8. Questions about Faith
8
Questions about Faith
Developing Approaches
Apologetics is about communicating the joy, coherence, and relevance of the Christian faith on the one hand, and dealing with anxieties, difficulties, and concerns about that faith on the other. This has always been the case, from the time of the New Testament onward. Apologetics insists there are indeed honest and persuasive answers to the honest questions people ask about faith. These questions must be respected and taken seriously. More importantly, they need to be answered. And even more importantly, there are answers that can be given.
The questions and concerns raised about faith vary from one culture to another. Early Christian writers were concerned about how to meet Platonist criticisms of their beliefs on the one hand, and how to develop effective ways of communicating and commending their faith to Platonists on the other. Many western European theologians of the early Middle Ages—including the great Thomas Aquinas—focused on apologetic questions raised by Muslim writers. (At that time, Islam was a significant presence in Spain and southern France.) Once more, we have to appreciate the importance of the audience for apologetics. The nature of the audience shapes the questions that might be asked about Christianity, just as it will shape the way in which the Christian faith is presented.
In an Islamic context, for example, questions are often raised about the history of the church (especially around the time of the Crusades), the doctrine of the Trinity, and the divinity of Christ. These two latter doctrinal points are widely seen to be in conflict with core Islamic teachings about the unity of God.
In a rationalist context, questions are often raised about beliefs that seem to be “irrational” (such as the doctrine of the Trinity or the characteristic Christian belief that Jesus is both divine and human), or that seem to call the fundamental goodness or autonomy of human nature into question (such as the doctrine of original sin). In a postmodern context, questions are likely to be raised about the New Testament’s emphasis on Jesus Christ being the only way to salvation (which is held to be inconsistent with postmodernism’s positive appraisal of diversity).
The important point is to understand your audience, and appreciate its concerns and questions. You should not see these as unwelcome threats, but rather welcome them as possible gateways to faith. When someone asks you a question, it’s important to see this as a signal of interest and a willingness to listen. Perhaps your questioner hopes to demolish you with a lethal challenge; nevertheless, you are being given an opening for the gospel, which it is crucial to value and engage. These questions give you the opportunity to open up some of the great riddles of life, and in doing so, begin to explain and commend the Christian vision of reality. There is no need to adopt a defensive attitude when defending Christianity. Rather, see each question as an opportunity to remove misunderstandings, explain the reliability and appeal of faith, and talk about its impact on life. Questions must be welcomed and good answers developed and given. They’re already there. We need only to discover them, and adapt them to our own gifts as speakers and to the specific audiences we’re engaging.
So how are we to engage these questions? Some apologetics textbooks offer standard answers to equally standard questions, encouraging readers to master these routine responses in order to become faithful and effective defenders of the Christian faith. As a professional educationalist, I have to confess I prefer a different approach. The best responses to the questions people ask us about our faith are not those borrowed from textbooks or based on industry-standard templates, but are those developed by individual apologists as they reflect on the questions being asked, the situations of the people asking them, and the resources available to answer them. Apologists cannot be content to depend on borrowed answers. They need to develop answers for themselves. In short, they need to own their answers. Never give an answer to a question that doesn’t satisfy you in the first place.
This chapter does not provide a detailed list of difficulties about faith and answers you might give. It sets out to encourage you to develop your own answers. It aims to teach you a method, not provide you with a prepackaged set of answers to cut and paste into your apologist’s mind. We shall first look at some general principles about engaging with questions, anxieties, and concerns.
But before we begin considering such questions, we need a framework we can use to make sense of our own role as apologists. A visual image will help us think about this. Many apologists find they get discouraged when they give what they believe to be good answers to honest questions—yet seem to have no obvious impact on their audience. Surely if a good answer is given, there is nothing to stop that person from coming to faith immediately? Sadly, life turns out to be rather more complicated than this simple model suggests.
An image I have long found helpful is to think of each person potentially being on a road leading from doubt or unbelief to faith. For some, that path is smooth and easy, having few roadblocks of any importance. For others, that path is long and difficult, with many potholes and other obstacles to faith along the way. The problem is that an external observer doesn’t know what someone’s road looks like; the apologist has no idea whether the difficulty raised by the person she’s speaking to is the one and only remaining barrier to faith—or whether a whole series of difficulties remain to be engaged. All the apologist can do is give a good answer and trust that a seed has been sown—and that one less barrier to faith remains. Our job is to move people along by one step. For some, this is the final step; for others, it is merely one step further along their road. But they are now nearer than they were! The apologist’s job is thus to walk with someone along that road to faith, leaving him or her closer to its goal than when they started.
