God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (27 page)

E
UROPE

Signs of
spiritual
renewal are also appearing in Europe. “Nevertheless there are signs that the same forces that are reviving religion in America—the quest for community in an increasingly atomized world, the desire to counterbalance choice with a sense of
moral
certainty
—are making headway in Europe.”
¹⁶
In the UK, though attendance in the Church of England may be in decline, there are churches popping up all over the kingdom. This year I spent several days training students at Imperial College in London to share the gospel with
The God Test
. Possibly the
foremost Christian apologist of our time, William Lane Craig who holds two PhDs in both philosophy and theology, challenged Richard Dawkins to debate his book
The God Delusion
at Oxford. Dawkins was a no-show. Instead Craig spoke to a full house at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford and laid bare the empty arguments of the book. Dawkins had spearheaded a bus campaign a few years before with signs that read, “There’s probably no God.” In the days following the scheduled challenge at Oxford, buses had a different sign, “There’s probably no Dawkins,” referring to Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig.
¹⁷

Pastor Wolfgang Eckleben, who oversees six congregations in the London area, told me recently, “After almost twenty years in London, I see an unprecedented openness to the gospel. As Jesus said, ‘the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.’ We simply need more people who can come here and help us reach out.”
¹⁸
Over 2.5 million people have taken the
Alpha Course
, which was developed at Holy Trinity Church in Brompton by Nicky Gumbel.

Gareth Lowe, a young South African living in Berlin and leading an outreach to the university students in that historic city, sees the beginnings of
spiritual
openness in
Germany
:

While there has not been an abandonment of rationalism and
secularism
in Germany, there is a growing awareness that it has not and cannot answer the deepest questions of life. There is a growing hunger for spiritual experiences, for
meaning and purpose
, and for deep relationships. It could be that Germany is at the early stages of a great spiritual awakening.
¹⁹

S
OUTH
A
MERICA

Though South America has historically been predominately Catholic, there has been a dramatic rise in evangelical Christianity. There are conservatively one hundred million evangelical believers, as well as millions of Catholics. In Brazil more than one million have gathered for concerts featuring Christian artists conducting massive worship services. Churches with ten thousand or more members are commonplace in Brazil,
Argentina
, Chile, and Colombia.

In
Mexico
, Bob Sanders and David Angulo conduct an outreach in the Baja peninsula. They have distributed over 100,000 Bibles and
Purple Books
(a Bible study guide) throughout the area. They have seen the crime rate fall as the
knowledge
of God’s Word saturates the hearts and minds of the people.

In nations throughout Latin and South America, millions of Christians are experiencing powerful, life-changing encounters with God. As a result many churches are growing dramatically and driving cultural renewal in their cities.

N
ORTH
A
MERICA

The prediction of the end of Christianity is proving to be wishful thinking on the part of secularists who want to see all public displays of faith eliminated. Though America was founded on the principles of
freedom
of speech and religion, many want freedom
from
religion. There has been a decline in North America in overall church attendance, but the numbers are misleading.
Nominal Christianity is fading, but evangelical Christianity is thriving. Ed Stetzer of
LifeWay Research
has confirmed this: “Mainline Protestantism and nominal Christianity are in decline, but robust evangelicalism is growing and is the future of the North American Church. In the years to come, evangelical Christianity will continue to be marked with committed Christians.”
²⁰

A
Barna
research poll indicated that the percentage of Americans who fall under the category of Born-Again Christians has actually increased from 31 percent in the early 1980s to 45 percent today.
²¹
Theological moderates have transitioned to theological liberals or evangelicals, who both have clear messages and convictions. Members of mid-sized churches have migrated either to small
spiritual
communities or to megachurches.
²²
The church in America is still strong and vibrant. Thirty years ago there were relatively few congregations that exceeded one thousand in attendance. Today there are over seven thousand. From the enormous conferences that fill stadiums to massive displays of faith at the Washington Mall, the Christian faith continues to flourish in this land. America is a nation that firmly believes in God as the book
God Is Back
confirms: “The most thorough study of American religious beliefs, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, demonstrates clearly that the world’s most powerful country is also one of the most religious.”
²³

Let’s look beyond the numbers into the very lives of people who have been impacted by the message of the gospel. There are literally millions with testimonies of how they came to faith from unbelief. Many even testify to experiencing supernatural
miracles
.
²⁴

Though many throughout history have turned their backs on God, many more have turned to Him. The majority of those who turn from Christ do so not because of a lack of evidence, but because of a lack of effort. They simply quit trying, or others stop trying to reach them. Living in darkness is much easier than living in the light; so are apathy and indifference toward others. That’s why nominal Christianity is diminishing, but the real faith is growing. This kind of faith is not a particular church or denomination but consists of genuine believers who have yielded themselves to following Christ.

P
ERSONAL
S
TORIES OF
A
THEISM TO
F
AITH

Each story is unique, each life important from the poor to the wealthy, from the educated to the illiterate. The stories I highlight here are, for the most part, not of people who were brought up as Christians. In these testimonies we see how faith can grow in the most challenging of circumstances.

M
ING
W
ANG
: A C
HINESE
A
THEIST AT
H
ARVARD

Graduate of Harvard and
MIT

The existence of God is demonstrated powerfully in the amazing journey of a dear friend of mine, one of the world’s foremost laser eye surgeons, Ming Wang, MD, PhD. He is a Harvard and MIT honors graduate and one of a small number of cataract and LASIK surgeons in the world who holds a doctorate in laser physics. He has performed well over fifty-five thousand cataract and LASIK procedures, including over four thousand on fellow doctors. Dr. Wang performed the world’s first 3-D LASIK and
was one of the first surgeons in the United States to perform laser cataract surgery.

