God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (2 page)

That’s why I have spent the last thirty years focusing on university campuses around the world. The campus is an exciting
place, a crossroads where a person’s cultural upbringing meets the world of ideas. It can also be the place where the truth of Jesus Christ shines the brightest. The gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t prevail only when there are no competitors; it shines most brightly when it is held up to other faiths. Secular religions, like Darwinian naturalism, can’t make the same boast. They don’t do well when faced with competition. They try to eliminate rivals. That’s why there is enormous energy spent keeping any reference to the existence of design or intelligent creation out of the classroom. Real faith—particularly real faith in Jesus Christ—welcomes the challenge.

Remember that Christianity originally arose in the hostile culture of the Roman Empire, where to believe in Jesus Christ could cost you your life. Thousands of early believers were thrown to the lions, burned at the stake, or even crucified, as Christ was, for their faith. The experience of the early Christians wasn’t a result of the culture they were born into or the way their parents raised them. Unlike more militant religions that force people to believe at the point of the sword, early Christianity spread by a force that was fairly unknown to men at the time—the force of divine love. This is what caused those who had grown up in the Roman Empire’s culture of violence, subjugation, and fear to turn to Christianity. Christ commanded His followers to advance His message by the irresistible force of love and the power of truth.

True faith in God isn’t coerced. It arises freely. The message of Christ transformed the Roman Empire because that message was based in love and truth and because it did not coerce obedience as other religions did. That’s why skeptics, idolaters, and atheists turned to the message of Jesus in the early years of
Christianity, regardless of where they were born. In places such as America, where the Christian faith has been practiced for generations, those born in the faith have an advantage that should not be ignored or dismissed as trivial.

T
HE
E
NDURING
G
OSPEL
S
TORY

The gospel is the good news that God became man in Jesus Christ. He lived the life we should have lived (perfectly keeping the moral law); He then died the death we should have died (for breaking that law). Three days later He rose from the dead, proving He is the Son of God and offering the gift of salvation to everyone who will repent and believe the gospel.

• God became man in Jesus Christ.
God stepped into the world by taking on human flesh. The religions of the world call men to ascend and work their way to God. Christianity explains that God came down to us.

• He lived the life we should have lived.
God expects us to keep the moral law. Christ lived a perfect life. His life modeled the life completely yielded to God. This was the life that God intended all men and women to live.

• He died the death we should have died.
This is a difficult truth for skeptics to embrace, that evil must be punished. If there is no consequence for breaking a law, then the law ceases to be a law. Christ bore our punishment by taking our place through His death on a Roman cross.

• He rose from the dead.
Christ’s resurrection from the dead verified His identity and proved that His authority was real. It also gives us hope that there is life after death.

• He offers salvation to those who will repent and believe.
In God’s gift of salvation we not only receive forgiveness of sins but also are delivered from the power of evil and its consequences—both in this life and the next. To repent means to turn from evil and from trusting in our own efforts to earn our own salvation. In turning from evil, we turn to Christ and believe. The promise is straightforward:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

M
Y
S
TORY

Despite being born in America and raised in a family that attended church, I lived as if there was no God. As long as I didn’t break any serious laws, I was okay. The notion of being religious was repulsive. Church was just a place to have weddings and funerals.

As a third-year university student, my personal problems became too big to ignore. As much as I tried to run from them or
drown them with drugs and alcohol, they only grew larger. The turning point came when I began to doubt my doubts about God and I humbled myself by admitting I had deep needs. That step of humility put me in a position to listen when someone started talking to me about the reality of God and His incarnation as Jesus Christ. I’m grateful for the people who took the time to speak to me, answer my questions, and ultimately call my bluff by challenging my unbelief.

For the first time I understood something that was truly good news. What was that something? That God had foreseen my need and provided help, long before I knew I needed it. How long before? Try two thousand years before. At the right time in history, God became man in Jesus.

I decided to believe God’s story and accept it as true—not just true for me but really true for all humanity—the metanarrative that defines reality in this age of uncertainty. That fateful decision changed the course of my life. My questions were not all answered at once. In fact, following Christ has been a journey of continually finding the answers to the questions and quandaries of our existence. Yet time and time again, the answers have come. God isn’t afraid of our questions, but we must ask them not out of hostility toward Him, but out of trust “that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6). Because God is real, humanity’s search for Him will not be in vain. With this hope in mind, I write this book for three types of people:

The Seeker
is attempting to believe but faces doubts about whether God is real. I offer the evidence in these pages hoping that person will be able to realize that it is indeed credible as well as fulfilling to believe in God. Even before understanding
Christianity or the Bible, there is ample evidence that the world around us is no accident.

The Believer
knows God is real subjectively but cannot easily articulate this faith to unbelievers. Hopefully these chapters will make the evidence for God clear so that it can be easily comprehended and then presented to others.

The Skeptic
may be reading this book from a critical point of view and a predetermined mind-set that there is no God. My hope is that regardless of how attached this reader is to skepticism, the following evidence will ironically allow a seed of doubt to be planted, helping that person break free of the matrix of a godless worldview and embrace the real story that best corresponds to the evidence, the one that declares, “
God’s not dead
.”