Later in this chapter, we will look at two specific case studies of objections and anxieties about Christianity that are often raised in discussion. These have been chosen to be representative of genuine concerns, while at the same time allowing us to reflect on how good answers can be developed.
Questions and Concerns: Some Basic Points
In dealing with questions, it is helpful to set them in perspective and realize how best to deal with them. Most apologists find they become much better at recognizing and responding to questions with experience.
1. Be gracious.
Paul reminds us we are “ambassadors for Christ” (2 Cor. 5:20). We need to remember we should model the values of the gospel in our response to people. God’s graciousness needs to be on display here, not human arrogance or impatience! Try to give polite, considerate, and helpful replies, especially if the question suggests that the person asking it doesn’t really understand the Christian faith, or has an inflated view of his own intellectual prowess.
2. What is the real question?
Apologists are often told to try and work out the question behind the question. What does that mean? Let’s imagine you’ve been asked a question about how a good God can allow suffering in the world. The questioner may see this as a genuine intellectual difficulty and want a good philosophical answer. Make sure you can give one!
But this might not be the case. The questioner could have sat at her mother’s bedside for night after night watching her suffer great pain in the final stages of bone cancer before dying—last week. Her perspective is not intellectual curiosity, but deep personal anguish. She isn’t going to want a philosophy lecture from you! She’s going to want sympathy and understanding. The answer she is looking for may well need to be existential rather than intellectual—in other words, reassuring her of God’s presence in the shadowlands of life.
One way of dealing with this issue that I have found helpful is to welcome the question, and then ask the questioner if he would mind sharing why this is a particular concern for him. This helps me work out what the real question is and address it properly.
3. Don’t give prepackaged answers to honest questions.
It’s tempting to learn responses to a list of questions by rote, and use these when responding to people’s questions about faith. But this is not effective, for two very good reasons. First, you’ll end up sounding like some kind of preprogrammed machine, churning out routine answers that are not adapted to the specific audience. And second, your stock answer may not fit the question being asked. You are heard to answer a different question. Audiences notice this kind of thing and find it unsatisfactory and unpersuasive. We apologists need to listen, and make sure we really engage with the question being asked, which may force us to adapt and develop our “standard” answer.
4. Appreciate the importance of learning from other apologists.
One of the most worthwhile things I do with my students at the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics is to get a group of between six and twelve of them together to discuss what we might say to a series of questions people ask us. I’ll pose a question in advance, and the students take a few minutes to draft their replies. We then work through all the responses, looking at both their style and substance. The result? Not only does this give students experience responding to questions; more importantly, they are exposed to a dozen or so different ways of engaging an important question. Everyone goes away with a better understanding of how we can respond helpfully to such concerns.
One of the best ways of developing your responses to concerns and objections to faith is to learn from others who have developed the art of apologetics—such as William Lane Craig, Peter Kreeft, or Ravi Zacharias. You can easily find video or audio recordings of their lectures, including responses to questions, on the internet. Listen to their responses to questions from the audience. Note both the tone and the content of their responses. It’s not just what you say that matters; it’s how you say it.
To help you develop your own method, we are going to explore some questions that arise naturally in apologetic presentations and conversations, and some possible approaches. This analysis is neither comprehensive nor profound. It just helps you to get an idea of some possible approaches to each question, and work out what you yourself would say. In each case we will identify some of the basic building blocks you might incorporate into your response. These are the threads; how you weave them together will reflect both your own approach to apologetics and the specific questions you need to engage. We begin by considering the problem of suffering.
Case Study 1: Why Does God Allow Suffering?
Our first case study is an issue that is regularly raised both in public debates and private conversations. If God is good, why is there suffering in the world? Why do bad things happen in a universe created by a supposedly loving God? It’s an important question in its own right. Yet it also allows us to reflect on how we go about framing answers to all of the questions we get asked.
