PreacherMike

If I was going to argue the position of atheism, I’d argue about like Sam Harris did. I’d speak about these things:

1. A sense that something is very wrong with this world — something that is hard to mesh with a believe in a loving, all-powerful God. I’d ask why this God doesn’t protect his people better. (How hard would it be to keep an SUV full of teenagers who are returning from a youth rally from turning over on I-20? How difficult would it be to answer the prayer of thousands of believers asking for a 5-year-old with cancer to be healed?)

2. A conviction that the personal testimonies aren’t enough. The same testimonies to healing, answered prayer, and changed lives have come from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, etc. People who believe dramatically different things have offered witness to the amazing things they’ve seen their God do.

3. An observation that people have continued to be willing to kill each other over their holy books. Partly, this is saying that the faith doesn’t seem to “work.” While we might say that’s just talking about the inconsistencies of the people of faith rather than of the faith itself, Jesus said, “By your love they will know you’re my disciples.” Apparently, if they live with grudges, bitterness, and murderous intent, it’s fair enough to assume they’re not Jesus’ disciples.

4. A feeling that the holy books of the various religions have serious problems. Each religion finds serious flaws in the holy books of the other religions. Few are able to back off and say that they all are problematic. (E.g., just pointing out that the OT has a higher moral than, say, the Babylonians, doesn’t really answer all the questions about killing teens who talk back and about taking women as personal spoils of war.)

All right, you may be wondering. Has Mike converted?

Nope. But I’ve always had a deep appreciation for serious struggles of faith. Several people introduced me to an approach to Christian evidences of the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT variety when I was in college. Shortly after I graduated, I started a Bible study with university students at UNC-Wilmington who were searching for faith. It quickly became clear that the EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT perspective only demands a verdict if you already believe. (There is, of course, some value to that.)

First, let me mention a couple books I read over the holidays that I think help us think through Christian apologetics in our current world context. One is Greg Boyd’s Letters From a Skeptic. The book contains a series of letters that Boyd exchanged with his father, Edward Boyd, who was an unbeliever.

In the preface Greg Boyd writes: “Exceptionally intelligent, intensely skeptical, very strong-willed, and 70 years old — could a more unlikely candidate for conversion be found than my father? He had given me little grounds for hope.”

The letters from the dad ask the good, tough questions; the letters from the son are honest and hopeful.

The last letter in the book says:

Dear Greg:

Dad

The other book is Alister McGrath’s brief (123 pages) Glimpsing the Face of God: The Search for Meaning in the Universe. It’s the kind of book that I’d be glad to put in the hands of those university students whose rental house I met in weekly so many years ago.

Here are a couple of my conclusions about Christian evidences:

1. My central arguments for faith aren’t cosmological (”nothing comes from nothing”), teleiological (”there’s an intricately designed watch, so there must be a watch-maker”), moral (”why does everyone agree that Hitler was evil?”), or ontological (”I can imagine that there is a God . . . so there must be a God”). I begin as a Christ-follower. I am a believer in the story of Jesus Christ. That’s where I begin. I believe because I have committed myself to this one who came from God “to put the world to rights” (as N. T. Wright would say it). So I’m inviting others to consider that possibility with me. My opening move is one of story. Within the consideration of that story, the other traditional Christian evidences find their value.

2. The whole EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT doesn’t ring true for many seekers. If there were evidence that DEMANDS a decision, they’d already believe. Some are dishonest, of course, but many are not. Many are genuine truth-seekers. I prefer to speak about clues. There are footprints in the sand. We’re trying to figure out the story behind those footprints.

“What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaning and destiny, and fingerprinted with the presence of God? This book is an exploration of this fascinating possibility.” (McGrath)

Someone asked in my last post how I could question Harris’s statement that atheism is “simply an admission of the obvious.” And the reason is because you can’t prove faith in atheism. There is no scientific discovery that can conclude definitively that there is no God. The man who was a primary driver in the Genome Project is himself a devoted believer!

Again, from McGrath: “There has never been any shortage of people who will tell us that the evidence is totally persuasive, and that — unless we are complete fools — we will accept that there is no meaning in life, and no God behind this world. Some argue that atheism is the only logically and scientifically respectable worldview. Yet this overlooks the inconvenient fact that the truth claims of atheism simply cannot be proved. How do we know that there is no God? The simple fact of the matter is that atheism is a faith, which draws conclusions that go beyond the available evidence.”

Finally, today, these words from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”