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1 an Apologetic Sketch This Essay Presents a Two-Step Apologetic for the Truth of Christianity. the First Step Presents a Cumul

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1 an Apologetic Sketch This Essay Presents a Two-Step Apologetic for the Truth of Christianity. the First Step Presents a Cumul An Apologetic Sketch This essay presents a two-step apologetic for the truth of Christianity. The first step presents a cumulative argument for the existence of a God. The second step argues that God has revealed himself in Jesus. I call this an apologetic sketch because it stands in relation to the overall evidence for Christianity as a sketch stands in relation to the finished work of an artistic genius. The existence of the Christian God is either a fact or a fantasy. If it is fact, then it is the greatest fact; indeed, it is the greatest possible fact . If it is fantasy, then it is the greatest possible fantasy: “The idea of God has guided or deluded more lives, changed more history, inspired more music and poetry and philosophy than anything else, real or imagined.” 1 Nietzsche notoriously proclaimed that “God is dead”; but Martin Burber’s alternative symbol of “the eclipse of God” 2 is more accurate. God has suffered a cultural eclipse in which belief is no longer a ‘live option’ for many; and as Philosopher Peter Kreeft writes, “both death and eclipse produce similar effects in our experience: darkness.” 3 Roger Scruton points out that: “The announcement of the death of God is less a statement about God, than a statement about us.” 4 For ours is a culture in which “secularism, subjectivism, relativism, materialism, and hedonism are the craters on the moon that has risen up to eclipse the sun of God.” 5 William J. Wainwright is surely right to note that “Disbelief is less often the result of intellectual objections than of the clash between religious beliefs and attitudes and sensibilities that have been shaped by an environment that leaves little room for God or the sacred.” 6 Those “attitudes and sensibilities” are often the result of intellectual objections; but these objections are, for the most part, uncritically accepted as part of a media-generated ‘climate of opinion’ that outlasts the demolition of its intellectual roots. Nietzsche’s ‘parable of the madman’ has thus proved truly prophetic: “Where is God?’ . ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? . .Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? . .Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing?” 7 The eclipse of God rends asunder the realms of fact and value: “when ‘God is dead’, the objective world is reduced to matter and the spiritual world is reduced to subjectivity.” 8 Such schism in the fabric of one’s worldview leads to the nihilism of postmodernity, either by the direct route of metaphysical naturalism, or by the scenic, ‘double-think’ route of what Francis A. Schaeffer dubbed the ‘two stories’. This fact/value division lies the foundation of modernity, but many make an attempt to ‘have their cake and eat it’ by making an unsupported affirmation of value and meaning that constitutes an ‘upper story’ metaphysically incommensurate with the 1 Peter Kreeft, Does God Exist ?, (Prometheus Books, 1993), Introduction. 2 Quoted by Peter Kreeft, C.S.Lewis for the Third Millennium , (Ignatius, 1994), p38. 3 ibid , p38. 4 Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Philosophy , p95. 5 Peter Kreeft, op cit . 6 William J. Wainwright, ‘Skepticism, Romanticism & Faith’, God and the Philosophers , op cit , p85. 7 Neitzche, Gay Science . 8 Peter Kreeft, Heaven, The Heart’s Deepest Longing , (Ignatius, 1989), p23. 1 available naturalistic foundations. 9 As R.C.Sproul argues, “the existence of God is the supreme proto -supposition for all theoretical thought. God’s existence is the chief element in constructing any worldview. To deny this chief premise is to set one’s sails for the island of nihilism. the darkest continent of the darkened mind. .” 10 Postmodern nihilism is simply the honest recognition that a naturalistic foundation is not only incapable of justifying faith in meaning and value, but is incompatible with such faith. Whether it is reached directly or indirectly, the darkness of the resulting postmodern condition is brilliantly illustrated by apologist Ravi Zacharias from the Wrexner Centre for the Performing Arts , which has been branded ‘America’s first deconstructionalist building’: “inside you encounter stairways that go nowhere, pillars that hang from the ceiling without purpose, and angled surfaces configured to create a sense of vertigo. The architect, we are informed, designed this building to reflect life itself – senseless and incoherent. I had just one question: did he do the same with the foundations?” 