In what follows, we’ll look at a portfolio of points that can be made in response to the question of suffering. Each is a thread that can be used on its own or woven with others as part of the pattern of a richer tapestry.
Let’s begin by asking why so many people find the existence of suffering to be a problem. At first sight, this seems very straightforward. There seems to be a logical contradiction here. If God is good, why is there evil in the world? For some, this is the real issue that needs to be addressed. Is faith vulnerable at this point? This question needs a reasoned, logical response.
But as we noted earlier, the existence of suffering raises anxieties for some people at a much deeper level. They are confused and distressed by the suffering or death of someone they love. Logic doesn’t really interest them that much. The problem is not so much understanding suffering as coping with it. Their anxiety is not so much that the Christian faith might be illogical, as that the universe might be meaningless. As comedian Woody Allen once wryly remarked: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
The apologist needs to be aware that this question has to be addressed at different levels. A cold, clinical dissection of the intellectual issues may be helpful to some people; it will leave others bewildered and confused, precisely because their concern is existential rather than intellectual. For many people, the experience of suffering is a problem of the heart rather than a problem of the mind. The question they are concerned with is not “How do I make sense of this intellectually?” but “How do I cope with this existentially?” Emotional empathy as much as intellectual wisdom is clearly needed here!
The first point that needs to be made is that we often have to learn to live with questions. Nobody has a knockdown answer to the problem of suffering. For militant atheist Richard Dawkins, suffering is pointless and meaningless—and is exactly what we should expect in a universe that itself has no purpose. We just need to get used to this. It’s a tidy answer, but it leaves many deeply dissatisfied. We just have to learn to rise above the pain and meaninglessness of the world. For many Stoic writers of the ancient world, human beings had to invent their own personal worlds of meaning in the midst of a pointless and absurd world. And that was the best we could hope to do—superimpose meaning on an essentially random and purposeless world.
Some atheists argue that the existence of suffering is evil and therefore is in itself adequate to disprove the existence of God. This is a curious argument, since closer examination shows that it is self-defeating. An argument from the existence of evil to the nonexistence of God depends on establishing that suffering is indeed evil. But this is not an empirical observation—it is a moral judgment. Suffering is natural; for it to be evil, a moral framework has to be presupposed. But where does this framework come from? The argument requires the existence of an absolute moral framework if it is to work. Yet the existence of such an absolute framework is itself widely seen as pointing to God’s existence. In the end, the nonexistence of God seems to end up depending on God’s existence. It’s not the best argument. Yet if it’s simply my personal perception that nature is evil, this has no relevance to the debate about God. It might simply say something about my naïve and sentimental tastes rather than about the deeper structure of the universe.
We need to go deeper here. Christianity declares that God suffered in Christ. In other words, God knows what it is like to suffer. The letter to the Hebrews talks about Jesus being someone who suffers along with us (Heb. 4:15). While this does not explain suffering, it certainly makes it more tolerable to bear. It expresses the deep insight that God suffered firsthand as we suffer. In the incarnation, God the creator enters into this world of pain and suffering—not as a curious tourist, but as a committed Savior. Christians thus recognize that God’s loving commitment to a suffering world was so great that God entered into it personally—not sending some representative, but choosing to share in its pain and suffering. Famous novelist and amateur theologian Dorothy L. Sayers made this point well when she commented:
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death.
God chose to suffer. The suffering of Jesus Christ can reassure us that we have the privilege of relating to a God who knows the pain and sorrow of living in a fallen world. The passion stories of the Gospels tell of a Savior who really understands suffering and who has been through it himself. And the psalms speak of a God who is with us always as we journey, even through the darkest moments (Ps. 23).
There is a famous saying about the medical profession: “Only the wounded physician can heal.” Whether this is true or not is, of course, a matter for debate. But it does highlight the fact that we are able to relate better to someone who has shared our problem, who has been through what we are going through now—and triumphed over it. As many already know from experience, it is often difficult to relate to someone who hasn’t shared our problem. One way of dealing with this apologetically is through empathy. You empathize with the other person’s problems and fears. Even though you haven’t shared them—and may not even be able to understand them!—you try to think yourself into their situation, so you can truthfully tell them you understand exactly how they must be feeling. Yet the central Christian idea of the incarnation speaks of God sympathizing with our sufferings—not empathizing, as if God hadn’t experienced them firsthand. God sympathizes, in the strict sense of “suffers alongside,” with us. In turning to God, we turn to one who knows and understands.
