before anyone and stay after school to work through this stuff.
I was then with my ex-wife and we were going back to church, so I was pulled out of the drug life by God, and got married. I was obsessed with R. C. Sproul and anything he wrote on theology/philosophy/apologetics and his book that was mentioned introduced to me to those deeper questions that I knew were there but science didn't tackle them.
So I learned all three together and I'm still learning. In the Air force I was blessed with an amazing OPC church in Abeline TX and an amazing pastor who gave me carte blanche to his books.
In moving from Classical to Vantillian apologetics after I returned home it just stuck with me. I couldn't get enough of it. And I wanted first hand knowledge of the philosophers, I recommend this to anyone. Read about their philosophy but then read them.
When I moved home the whole Emergent Church/Post-conservative movement was going on and I remember thinking "you got to know this Postmodern stuff". After reading primary sources I came to the conclusion that not a lot of Evangelicals understood it. So I dived into that thinking that the world isn't going to take us seriously if we keep raising the same old Boogeyman from before (there's no such thing as truth, I mean who would honestly mean that). But now based on an autonomous basis, not a biblical one, that was in my opinion Evangelicals failure.
I'm not criticizing anyone just a general idea. Since then the bug is buried deep. I have been quite interested in the past 15 years of the passing of Postmodernism into, who knows what to call it. There's many different names but it's the same "God" anything other than biblical theology.
That I'm more interested in rather than why Evangelicals keep insisting that we live in a Postmodern world. That's how the Devil will get us by thinking we're fighting the last battle when we in a different age. It has passed and what did it give way to?
That's what the Apologists of today should be concerned with. We can and should debate apologetical method but have a united front to the unbelievers out there in defense of the faith. So now I'm still very much interested in philosophy but it tends to be directed more towards apologetics.
My list of favorite philosophers is St. Augustine, Cornelius Van Til, Herman Dooyeweerd (without his weird stuff), Robert Knudsen, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Blaise Pascal, William James, and others but that should suffice.
I hope that trip down memory lane was insightful at least to how much our great and merciful God guided me out of the horrors of that lifestyle and into a growing passion for the Kingdom and using the talents he gave and nurtured in me to the glory of that Kingdom. Praise be to God.
