In The Temptation to Exist, the French philosopher E. M. Cioran said, “We never follow the consistent rationalist for long; once we pluck out his mystery and know where he is headed, we abandon him to his system.” After the cold and somewhat sterile rationalism of An Introduction to Christian Apologetics, Edward Carnell seemed to experience this sort of dissatisfaction within himself. His second major work of apologetics, A Philosophy of the Christian Religion, published in 1952, developed a defense of Christianity based on the broader category of values and began with the claim that “religion starts whenever an individual is willing to name a value for which to live and die.” He designated clearly the limited role of reason and logic in this quest:

Put another way, for the whole person satisfaction must involve more than reason's “knowledge by inference”; it also entails “knowledge by acquaintance,” a category that includes knowledge of persons as well as places and things, and that enjoys its ultimate fulfillment in knowledge of God. Carnell called this angle of vision “the perspective of inwardness” and said that Kierkegaard taught him how to use it: