Previous parts can be found here.

What argument is most convincing to plant the seeds of doubt (or, rather, faith) in an atheist’s mind?

Do you mind if I restate your question while retaining its original intent? It might be more interesting to phrase it this way: Atheists on this site have kindly submitted questions for me, but what questions would I ask an atheist?

As I pondered that issue, I decided to send emails to some of my friends to get advice on what they would ask. Here are a few of their replies — all of which I agree would be excellent to ask a skeptic. If they’re considered fully with all of their implications, they might indeed plant some seeds:

Historian Gary Habermas: “Utilizing each of the historical facts conceded by virtually all contemporary scholars, please produce a comprehensive natural explanation of Jesus’ resurrection that makes better sense than the event itself.”

These historical facts are: (1) Jesus was killed by crucifixion; (2) Jesus’ disciples believed that he rose and appeared to them; (3) The conversion of the church persecutor Saul, who became the Apostle Paul; (4) the conversion of the skeptic James, Jesus’ half-brother; (5) The empty tomb of Jesus. These “minimal facts” are strongly evidenced and are regarded as historical by the vast majority of scholars, including skeptics, who have written about the resurrection in French, German, and English since 1975. While the fifth fact doesn’t have quite the same virtual universal consensus, it nevertheless is conceded by 75 percent of the scholars and is well supported by the historical data if assessed without preconceptions.

Philosopher Paul Copan: “Given the commonly recognized and scientifically supported belief that the universe (all matter, energy, space, time) began to exist a finite time ago and that the universe is remarkably finely tuned for life, does this not (strongly) suggest that the universe is ontologically haunted and that this fact should require further exploration, given the metaphysically staggering implications?

“And, second, granted that the major objection to belief in God is the problem of evil, does the concept of evil itself not suggest a standard of goodness or a design plan from which things deviate, so that if things ought to be a certain way (rather than just happening to be the way they are in nature), don’t such ‘injustices’ or ‘evils’ seem to suggest a moral/design plan independent of nature?”

Talk show host Frank Pastore: “Please explain how something can come from nothing, how life can come from non-life, how mind can come from brain, and how our moral senses developed from an amoral source.”

Historian Mike Licona: “Irrespective of one’s worldview, many experience periods of doubt. Do you ever doubt your atheism and, if so, what is it about theism or Christianity that is most troubling to your atheism?”

Author Greg Koukl: “Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?”

I didn’t email Alvin Plantinga, considered by many to be among the greatest philosophers of modern times. But based on his assertion that naturalism is self-defeating, we could formulate this question (thanks to William Lane Craig for some of the concise wording): If our cognitive faculties were selected for survival, not for truth, then how can we have any confidence, for example, that our beliefs about the reality of physical objects are true or that naturalism itself is true? (By contrast, theism says God has designed our cognitive faculties in such a way that, when functioning properly in an appropriate environment, they deliver true beliefs about the world.)

Granting these questions their full weight, and doing your best to set aside bias and preconceptions, how would you answer them?

Previous parts can be found here.

You’ve essentially said before that you interviewed only Christian scholars/apologists in your books because you were asking questions in the shoes of a skeptic and you wanted to know the Christian explanation to certain questions. Weren’t there many questions you may not have thought of that other skeptics could have asked? In other words, wouldn’t it have been a wise move to take the Christian responses back to secular scholars who could’ve proposed counter-arguments you did not think of? Would it be problematic to your reading audience if your books had more diverse dialogue (multiple viewpoints)?

Thanks for your question and the opportunity to explain the methodology of The Case for Christ. As the subtitle indicates (“A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus”), this book is about my own spiritual journey. As I explained in the introduction, this book was my effort to retrace and expand upon my original investigation in print form. As I explained earlier, this original investigation included extensive research of all sides of these issues. For the book, I decided to ask Christian experts the questions that had stood between me and God, and I left it to the reader to decide whether their answers were reasonable and compelling.

When a scholar offered an answer to one of my questions, many times I would come back at him with my own further objections. Often, these follow-up questions were informed by my reading of skeptics through the years. Indeed, I had studied the writings of enough atheists and liberal scholars during my original investigation to know what they would most likely say in response to the scholar. If the skeptics had a good point, I would try to raise it; if I thought their responses to this particular issue were weak, or that the answer was pretty obvious, or that this exchange would take me into a side issue, I didn’t. Did I cover every possible objection? No, I didn’t, and I couldn’t. Naturally, there are good questions that didn’t get addressed. But keep in mind that The Case for Christ is merely an introductory work on this topic; each line of questioning could have gone on and on. Each chapter easily could be an entire book in itself. As it is, I was pushing the limits of a popular-level work; the mass market edition is about 400 pages in length.