11 Even in the depths of their despair the postmodernist must depend upon that which he or she denies. Western civilization is suffering from an eclipse of values (of truth, goodness and beauty) that has inevitably followed the eclipse of God; and now life is full of stairways going nowhere. As one cynic said, “God is dead, Marx is dead, and I’m not feeling too well myself.” 12 Nietzsche himself admitted: “My life now consists in the wish that it might be otherwise. and that somebody might make my ‘truths’ appear incredible to me.” 13 As Douglas Groothuis writes: “A unified Christian vision for life – incorporating the good, the true and the beautiful – is up for grabs in postmodernity.” 14 The eclipse of God has resulted in a loss of objective meaning and purpose that should make us eager to explore with open minds the ultimate question: does God exist? 15 As Theologian David Ford writes: “No longer can it be seen as natural to dismiss the premodern as antiquated and irrelevant, or to assume that we have progressed beyond it. Instead. we can be free to engage with the resources of premodernity with some respect and even an expectation that they might have a good deal to teach us. Postmodern critiques have tended to be extreme and their suspicion has tended towards nihilism; but the benefit has been that a modern superiority complex is much harder to sustain, and so the religions, which have such deep roots in the premodern, can more plausibly be imagined as shapers of current life and thought.” 16 9 cf: Philosophia Christi , Series 2, Volume 1, Number 2, Paul Copan, ‘Can Michael Martin be a Moral Realist? Sic et Non ’’; & Series 2, Volume 2, Number 1, Michael Martin, ‘A Response to Paul Copan’s Critique of Atheistic Objective Morality’ & Paul Copan, ‘Atheistic Goodness Revisited: A Personal Reply to Michael Martin’. 10 R.C.Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas , (Crossway Books, 2000), p171. 11 Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God ?, (Word). 12 Steve Kumar, Christianity for Sceptics , (John Hunt, 2000), p79. 13 Neitzche, The Portable Neitzche , Walter Kaufman ed., (Doubleday, 1954), p441. 14 Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay , (IVP, 2000), p243. 15 “The greatest question of our time. is whether men can bear to live without God.” – Will Durrant. 16 David Ford, Theology – A Very Short Introduction , (), p35. 2 To ignore the challenge of God’s existence would be to engage in what C.S.Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’: “the uncritical assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so, buy whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.” 17 Why think that rational investigation can lead us either towards or away from God? Isn’t religion all about faith ? As C.S.Lewis defined it, faith is “the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” 18 Hence, “the battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.” 19 In other words, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive competitors: “New Testament religion tells us to love God with the mind (Matt. 22:37), to have an answer in the form of good reasons for why we believe what we believe (1 Peter 3:15), and to accept that God wishes to reason together with his creatures (Isa. 1:18), and to believe that human reason, though fallen, is still part of the image of God within us (Acts 17:27-28) and continues to be a gift we are to cultivate and exercise. Thus, the modern view of faith as something unrelated or even hostile to reason is a departure from traditional Christianity and not a genuine expression of it.”20 It is impossible to argue that ‘reason cannot be applied to God’; after all, such an assertion claims to apply to God! 21 As William Lane Craig notes, “no reason can ever be given to justify denying the validity of logical principles for propositions about God. For the very statement of such reasons. involves the affirmation of certain propositions about God, which are governed by the principles in question.” 22 Rather than pre-judging the issue, we should take a look at the case for God and see whether or not it convinces. As Norman L. Geilser says: “There are not different Gods but only two different approaches to one and the same God: divine declaration and philosophical inference. It should not seem strange to those who believe in God’s manifestation in His creation (Rom. 1:19,29; Ps. 19:1) that it is possible to arrive at knowledge of God by inference from these manifestations.” 23 Geisler & Corduan rightly conclude that: 17 C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy , (Fount).
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