There is a splendid story often told about East Anglia, which was once the center of England’s wool trade. During the later Middle Ages, a dead shepherd would be buried in a coffin stuffed full of wool from his own sheep. Why? So that, when the day of judgment came, Christ would see the wool and realize this man had been a shepherd. As Christ himself had once been a shepherd, he would know the pressures the man had faced, the amount of time needed to look after wayward sheep, and would understand why he hadn’t been to church very much! Amusing though the story is, it does, however, make an important point, which we must treasure as one of the most precious of the many Christian insights into God: we are not dealing with a distant God who knows nothing of what being human, frail, and mortal means. God knows and understands, so we can “approach the throne of grace with boldness” (Heb. 4:16).
Furthermore, the Christian gospel declares with passion and power that the suffering and pain of this world will give way to a better place—a place in which God “will wipe every tear” from our eyes. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Rev. 21:4). We live in hope.
These reflections help to set suffering in context. We can also address some aspects of suffering quite persuasively. For example, it is important to make the point that we live in a fallen world in which humans no longer live as God intended them to. Human selfishness and greed have led to wars, famine, overexploitation of the land, and fundamental and potentially damaging changes to the world’s resources. None of these are things God wished to happen. They are things human beings have done. It is often pointed out we have developed a technology that could allow us to make ourselves extinct. That’s our choice, not something God wanted.
Furthermore, it is also important to appreciate that suffering arises from the way this world is. We have no reason to believe there could be a “better” world. For example, scientists believe that for life to exist on earth, we need “tectonic plates”—in other words, the earth’s surface needs to be able to shift in response to geological pressures. The result? Earthquakes and tsunamis. Are these evil? No, they’re just natural. They can cause suffering. But they’re not intended to. It’s part of the price we pay for living in a world in which life is possible. Some critics of God mutter darkly about God’s failure to create a world that meets their design specifications. If they were in charge, things would be much better! Yet these earnest people seem to be blind to the inconvenient fact that there is absolutely no reason to suppose that a better world could be created, or that a better world exists anywhere else!
Yet there is a much deeper point here. Why do we feel disturbed by the suffering of others? Why do we feel there is something so wrong about suffering? This is a matter of the heart, rather than the head. Where does this deep-seated intuition that suffering and pain are not right come from? As we saw in our reflections about the argument from desire and argument from morality, profound intuitions such as this one are much more significant than many admit. If they are random and meaningless, our perception about the world has no inherent value.
But what if this intuition points to something deeper—something built into us that reflects our true nature and identity? What if it is an aspect of the “homing instinct for God” we noted earlier? What if this revulsion against suffering and pain is a reminder of paradise on one hand, and an anticipation of the New Jerusalem on the other? What if our thoughts about the present state of things are shaped by our intuitive realization of our true origins and destiny?
The issue of suffering thus opens up some very important apologetic questions, as well as some significant opportunities. Yet ultimately, this is a question that nobody—whether secular or religious—can answer totally. The real issue concerns who can offer the most existentially satisfying answer, which stands up to critical reflection despite leaving some questions unanswered—perhaps because, given our human limitations, they are ultimately unanswerable. A willingness to live with unresolvable questions is a mark of intellectual maturity, not a matter of logical nonsense as some unwisely regard it.
Later in this chapter, we’ll reflect on how to work the angles of this question. How can these ideas be used apologetically? But first, we’ll move on to sketch the issues relating to another classic question of apologetics: Is belief in God just a crutch to help inadequate people get through life?
Case Study 2: God as a Crutch
One of the most familiar criticisms of Christianity is that it offers consolation to life’s losers. The only way such sad people can cope with life, it is argued, is by inventing a God who comforts them. Real people don’t need such spurious reassurance. They just get on with life. Religion is for the emotionally inadequate—a crutch for those who can’t cope with the reality of life and prefer to invent their own imagined world.
It is important to note that this criticism is actually an assertion, rather than a carefully reasoned or evidence-based argument. There is no scientific proof for any such claim. Nevertheless, it has cultural plausibility for many and is frequently encountered in debates and arguments. So how are we to respond to it?