I didn’t want to get into an endless loop of expert versus expert. After all, you can find a Ph.D. to say virtually anything. That’s why I didn’t just ask these scholars for their opinions; instead, I pressed them on why they believe what they believe. I challenged them to present facts and explanations that could be evaluated by the reader. As I said in the book’s conclusion:

… maybe questions still linger for you. Perhaps I didn’t address the objection that’s uppermost in your mind. Fair enough. However, I trust that the amount of information reported in these pages will at least have convinced you that it’s reasonable — in fact, imperative — to continue your investigation.

I went on to encourage readers to thoroughly and systematically pursue answers to whatever spiritual sticking point they have — in fact, to make this a front-burner issue in their life.

Of course, I could have used a different approach to the book. For instance, I could have used a debate format that would have featured multiple viewpoints, going back and forth between opposing experts. However, there already were (and today are more) books like this. For example, Christian scholar Gary Habermas and then-atheist Antony Flew published their 1985 debate on the resurrection (an encounter, by the way, that four of five judges from a wide spectrum of views and persuasions said Habermas won, with the remaining judge calling it a draw) and Christian J. P. Moreland and atheist Kai Nielsen published their debate on the existence of God in 1993. [Hemant's note: Those books can be found here and here.]

I encourage Christians and skeptics to read or attend debates like these. Christian scholar William Lane Craig has several transcripts of his debates with prominent atheists on his web site, www.reasonablefaith.org. My television show Faith Under Fire was based on a debate format, where I invited such atheists as Richard Carrier, Michael Shermer, Tim Callahan and Edward Tabash to debate such Christian apologists as Craig, Habermas and Moreland. We’ve even produced a curriculum using tapes of these debates, so that small groups of skeptics and Christians can sit down together, hear both sides of these issues, and have a healthy interaction in which they can offer their own perspectives and opinions. Clearly, I don’t think Christians have anything to fear in the marketplace of ideas.

However, I wanted my book to deal with the pursuit of my own questions and concerns, believing that they reflect the basic issues most people have. In the end, I think I did cover the topics fairly well, considering how generally weak the critiques of the book have been.

By the way, I did interview a noted skeptic for my book The Case for Faith. I extensively quoted Canada’s most famous agnostic, Charles Templeton, author of Farewell to God, about why he abandoned his Christian faith and became a critic of Christianity. (As I described, Templeton broke into tears when he told me how much he missed Jesus. I still get chills when I listen to the recording of that exchange.)

Templeton ended up raising the very same objections to Christianity that originally took me down the path toward atheism. However, in the remainder of the book I confronted Christian scholars with these issues and in my view they offered rational and compelling answers. Again, I left it to each reader to come to his or her own conclusions. Obviously, each person is free to make up his or her own mind. Seems to me that’s fair.

Before getting to the next question, Lee wanted to respond to your earlier comments (once again, all hyperlinks were added by me):

Wow, my first submission to this site prompted 91 comments the last time I checked. Whew! I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether we achieved the kind of mutual respect and constructive discussion that I think, deep down, we all want. As for me, my biggest emotions in reading through the comments were, first, that I was glad people care enough about these issues to be passionate about them, and, second, that I was really frustrated with this mode of communication.

With each comment, I found myself wishing I could meet with the writer personally, sit down together with a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and have a true back-and-forth conversation. I invariably found myself wanting to know more about each person’s story and all of the factors that have led them to their current conclusions. I wanted to listen more than talk.

Of course, this kind of format, by its very nature, is inefficient and unwieldy. There’s no easy way to go back and forth with clarifications and explanations. Among the 91 posted comments are dozens of additional questions and observations worthy of further exploration. I had to smile as I read them because so many are the same kind of objections I would have raised when I was a skeptic! But it would be time-prohibitive to try to address each and every one of them in this slow, awkward, keyboard-dependent approach. I’ve barely got time to answer the initial questions that prompted this whole encounter!

It was gratifying to see how, in some cases, subsequent posters were able to provide insights to help answer previous posters. For example, some questioned whether I was ever really an atheist because I had speculated that if God exists he would have disapproved of my lifestyle. As a later poster said: “I know that I, myself, sometimes wonder, ‘What if God really exists?’… That doesn’t make me any less of an atheist.” Said another: “Strobel, presumably, already had… knowledge of what the god he was raised with would think.” This, he noted, is decidedly different from believing in that deity.

