CONCLUSION: Why Bother?
CONCLUSION
WHY BOTHER?
Of course, there are replies and counter-replies to all of these arguments, and no one imagines that a consensus will be reached. Indeed, after a period of passivity, there are now signs that the sleeping giant of atheism has been roused from his dogmatic slumbers and is fighting back. J. Howard Sobel and Graham Oppy have written large, scholarly books critical of the arguments of natural theology, and Cambridge University Press recently released its Companion to Atheism. Nonetheless, the very presence of the debate in academia is itself a sign of how healthy and vibrant a theistic worldview is today.
Of course, the arguments of this book lead at most to a generic theism. Pantheistic and polytheistic religions will be ruled out, along with atheism, if these arguments are sound, but the arguments will not lead you to a particular brand of theism. If you want to go further, then you must go beyond natural theology to look at the evidence for particular kinds of theism. If you are seeking to know the truth about God and Christianity, then I invite you to have a look at the companion book to this volume, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?
Some people might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost—for don’t we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Rational arguments for the truth of theism are no longer supposed to work; some Christians, therefore, advise that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it.
This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary culture. The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth, perpetuated in Christian churches by misguided youth ministers. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. Nobody is a postmodernist when it comes to reading the labels on an aspirin bottle versus a box of rat poison. If you’ve got a headache, you better believe that texts have objective meaning! People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But that’s not post-modernism—that’s modernism! That’s just old-line Positivism and Verificationism, which held that anything you can’t prove with your five senses is just a matter of personal taste and emotive expression. We live in a cultural milieu that remains deeply modernist.
Otherwise, how do we make sense of the popularity of the New Atheism? Dawkins and his ilk are indelibly modernist and even “scientistic” in their approach. On the postmodernist reading of contemporary culture, their books should have fallen like water on a stone; instead, people lap them up eagerly, convinced that religious belief is folly.
Seen in this light, tailoring the Gospel to a postmodern culture is self-defeating. By laying aside their best weapons of logic and evidence, Christians will ensure modernism’s triumph over them. If Christians adopt this course of action, the consequences in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality. Meanwhile, scientific naturalism will continue to shape our culture’s view of how the world really is.
In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. They confidently believe that a person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.
A robust natural theology may well be necessary for the Gospel to be effectively heard in Western society today. For the Gospel is never heard in isolation; it is always heard against the background of the current cultural milieu. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the Gospel that a thoroughly secularized person will not. You may as well tell the secularized person to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ!
Christians who depreciate theistic arguments because “no one comes to faith through intellectual arguments” are therefore tragically shortsighted. For the value of natural theology extends far beyond one’s immediate evangelistic contact. It is the broader task of Christian apologetics, including natural theology, to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the Gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. It thereby gives people the intellectual permission to believe when their hearts are moved. As we progress further into the 21st century, I anticipate that natural theology will be an increasingly relevant and vital preparation for the reception of the Gospel by thinking people.