1
GOD’S NOT DEAD

What divides us is not science, we are both committed to science, but our worldviews. No one wants to base their life on a delusion, but which is a delusion? Christianity or atheism?

—J
OHN
L
ENNOX
¹

When a Man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.

—
ATTRIBUTED TO
G. K. C
HESTERTON
²

I WAS IN MY THIRD YEAR OF COLLEGE WHEN MY ATHEIST older brother, Ben, decided to try to talk me out of my Christian faith. I probably looked like an easy target. I had not been a Christian that long, and Ben was in his third year of law school at
Southern Methodist University
in Dallas. He was at the top of his class, already had a master’s degree in counseling, and had been sharpening his disdain for Christianity for a while.

We arranged to meet over a weekend at our parents’ house in Dallas. Ben prepared as if he was going to be trying a legal case,
studying the Bible to get the ammunition he needed to blow me out of my new faith. He told one of his classmates, “I’m going home to get my little brother out of this born-again thing.” He showed up with his prepared questions and finely tuned challenges, anticipating anything I might say. He was confident he could get me to abandon this whole notion of faith in God and belief in Jesus Christ.

I’d like to tell you that I had brilliant, learned answers for everything he brought up. But I never had the chance to respond. As I listened to and addressed Ben’s doubts simply, the truth of God’s Word began to soften his heart. I could see he was doubting his doubts. There was finally a moment when I told him, “Ben, it’s not what you don’t know about God that’s keeping you from believing; it’s what you do know. You know He is real and you know He is holy [meaning pure].” The apostle Paul wrote that people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). The reason? They don’t like God’s rules. The problem with this is that it’s like trying to hold a beach ball under the water: the harder you push truth down, the more forcefully it resurfaces. This was definitely what my brother was doing. He was trying to escape from the pangs of conscience that were convicting him of his behavior.

At the end of the day—the day on which he intended to talk me out of my faith—I baptized Ben in a swimming pool. Not long after he came up out of the water he said, “I don’t think you answered all my questions, but I think I was asking the wrong questions.” Today, Ben is a successful trial attorney in Austin, Texas, and a formidable witness for Christ.

That weekend thirty years ago was a turning point for both Ben and me. He became a believer in Jesus Christ while he was
trying to talk me out of “this born-again thing.” And since that day, I’ve devoted my life to getting people out of “this atheist thing.” I work primarily among university students around the world, and I have been joined by thousands of others who have found that faith in God is both spiritually revitalizing and intellectually satisfying. We’ve also seen the opposite: that atheism doesn’t satisfy a man’s heart or mind.

T
HE
E
ND OF
F
AITH?

More than forty years ago, the cover of
Time
magazine asked, “Is God Dead?”
³
The writers were reflecting upon the famous claim made by nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that God is dead. Other voices from that century raised the same issue in different words. Followers of Charles Darwin had suggested that belief in God would soon disappear from a scientifically progressive society. Karl Marx had said that religion is a drug, “the opium of the people.”
⁴
In 1999,
The Economist
magazine published an obituary for God.
⁵

But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. In 2009, the senior editor of
The Economist
cowrote the book
God Is Back
,
⁶
which served as a retraction of the 1999 article. Christianity is experiencing astounding
growth
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In
Europe
, where there has been generations of religious decline, there are encouraging signs of
spiritual
growth, particularly in places such as London, Berlin, and Dublin that have a deep history of faith in God. This is due to an intellectual renaissance as well as a spiritual one. People are awakening from the dogmatic slumbers of
secularism
and
naturalism. And in America the overwhelming majority still acknowledge the existence of God, and the nation is beginning to witness a spiritual awakening among youth. In spite of the fact that God has been virtually banished from the classroom, university and high school students are questioning what they’ve been taught—the naturalistic dogma that the universe and life are merely the product of blind, random forces—and they are acknowledging that there is rational grounds for believing in a Creator. The thick fog of unbelief that has hovered over academia is starting to burn off as more and more evidence for an intelligent Creator surfaces.

With this rise in faith worldwide has come a corresponding response. Over the last decade the secularist camp set out to stem the tide of renewed faith. The term
new atheists
has been given to a group of skeptics who have sought to revive the arguments against God and repackage them for a new generation. Ironically, very little is
new
about these atheistic arguments. In fact, the success of their claims is mostly due to the fact that the theistic responses to their claims—which are the truth about God—have not been widely circulated.

A generation ago, C. S. Lewis composed a set of lectures that were broadcast over the
BBC
and were transcribed and published as
Mere Christianity
.
Formerly an atheist, Lewis realized that he had to ignore too much evidence to maintain his unbelief:

If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest one, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had
to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most.
⁷

The arguments atheists use against God quickly disappear like a mirage when they are answered by learned believers such as Lewis. Atheists claim that the universe isn’t what you would expect if a supernatural God existed. All this death and
suffering
, they say, are plain evidence that a loving, intelligent God could not be behind it all. The truth is that God has created a world where free moral
agents
are able to have real choices to do good or evil. If God had created a world without that fundamental
choice
and option to do evil, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. God made a world where choices are real and humanity is affected by the choices of other humans. Drunk drivers kill innocent people. Some murder and steal from their fellow men. Though God gave clear commandments to humanity, we have for the most part ignored these directives. The mess that results is not God’s fault. It’s ours.