Several comments begged for further clarification. Did I investigate other world religions? Yes, especially (but not exclusively) Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Judaism, and New Age beliefs. In my writings, I’ve described why I believe the evidence points more strongly toward Christianity than other world faiths. Did I change my morality because of fear of divine retribution? No, the primary reason my morality changed is because God transformed my values and character, giving me a new perspective and new attitudes toward him and other people. Because I love God, I seek to follow him and his teachings as best I can, with the help of his Spirit. That’s not burdensome to me; actually, it’s a great adventure. I’m not recoiling in fear over divine punishment; instead, I have a sincere desire to honor God in how I live and treat other people.

Some posters reacted to my comment that I didn’t have enough faith to believe that nothing produces everything [referring to cosmology]; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason.

As one poster observed, “To make the statement ‘nothing produces everything’ is patently ridiculous.” I agree! Who would ever say such a thing? Well, there’s prominent atheist Quentin Smith, who wrote in Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (p. 135) that “the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing.”

In this book, Smith tried (but, in my view, failed) to explain away the kalam cosmological argument for God’s existence: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. He was pushed into the uncomfortable position of arguing that nothing produces everything, which, frankly, I think takes a huge leap of faith.

But another poster objected: “Logic does not follow that an intelligent being caused [the universe] or that Zeus caused it or even that a tiny unicorn caused it.” Well, I’ve never claimed that the evidence of cosmology takes a person all the way to Christianity, only that it’s one bit of evidence in a cumulative case for the existence of God.

However, there are several logical inferences that can be reasonably drawn from the cosmological evidence: that whatever caused the creation of space and time must be an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal being endowed with freedom of will and enormous power. And that’s a core concept of God. (Before you jump on me for failing to provide specifics, please see The Case for a Creator, pages 93-123 – too much to reproduce here! And hold off on the question, “Yeah, well, then who created God?” That’s coming in a future post.)

Someone else raised questions about the 1959 origin-of-life experiment that helped lead me to atheism. The poster observed: “Just because there is controversy surrounding the makeup of the atmosphere of early earth does nothing to invalidate the results of [the] Urey-Miller [experiment], which showed that inorganic molecules CAN and DO produce organic biomolecules in the right environment. So, the building blocks of life can come from non-life.”

The problem is that Stanley Miller’s suppositions about the content of the primitive earth’s environment turned out to be wrong. If you replay the experiment using what scientists now believe is the correct atmosphere, you don’t get the same results he did. As one expert told me: “Some textbooks fudge by saying, ‘Well, even if you use a realistic atmosphere, you still get organic molecules, as if that solves the problem…. Do you know what they are? Formaldehyde! Cyanide! They may be organic molecules, but in my lab at Berkeley you couldn’t even have a capped bottle of formaldehyde in the room, because the stuff is so toxic… The idea that using a realistic atmosphere gets you the first step in the origin of life is just laughable… To suggest that formaldehyde and cyanide give you the right substrate for the origin of life, well, it’s just a joke.”

But let’s pretend for a moment that you could produce some amino acids by shooting electricity through the atmosphere of the early earth. Even then, you’re so far away from even the most primitive living organism that no mere waving of the hands can bridge this enormous gap. It would be like saying that rain and dirt and wind can create a rudimentary brick and therefore this explains the origin of Sears Tower.

Interestingly, when I got a chance to question Antony Flew, once one of the world’s leading atheists and author of The Presumption of Atheism, about why he has now abandoned his atheistic beliefs and become a believer in a Creator, one of the key reasons he cited to me was “the integrated complexity of the biological world.”

Flew also said something else to me: the reason he now believes in a Creator is because he was committed to following the evidence wherever it led him — even if it was to an uncomfortable conclusion that contradicted his lifetime of atheistic scholarship. I hope all of us remain as committed to pursuing truth with the same vigor and open-mindedness.

Strobel is the atheist-turned-Christian author of such books as The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for Easter.

It’s been a long time coming, but he is responding to the questions I sent him (your questions from the posting) — in depth — one-by-one.

So this is Part 1 in what I hope will be a recurring series. Others will soon follow. Hopefully, the dialogue initiated by Strobel’s responses will lead to an interesting discussion between atheists and Christians, including one of the most famous and prolific Christian apologists. While the question below offers more background on Strobel, future questions are more specific about claims he makes in his books.

I should point out that any hyperlinks in his response were added by me (unless otherwise noted) to provide references when needed.

Here’s Lee:

First of all, thanks to Hemant for initiating this process and to everyone who submitted a question. I really appreciate your patience. I had several projects I needed to complete before I could begin offering responses. Almost all of the questions seemed to be sincere and honest inquiries, and so I’m glad to provide my perspective and then allow you the opportunity to respond and comment. With that basis of mutual respect, I believe we can interact in a meaningful way.

