"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” Thorton Wilder
"My conversion as an undergraduate was founded on a conviction that the Christian faith made intellectual sense of the world, of history, and of personal experience." Ian Hutchinson, Professor and Chair of Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT
Dear non-Christian:
Here are a couple things you need to think about:
1) We (Christians) have problems. The problem of evil is not going away anytime soon. We are divided, with extremely intelligent, thoughtful Christians on both sides of the fence, on a number of issues. There are evolutionary dead-ends. Many, if not most "Christians" do not reflect the Spirit they claim to hold. The Universe is unfathomably large. We really, really thought Jesus would be back by now. We really are having trouble praying the cure of an amputee. Have you checked out the cruelty of the insect world lately? Have you tried to think about the Flood story lately? Oh boy.
2) You have much, much bigger problems. There is one thing that I have learned from my experiences at Harvard, and my interactions with people involved in my field outside of Harvard, for the past four years. There are a lot of very, very smart people in this world, that are very, very thoughtless about the most important things. Timothy Keller helps crystallize the following point which is worth thinking about. Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason" says something along the lines that every thoughtful, educated person needs to ask three primary questions: How do we know we know, How do we know right and wrong, and what do we live for? If Kant is right, and these have been more or less the big three questions any philosophy 101 class will discuss, then the Atheist position is totally untenable. Here is why:
1) How do we know we know? Here is the crux of the Atheist problem, that guys like Dennett, and Dawkins, and B. Russell could and will never be able to answer. Simply, a materialist, as Keller points out, "has no reason to trust reason". You cannot claim that we are an accidental collection of molecules, and then claim that the random, accidental interactions these chemicals have in your neo-cortex produce meaningful things we call feelings, like love, and the sense of justice, and form faculties that we call reason, and rationality, and come together and reflect truth. You cannot use reason and rationality to prove to me that you and I are nothing but an evolutionary accident. And beyond this, you really cannot claim that reason and rationality cannot actually reflect truth, because, of course, all our life experiences testify to just that. That is a big problem for a thoughtful atheist. You can say to me you are an atheist. Sure. But you cannot use rationality or reason, the very things you claim are products of random, meaningless molecules that have been formed from blinded, unguided processes. That is totally nonsensical, and, of course, any thoughtful atheist should understand this. The brightest and most honest secular atheists like the late Richard Rorty and Alex Rosenberg, understand and admit this, to both their credits.
2) Right and Wrong? Have you ever seen a one-year old look at you and you know that he knows what is right and wrong? Morality has been an ace up the theist sleeve for quite some time. The field of evolutionary psychology, a field fully devoted to answer this question, has been entrenched in corporal hand-waving. As the current top US physician-scientist Frances Collins will tell you, there is no explanation for humans sense of right and wrong outside the imago dei, as a reflection of our Creator. But this is hardly the point. Evolutionary psychology could one day present incontrovertible evidence that morality evolved through the evolutionary step-up to humankind, and that would hardly matter. What matters is if materialists believe our sense of morality is just a product of accidental chemical mixing, then the result of morality is meaningless. Rape is neither right nor wrong. Genocide is neither right nor wrong. Yet, of course, everyone would agree that these are not right, and most people would object if their neighbors were being raped, or their cities were being wiped out. Yet, from the materialist point of view, it cannot be meaningful. Thus, any sense of justice or good or bad is meaningless . How random chemicals are making us feel can of course only be meaningless. Yet, again, we know better. Any atheist that gets out of bed in the morning and lives with or protects any state or standard of morality is living a total life of contradiction, and one totally void of any integrity. Again, some of the brightest atheists will admit to this, speaking to their honesty but also to what I would understand as a considerable challenge.
3) What are we living for? My atheist friend, why get out of bed? The earth rotates around its axis because of physics. A bug crawls because it is programmed to. You love your kids, you miss your mother, you love your wife, you put your arm around a hurting neighbor, you fight for freedom -- because you are programmed to do so. The random assortment of the molecules that begin to exist at the big bang program you to do all these things. All these things -- no less love -- is totally meaningless.
Yet, you know better than that, right? Beauty lasts, movies touch, paintings move, books make you think, seeing an old friend ignites the heart, and, most importantly, your reason and perceptions do lead you to truth, you do have a sense of right and wrong, and you do long for something that you don't have.
Some of the smartest thinkers in the world, even the California cathouse-loving Hawking, makes the biggest intellectual mistake a person can make. The law of physics can explain, or will one day be able to explain, everything that is material in this big, big universe. But only if an eternal intelligent and loving Creator created the law of physics, and spoke everything (of course, not in the sense that we understand "spoke") material into reality, does the universe and the crown jewel of evolution - you - make sense. To simply say it is because of physics misses what any thoughtful person needs to consider, and, of course, ironically, violates one of the most fundamental laws of physics (cause and effect).
The older I get, the more I understand how utterly thoughtless and sloppy atheism actually is. And the more I understand how Jesus Christ -- with all the problems we Christians have, most of which I suspect is because of our nature to tie our interpretations into God's reality, and this multiplied by the messiness of humanity -- is the only thinking person's answer. God calls us -- almost begs us at times -- to reason with Him. To use our minds, our reason, to think it all through. The late Carl Sagan, who was described by Issac Asimov as one of the only two people he ever met that (he felt) was intellectually superior to him, once told R.C. Sproul that we now know what happened nanoseconds after the big bang. When Sproul pressed him about what happened right before that, Sagan's answer was essentially he was not interested in answering that. Not interested? While Sagan called Atheism "stupid", a lifetime of inquiry seemingly never led him to answer the big three questions that Kant and philosophers have put forward. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing. Watching a loved one die from ALS is a horrible thing. Not allowing your mind ponder these big three questions is catastrophic.
Simply put, the atheist lives a life void of meaning and integrity, and wakes up in the morning and goes to sleep at night living in total contradiction, in a sort of schizophrenic cloud of ignorance.
Thoughtfulness and honesty always and only lead to Jesus Christ, whom the law of physics and the law of love was created through.
