God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty
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Authors: Rice Broocks
Tags: #Christian, #Non-Fiction, #Religion, #Philosophy
© 2013 Rice Broocks
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version
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Scripture quotations marked
NIV
are from the Holy Bible, New International Version
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, NIV
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Scripture quotations marked
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are from the King James Version of the Bible.
ISBN 978-0-7852-3833-1 (IE)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954165
ISBN 978-0-8499-4853-4
Printed in the United States of America
13 14 15 16 17 RRD 9 8 7 6 5
To my children’s children
So the next generation would know them,
even the children yet to be born,
and they in turn would tell their children.
—P
SALM
78:6
NIV
CONTENTS
Introduction: Ground Zero of Faith
Chapter 2: Real Faith Isn’t Blind
Chapter 3: Good and Evil Are No Illusions
Chapter 4: There Was a Beginning
Chapter 5: Life Is No Accident
Chapter 6: Life Has Meaning and Purpose
Chapter 7: Jesus and the Resurrection
Chapter 8: The Witness of Scripture
INTRODUCTION
GROUND ZERO OF FAITH
Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized . . . because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers’ arguments were deeply flawed.
—W
ILLIAM
W
ILBERFORCE
,
R
EAL
C
HRISTIANITY
1
“GOD, I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE IN YOU ANYMORE.” THIS WAS the frustrated conclusion of my friend Dean as he drove down the highway thinking of a conversation he had recently with an atheist—a conversation that rocked his world. He had been deeply challenged by this person’s questions and objections to the existence of God. What was most upsetting to Dean was that he had no answers. Frustrated and embarrassed by his own inability to answer this skeptical barrage, he finally told God he intended to stop believing.
What happened next was the last thing he expected. After making his declaration that he would no longer believe, he heard a voice:
Who do you think you’re talking to?
He immediately pulled his car over to the side of the road to “get his heart right” with God. And he did. Then Dean had to “get his head right.” Rather than bury his doubts, he brought them into the light and began to deal with them by studying the evidence that undergirds real faith. He says he is now able to answer the skeptic’s challenges as well as help the doubter who is struggling to find faith.
Stories like Dean’s have led me to write this book. My hope is that every believer will be able to grasp the reasons to believe in God and be able to communicate them with the world around them. This is the challenge given to us from one of history’s greatest examples of someone who recovered from the dark night of unbelief: the apostle Peter. “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15
NIV
). There are straightforward answers for the skeptics’ questions, but most believers aren’t familiar enough with them to be able to explain those reasons to others. I hope this book changes that for those who read it.
The bluster from the ranks of the unbelieving is summed up in the words of musician and zoologist Greg Graffin of the group Bad Religion, who asserts that those who suggest life was intelligently designed have “not produced a single shred of data” to back up their claims.
2
Graffin is partially right. There isn’t a shred of data. There is evidence for an intelligent Creator everywhere you look. To say there is no evidence for this Creator is like saying the thousands of paintings in an art museum couldn’t have been painted because there are no artists visible in the gallery. The evidence of an intelligent mind behind the universe is so overwhelming that it has “shredded” the notion that everything was produced by nature alone. The evidence for God is not found only
in some obscure fossil or the untestable hypotheses of a theoretical physicist; it is glaringly present everywhere you turn.
I intend to give you an overview of that evidence. Faith in God is rising, yet so is skepticism. In the name of science and reason, faith is being framed as irrational and illogical. The metanarrative of Darwinian evolution has turned many minds and hearts, teaching that life arose spontaneously from nothing, for no reason, and for no purpose, guided by the “blind watchmaker” of natural selection.
3
The belief that everything we see around us came about through natural causes is called
naturalism
. As Stephen Hawking concluded, “What place, then, for a creator?”
4
I intend to show you the need for the Creator to explain the world around us as well as the world within us, that is, the human soul. To do this, I refer to some of the thousands of scholarly works written on the evidence for the existence of God. For centuries great minds have wrestled with the idea of an inspired creation and brilliantly answered doubts, quandaries, and accusations. And today we need the wisdom of history’s giants of philosophy, theology, and science. I will refer to their arguments alongside my own comments as you absorb the genius of those who have already fought and won the great intellectual battles for faith. My own ideas and observations have come through years of study and discussions on these topics with skeptics as well as seekers. The reality is that people come to a place of faith not against reason but through it. That’s why the first step of faith or
ground zero
is to believe God exists.