Hemant asked me to try to answer the questions in the order they were given to me. So here’s the first one:

What is your own background with atheism? What caused you to become a Christian? Is there a difference between your former atheism and the “New Atheism” of today? In other words, how hard-core of an atheist were you?

My commitment to atheism essentially came in three steps. The first was when I was in junior high school and began asking Christians uncomfortable questions, like, “How can there be a loving God with so much suffering in the world?” And, “How can a loving God send people to hell?” And, “How can Jesus be the only way to God?” Rather than engage with me, they basically told me to keep my questions to myself. I quickly concluded that the reason they didn’t want to discuss these matters was because there were no good answers from the Christian perspective.

The second step came when I began studying neo-Darwinism in high school. I was particularly struck by Stanley Miller’s 1959 experiment in which he recreated what he thought was the original atmosphere of the primitive Earth, shot electricity through it to simulate lightning, and discovered the creation of some amino acids, the building blocks of life. I naively concluded that Miller had proven that life could have emerged in a purely naturalistic way. To me, that meant God was out of a job!

I started considering myself an atheist in high school, but the third step that cemented my position came when I took a college course on the historical Jesus. The professor, who relied in 19th century German paradigm, convinced me that there was essentially nothing in the New Testament that could be trusted.

Along the way, I read a lot of atheistic literature, which served to deepen my commitment to spiritual skepticism and give me a more systematic basis for my atheistic convictions. I was especially captivated by Bertrand Russell’s book Why I am Not a Christian and Antony Flew’s The Presumption of Atheism. And I was quite sympathetic to many of the church/state issues raised by atheists.

However, in the interest of total disclosure, let me add that my problems with faith were not solely intellectual. I had a vested interest in the non-existence of God because I was living a rather immoral lifestyle and did not want to be held accountable for my behavior. To me, atheism opened up a world of hedonism that I knew wouldn’t be acceptable to God if he existed.

(Let me be clear: I’m not saying that all atheists are hedonists. I’m just saying that, for me, atheism cleared the way for me to live a self-indulgent, me-first, narcissistic life. And to be honest, to this day I can’t figure out why atheists would choose any other path, although I know many do.)

Was I “hard-core”? I’m not sure how to define that. I was recently contacted by a woman who had been an acquaintance of mine in high school. She said she was “the good Catholic girl” and reminded me how I used to taunt and belittle her because of her faith. So I guess I was more aggressive at a young age than I remember!

At the same time, though, I didn’t have the kind of scorched-earth militancy I see in some of the “New Atheists” you referenced. While a lot of the issues they raise are the same ones that vexed me, I was not on a mission to wipe all faith from the face of the planet. I was happy to peacefully coexist with Christians and people from other belief systems.

How did I become a Christian? My wife’s conversion to Christianity (which deeply troubled me at first) resulted in a lot of positive changes in her attitudes and behavior, which I found winsome and intriguing. She invited me to a church, where I heard the Gospel explained in a way I could understand it. While I didn’t believe it, I realized that if it were true, it would have big implications for my life. So I decided to use my journalism experience and legal expertise (at the time, I was legal editor of The Chicago Tribune) to investigate whether there was any credibility to Christianity or any other faith system.

For nearly two years, I investigated science, philosophy, and history. I read literature (both pro and con), quizzed experts, and studied archaeology. On November 8^th, 1981, alone in my room, I took a yellow legal pad and began summarizing the evidence I had encountered. In light of the scientific evidence that points toward a Creator and the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, I came to the conclusion that it would have required more faith for me to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.

Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take, especially in light of the affirmative case for God’s existence and Jesus’ resurrection (and, hence, his divinity). In other words, in my assessment the Christian worldview accounted for the totality of the evidence much better than the atheistic worldview.

Years later, I wrote three books that retraced and expanded upon my original journey. The Case for Faith examines the eight big objections to Christianity that bothered me all the way back to my junior high years. The Case for a Creator looks at the affirmative evidence for the existence of God from cosmology, physics, and other fields of science. And The Case for Christ recaps the historical evidence for Jesus, including his resurrection, through which he validated his claim of divinity. Those books, nearly a thousand pages in length, summarize the basis for my conclusions.

Having said all of this, I do believe strongly that despite our fundamental disagreements, it should be possible for atheists and theists to engage in constructive discussions instead of resorting to name-calling or the imputation of bad motives. While I now believe atheists are wrong in their conclusions, I’m confident that they still matter to God and therefore deserve respect. As a former spiritual skeptic myself, I can appreciate their viewpoint and I try to give due weight to their objections and arguments. Thanks for your willingness to engage in the same way.

Feel free to leave your questions in the comments and I’ll pass along as many as I can to him.


[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]