First, we need to understand its historical origins. Where does this criticism come from? As might be expected, its modern statements are found in the writings of atheist psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). For Freud, belief in God is an illusion. Freud argues that God exists only in the human mind. The idea of God is a “wish fulfillment,” resulting from our desire for meaning and love.
We tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is the very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
In other words, we invent a make-believe world that corresponds to our desires, instead of reconciling ourselves to the harshness of the real world around us.
In popular writings, this is often expressed in terms of God being a delusion (as per Richard Dawkins) or a crutch. This second approach has significant rhetorical force, as it implies that those who believe in God are inadequate, wounded people who need help to cope with the realities of life—and who invent God as a spurious psychological means of support. Freud declares (though without any obvious empirical evidence) that our concept of—and attitudes toward—God are infantile illusions, shaped by our experiences of our own fathers. Immature people never grow out of their childish trust in and dependence upon their father and naturally transfer this dependency to an imaginary “enormously exalted father.” Freud makes it clear that he regards such a belief in God as intellectually naïve:
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
We find much the same contemptuous attitude in New Atheism, particularly in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006). Yet when all is said and done, this is simply an assertion—an assertion that derives its cultural credibility not from empirical evidence, but from the frequency with which it is repeated on one hand, and the confidence with which it is asserted on the other.
Evidential basis for this bold assertion that God is merely the projection of a childish wish for the protection of a father is practically zero. Freud’s scientific credentials have been severely criticized in recent years, as it has become increasingly clear that his “scientific investigations” often amounted to little more than retrospective validation of his prejudices, especially his hostility toward belief in God. Freud sets out from the assumption that there is no God, and then seeks to show that a rational explanation may be found for why people do believe in such a nonexistent God. Yet there is an obvious confusion here about whether atheism is the presupposition or the conclusion of this decidedly unsatisfactory piece of reasoning.
But obvious and embarrassing lack of evidential foundations aside, how valid are these arguments? How coherent is Freud’s position? There seems to be an obvious problem with Freud’s theory—specifically, in his curious idea of a universal, subconscious Oedipal desire within males to kill their father and marry their mother. On the basis of this aspect of his thinking, males would seem to have at least as plausible a psychological basis for wanting to do away with any “father in heaven” as wanting to believe in him. According to Freud, people have both positive and negative feelings toward this “exalted father,” and these negative feelings might cause the wish that God not exist to be as strong as the wish for his existence.
Where Freud regarded religious belief as an illusion, C. S. Lewis regarded Freud’s atheistic materialism as self-refuting. After all, this argument about “projection” or “invention” cuts both ways. Freud argues that God is a wish fulfillment, in which a heavenly father takes care of all our needs. Yet it is just as logical and evidence-based to argue that Freud and other atheists deny the existence of God out of a need to escape from a father figure they don’t like. After all, Freud’s relationship with his own father was somewhat strained. It is not difficult to argue that belief in the nonexistence of God springs from his deep desire that no father figure exists. Or that, if such a figure exists, he can be—and ought to be—murdered, perhaps?
Furthermore, Freud fails to do justice to the complexity of human ambivalence about God. After all, the truth that God is loving is a disclosure of revelation, not a natural human insight. As Martin Luther and John Calvin both insist, the more natural human instinct is to be fearful of God. Lewis argues that Freud fails to recognize there is a psychological dynamic of fear fulfillment as much as wish fulfillment. People have reasons to wish God not exist as well as to wish for his existence. Thus, when he was an atheist, Lewis was quite clear that he regarded God as someone he did not want to meet: “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”
Much more seriously, Freud’s “argument” amounts to little more than an assertion that human belief in God is consistent with atheism. But it is also consistent with other systems of thought—most notably, with the Christian belief that God created us with a homing instinct for heaven. To quote from the prayer of Augustine of Hippo, which we noted earlier: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” Freud argues that atheism can account for belief in God, or a human yearning for God. Perhaps it can, although it all seems a little forced and contrived at points. Yet Christianity accounts for this belief and yearning in a far more coherent and plausible way.