Growing up during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in
China
, Ming was denied the opportunity of going to school. Instead, he played the Chinese violin, called the
er-hu
, in an effort to avoid deportation to a poor part of the country, where he would have faced a life of poverty and hard labor. This devastating fate fell upon millions of youth in China during that time. A chance meeting with a visiting American professor helped Ming come to America. He arrived in the United States in 1982 with fifty dollars, a Chinese-English dictionary in his pocket, and a big American dream in his heart. Ming truly appreciated the
freedom
and opportunity to learn in this country, and he worked hard, becoming one of the world’s most renowned laser eye specialists today. “God is not dead. He is alive and well and more powerful than ever before, including in the scientific community.” Dr. Wang continued:

I came to know Jesus Christ because I did not find in science the answers to life’s questions for which I was searching. Actually, the more I learned about science, the more—not less—evidence that I saw of God’s creation and design. For example, as I was becoming an ophthalmologist and learning about the inner workings of the eye, the amazing and logical arrangement of photoreceptors, ganglion cells, and neurons, I realized that there is absolutely no way that an intricate structure such as a human eye could ever evolve from a random compilation of cells. The very complexity of a human eye is, in fact, the most powerful evidence of the existence of God.

While Ming was at
Harvard
Medical School and
MIT
, a Christian pediatric professor sensed the opportunity to influence then-atheist Ming and took him out for lunch. “What is across the street?” he asked.

“A car,” Ming responded.

“What is the difference between a car and human brain?”

Ming answered confidently, “A brain is much more complex.”

The professor then made this critical point: “Can you imagine a random pile of scrap metals assembling themselves into a car?”

“No!”

“Then, how about a human brain? Could it assemble itself?”

To this day, Ming feels deeply indebted to the professor, whom he admired scientifically and who cared enough about young Ming, sensed his struggle with science, and pointed out the way to Jesus Christ. Ming says now that he has found the Lord for himself, he needs to do what the professor did years ago in helping him, namely, use his scientific influence and medical reputation to encourage the next generation of young doctors to search for truth and find answers in Christianity. “As a Christian and a scientist, I do believe that faith and science are compatible and can work together. Actually it is through uniting rather than separating them and through perseverance and believing that God has created this world, and it is without contradictions, that we can actually find new, unexpected, and more powerful solutions to the problems in our lives.”
²⁵

J
OE
M
ARLIN
: A
N
A
THEIST WITH
C
OMPASSION

MD and PhD Candidate at
New York University

Joe is one of those people who simply wants to make a difference in life. More specifically, he wants to help others. He dispels
the myth that atheists are all angry people who care about nothing but themselves. After graduating from Cal Berkley, he was accepted at New York University into a program that allowed him to earn his PhD and MD simultaneously. Though an atheist, his philosophy on creation was simple: “something happened.” He describes his beliefs as rooted in the
chaos theory
, the idea that all life’s occurrences are interconnected, though the cause-and-effect link between them is often obscured or unknown.

It was in a classroom at NYU where he started questioning his atheism. “Sitting in class one day there was this deep sense of the reality of God that swept over me. It was as if God were speaking to my mind, ‘I am real.’ ” Months would go by before he told anyone of this experience.

After a series of conversations about God and
spiritual
things, he was invited to a Manhattan church, Morningstar New York. There he met Bruce Ho, a pastor who had relocated from Honolulu after the 9/11 tragedy. “Bruce met with me every week for two months. He listened to me and would give me straightforward answers. What really touched my heart was that he would tell me every time we completed a session together, ‘Joe, I’m really excited about the things God is doing in your life.’ Even though I wasn’t a Christian yet, I knew that there was more to our existence than ‘something happened.’ There is actually a Someone.”

Joe had read
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins and other books that talked about the Bible being merely a book of myths. He started reading the
Gospels
for himself and found them completely opposite from how the skeptics portrayed them. “One day I started praying and sensing that same presence I felt in the classroom months before. This time, I knew that it was Jesus. So I spoke to Him and said, ‘Hello, I’m Joe.’ ”

I asked him in the interview if Jesus said anything back to him. He said, “No, He didn’t. But I knew that He knew me.”
²⁶

B
RIAN
M
ILLER
: A P
HYSICIST WITH
F
AITH

Graduate of
MIT
and Duke

Dr. Miller began his undergraduate education at MIT wanting to understand how the universe works and to pursue the deepest questions about human existence. To fulfill the first goal, he majored in physics. To pursue the second, he had lengthy discussions about the
meaning of life
with his friends, signed up for a freshman course on the Bible, and read Richard Dawkins’s book
The Blind Watchmaker
. The Bible professor claimed that the stories in Scripture were mostly fictional accounts written to advance the agendas of the authors. Dawkins’s book claimed that the apparent design in nature was an illusion and the result of the blind forces of evolution. As a consequence, God most likely was a myth.

One night Brian confessed he did not know if God existed, but if God did exist, He needed to show him clearly what was true. Brian further explained to me in our interview that as a scientist, he could believe only what was proven true with clear-cut evidence. That night began a long journey that led him through a careful study of science, philosophy, history,
archaeology
, anthropology, and a few other disciplines. Through his studies, he learned that science plainly pointed to God’s existence and His care for humanity. Brian also realized the
Gospels
are well supported by historical evidence, and the resurrection of Jesus is virtually undeniable by any rational standard. God not only satisfied Brian’s need for clear evidence but also performed
miracles
: Brian saw his Christian friends supernaturally heal the sick in
Jesus’ name, and at times he heard God’s voice in subtle yet transformative ways. He was personally experiencing God’s love.