Make no mistake; the atheists present their case with great fervor. They assert there is no rational proof for the existence of God, the Bible is a book of fairy tales and contradictions, and religion in general is a bad thing. Furthermore, they charge that
anyone who is rational and not delusional will come to the same conclusions. They feast on unprepared religious people who unintelligently hold to beliefs they’ve merely inherited, who have only a secondhand faith. But these skeptics seldom take a second look to see how unsustainable their own views are. Instead, they believe it’s only a matter of time until everyone sees things their way. Their strategy is simple:
1. Use ridicule and mockery to label people of faith as anti-intellectual or irrational.
2. Set up a false dichotomy between science and faith, telling people to choose one or the other.
3. Keep the debate one-sided by not allowing a dissenting opinion in the public arena, making sure the only places where expressions of faith are allowed are in strictly religious settings.
The sad reality is that this strategy is working. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007, 83 percent of millennials said they never doubted God’s existence. In 2012, the number dropped to 68 percent. That is a fifteen-point drop in five years.
5
Other studies have shown that more than half of the young people in America who attended church will drop out after they leave high school for college.
6
While there are a variety of reasons for this, one of them is that these students have never been prepared to handle the objections the skeptics raise. Young people must have more than an experience of Jesus if they’re going to withstand the intellectual onslaught that awaits them in college.
As a Christian minister my passion is to teach the truths believers need not only to defend themselves from getting robbed
of their faith but also to go on the offensive with the unbelieving world around them, demonstrating that God exists. Once that truth is firmly grasped, it becomes a logical necessity to seek out the nature and character of this Creator. This God has indeed revealed Himself to humanity through Jesus Christ.
One of my great joys has been watching people find a faith in God that is both intellectually satisfying and spiritually fulfilling. The good news is that there are encouraging signs of a spiritual awakening happening among young people. Though not as dramatic as the growth of the Christian faith in Africa, Asia, and South America, thousands of people in North America have come to faith in God for the first time or returned to a faith they once had; but the struggle is far from over. The new generation of skeptics is committed to its own nonbelieving agenda. Its mission is to see the elimination of all religious faith, or as atheist Sam Harris said, “the end of faith.”
7
People of faith cannot afford to be passive and disengaged. Many fall into the trap of thinking,
Maybe if we are nice enough, they will know we are true believers and God is real.
After all, doesn’t the Bible say to “preach the gospel and if necessary use words”? Well, no, it doesn’t. That phrase is usually attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, but it is doubtful that he ever said it. While we must certainly treat those who express hostility toward God with dignity, we must also be prepared to speak the truth boldly. No one said it would be easy. Even the great evangelist and apostle of the early church Saul of Tarsus asked people to pray for him so he could “speak boldly, as I ought to speak” (Ephesians 6:20). The evidence from the New Testament is that the apostles and the early Christians possessed this boldness to proclaim the gospel at the risk of their own lives. We must, at least, be as bold
in our witness for Christ as skeptics are in their attacks against the faith.
Those early believers grasped something we need to understand. Every worldview is in essence a story, a metanarrative that attempts to answer the real questions of our existence. As it has often been said by a wide range of authors, whoever tells the most believable story wins the age. The early Christians told their story and confirmed it with evidence: Jesus resurrected to fulfill the words of the ancient prophets. In our postmodern world people want to believe every story is equally valid, but all stories aren’t equal. Once on an airplane I sat next to a strange woman who told me she believed she was God. After hearing this I smiled and said, “If you’re God, I’ve got a lot of questions for you.” Reason helps us dismiss absurd claims like this.
Similarly skeptics make claims that are thin and easily disproved as well. Other arguments require a much more thoughtful response, such as their claim that your religion depends on where you were born. If you were born in America, you would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you would be a Hindu. There’s some truth to this, but it isn’t the whole story. Just because you were born into a certain religion doesn’t mean you will remain in that faith once you are old enough to think for yourself and consider other worldviews. In fact, the lives of many of the skeptics themselves prove this point. Many of them were born into Christian families and cultures but left once they got older. The same is often true for people born in any culture. When later in life they are exposed to the free market of ideas, they change. They switch. They choose other options.