But let’s end by focusing on the image of the crutch. It’s a rhetorical device, and its message is simple: God is for the emotionally and intellectually crippled. Strong and healthy people don’t need this sort of bogus support or specious comfort. They’re able to look after themselves. God is just for the weak and foolish. It’s pretty much the same message we find in New Atheism, which prides itself on the intellectual excellence of its leading gurus, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Two important points need to be made here. First, the issue is that of truth, not need. Christian apologists have always insisted that the claims of Christianity are firmly grounded in the bedrock of truth. Historically, relationally, existentially, and intellectually, the Christian faith tells things the way they really are. Part of that total vision of reality includes the important idea that human beings are made in the “image of God,” and thus possess an inbuilt tendency to find our way back to God—whether we like it or not.
Second, if you have a broken leg, you need a crutch. If you’re ill, you need medicine. That’s just the way things are. The Christian understanding of human nature is that we are damaged, wounded, and disabled by sin. That’s just the way things are. Augustine of Hippo compared the church to a hospital. It was, he suggested, full of wounded and ill people who were being healed. Freud seems to argue that he and other atheists are simply better human beings who lack any need for support. But this is just smug nonsense that runs away from reality. It denies the darker side of human beings, to which contemporary culture bears disturbing witness. People are addicted to sex, power, and narcotics—to mention only three categories of things that cause us to forfeit our independence and become their servants.
Whether Freud likes it or not, there is something terribly wrong with human nature. It needs its wounds to be bandaged, its sores to be washed, its diseases to be healed, and its guilt to be purged. The image of the crutch summarizes our need for intervention, which is grounded in the realization that we need help—even if we are too proud and complacent to ask for it. Freud wrote much of his more naïve material about human nature after the end of the First World War, in 1918, and before the dawn of the Nazi era in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Many would argue that the rise of Hitler would have caused Freud to review some of his more idealistic ideas about human nature. Freud died long before anyone knew about Auschwitz and the Nazi death camps.
Yet Freud himself appears to have been aware of a problem here. Even as early as 1913, Freud expressed concern that psychoanalysts were not “themselves better, nobler, or of stronger character.” We see here a tacit admission that Freud’s remedy for the human problem does not appear to have worked for those best qualified to practice it. A question of “physician, heal thyself,” perhaps?
Working the Angles: Applying the Case Studies
In the previous two sections of this chapter we have explored some themes relating to two classic questions of Christian apologetics and identified some components of answers to two important anxieties about faith. But apologetics is as much an art as it is a science. It’s not just about knowing arguments; it’s about how you use them. There’s a helpful analogy here with a medical practitioner: she will have a deep knowledge of the theory of medicine, including both what can go wrong with the human body and what can be done to sort things out. But this science of medicine has limited use unless you can get your patient to tell you what the problem really is.
As many of my medical colleagues complain, their patients often seem reluctant to tell them what their real problems are. Perhaps people are embarrassed by their symptoms, or maybe they are afraid of the possible implications of those symptoms. Every experienced medical practitioner knows the importance of cultivating the art of a good bedside manner: being a good and attentive listener, gaining patients’ confidence, and enabling them to disclose their anxieties. They have to find out what the real problems are. It’s an art that has to be learned the hard way—by experience.
Apologetics is like that. Knowing apologetic arguments, ideas, and approaches is only part of the task of the effective apologist. The best apologists are those who marry a rigorous knowledge of the science of apologetics with a deep appreciation of the art of apologetics. And here’s the difficult bit: you can learn the ideas from books and lectures, but you can only learn the art by practice, by trial and error—in short, by doing apologetics. Apologetics is like baking cakes, laying bricks, and playing the piano: you learn them by doing them. In each case, there is a theoretical element. Yet the theory leads into and informs the practice.
It is both impossible and irresponsible for someone such as myself to provide model answers to questions and objections. Not only does this reduce apologetics to learning a few replies by rote, it also fails to realize that each question is different and demands to be taken seriously on its own terms. We must listen carefully before we reply. For example, consider the following questions and anxieties, all of which relate directly to the issue of suffering—yet come from different places and need their own distinct responses. Read these questions. Try to work out where the questioner is coming from.
Study each of these questions carefully. First, notice that there is little in any of the questions to indicate whether the person asking it is a Christian, an agnostic, or an atheist. This is a very common apologetic dilemma. The question doesn’t necessarily tell you whether it’s coming from a believer with doubts and questions—or from an atheist who’s out to discredit you. You have to make a judgment about how you respond.
Second, note how a stock reply won’t meet the very different issues raised by these questions. Each has to be taken on its own terms. You need to work out what might lie behind them. Let’s take the third question, for example, which raises an issue of real importance about the approach C. S. Lewis adopts in The Problem of Pain, which speaks of suffering as God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Lewis’s point is good. Yet many feel that this approach is a little simplistic and inadequate when confronted with the brutal, harsh reality of suffering—including, of course, Lewis himself, after the death of his wife from cancer. His famous work A Grief Observed is a powerful critique of his own earlier approach. Yet Lewis did not lose his faith; if anything, it matured and grew through his tragedy. In responding to this question, you could talk about Lewis’s changing (and increasingly realistic and engaged) attitude toward suffering, and how he accommodated it within his faith.
The art of apologetics extends the reach of the science of apologetics. It helps us to make connections with people. When dealing with any concern about faith—such as the two we have just been looking at—we must avoid offering a stock answer and try to tailor our reply to the specific question we have been asked.
The fourth step is the hard part. For a start, there is so much we want to say. How can we pack all our ideas into a single answer? When I started out as an apologist, I found it very helpful to begin by writing out in full a response to a question I had found to be important. I would then read it aloud and try to tidy it up so it sounded better. Remember, written and spoken English are very different! Suppose this response took nine minutes to give. I would then try to reduce it to four minutes, aiming to keep the best bits, and make it as punchy and relevant as possible. Finally, I’d try to reduce it to two minutes.
Why? Partly because this forced me to focus on what needed to be said, rather than what I would like to say. But mostly because people find long answers wearying, and much prefer succinct, engaging replies to encyclopedic lectures. When you see the eyes of your audience glazing over with boredom, you know you’re in trouble.
Yet for many, the problem is not the length of time it takes to give a good answer, but how you work out the good answer in the first place. When I answer questions after a talk, I often find I have to think on my feet and respond very quickly. Yet twenty-five years of experience of doing this has really helped. I’ve had to wrestle with most questions, and have worked out what I can say helpfully. The main challenge is to make sure I connect with the question being asked in a helpful and gracious manner. It’s an art I’ve had to learn by doing.
In what follows, we shall explore two genuine questions and the response I gave to each. The replies are relatively short—about two or three minutes long. Then I will explain why I chose to respond in this specific way. I suggest that you read each question and work out what you would say. Then read what I said, and try to reverse engineer my response. Why do you think I gave that answer? Why did I choose those particular colors from the apologetic palette? Then move on, and read my own comments about both question and response. In both cases, these are questions from an audience after a talk I gave in Oxford in 2007 responding to Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (2006).
Question One
“I have a real problem with God and the suffering of the world. It’s so hard to make sense of things. I don’t think he really cares about us! Why can’t he just take suffering away from us?”
My Answer
“Thank you for that question. I’m sure that there are others in the audience with very similar thoughts and concerns. Let me try and say some things that might be helpful here. First, we all have a problem with suffering. It seems wrong and out of place. We have this deep feeling that it’s not the way things are meant to be. But part of the Christian hope is that we will one day be in a place where there is no suffering or pain. All these things will have gone. That’s where we really belong. This world is like a dark valley of sorrow. Yet Christians know that at the far end of this lies the New Jerusalem, a place of peace. That hope keeps us going as we travel through what the Bible calls the ‘valley of the shadow of death.’
“And there’s a second point: God does care for us. He is with us as we travel. As a Christian, I believe passionately that we see God in Jesus Christ. God entered into this world of pain, sorrow, and death. That’s what the idea of the incarnation is all about. And that means that God chose to come where we are. He chose to share our pain and sorrow. He doesn’t send some sidekick to tell us he cares for us. He journeys to where we are, and tells us in person. Jesus suffered on the cross so that one day we can be in a place in which suffering is no more. Now there’s much more I need to say about this. But the really important thing is that God leads us through suffering into glory. And he’s with us as we travel. We aren’t on our own.”
Question Two
“You said that God wasn’t a delusion. But anyone who knows anything about psychology will tell you that we invent things to suit our need. We make up ideas, and God is no exception. Why don’t we just recognize this and face up to things?”
My Reply
“That’s a very interesting question, and it opens up lots of important issues. Let me just focus on a few things and make sure that I address the central point you raised. I’m not sure I would agree with your summary of modern psychology, but I agree that we are often tempted to invent ideas that we find consoling. When I was an atheist myself—some years ago now—I took the view that God was just a comforting idea invented by sad people who couldn’t cope with the harshness of life. In fact, I took some pleasure in pointing out the metaphysical austerity of atheism. After all, I argued, this was such a bleak outlook on life that nobody would want to invent it!
“Let me just say two things in response to this excellent question. First, I have colleagues who are atheists precisely because they don’t want God to exist. They want to construct their own worlds, and decide what’s right and what’s wrong. God would just get in the way, and make things complicated for them. They know what they want to be true; so they declare that it is true. So I think this argument cuts both ways. If it’s right—and that’s an open question, by the way—it explains why atheists don’t believe in God and theists do believe in God.
“And second, we need to check things out against the evidence. I didn’t become a Christian because I felt any need for God. If anything, I was like someone who believed there was only stagnant pond water to drink, who then discovered champagne! What moved me to faith was reflection on the world, not some kind of existential inadequacy on my part. I was perfectly happy to accept a bleak outlook on life—if this was clearly right. In the end, I came to faith in God because I believed that this was right. Now I know that sounds like a very intellectual kind of conversion. I had yet to discover that Christianity had imaginative and emotional depth, as well as a capacity to make sense of things. That came later. But that’s another story.
“So I certainly agree with you that we need to face up to reality and check things out. You and I are clearly both critical thinkers. I think the big difference between us is where we believe that process of critical thinking takes us!”
—
Let me make it clear that these are not model answers, applicable to just about every situation. They are real answers, forged in the heat of the moment, which seemed appropriate to those specific questions in the form in which they were raised. Why did I choose to answer the questions in that way? From our engagement with these two concerns, it is clear there are lots of points I could have made. So why did I limit myself to those particular colors on my palette? One obvious reason is that answers to questions need to be fairly short. This limits the number of points you can make. I just couldn’t pack all the points I noted earlier in this chapter into those short replies.
Let’s look at the first response. As I listened to the person asking this question, I felt that the problem was existential rather than intellectual. The words suggested there was an intellectual component to the question; his demeanor suggested the problem lay deeper. I felt he was not really asking about the possible irrationality of belief in God, but the possible meaninglessness of the universe—and of his own life. In my response, I therefore highlighted the core theme of the presence of God in times of darkness, doubt, and loneliness, before going on to emphasize the key role of the doctrine of the incarnation in affirming God’s commitment to us. I ended by emphasizing a single point: “We aren’t alone,” because that is what I felt this person needed to hear.
Notice I didn’t defend God in the face of suffering. I felt the appropriate thing was to show this person how the Christian faith faces up to suffering and has important things to say. As an apologist, I have often found that explaining what Christianity has to say on any given matter is one of its most effective defenses.
What about the second response? As I listened to my questioner, it seemed clear to me he placed great value on reason and evidence, and was inclined to think that belief in God was poorly supported by either. The implicit assumption behind his question was that my faith in God was a delusion. I chose to respond initially by making the point that we often collude with our desires and create reality according to our taste. As I made clear, my questioner needed to consider the possibility that people who don’t believe in God are simply transmuting their desires into a worldview.
I then told a story—my own story, although only briefly and partially. The main point I wanted to make was that my conversion, at least in my own view, was a movement toward reason and evidence, not away from them. I also wanted to sow a seed—namely, the suggestion that atheism is actually a rather bleak perspective on life, and that some are unwise enough to assume that the harshness and austerity of a way of looking at things are indicators of its truth. They’re not!
Those are my “live” answers—developed then and there, in response to genuine questions from an audience. I hope they were helpful. But I am sure you will believe—and rightly so—they could be improved upon. That’s something I gladly leave to you!
For Further Reading
Beckwith, Francis, William Lane Craig, and James Porter Moreland. To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004.
Craig, William Lane, and Chad V. Meister. God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009.
Guinness, Os. Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005.
Kreeft, Peter, and Ronald K. Tacelli. Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009.
Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. London: HarperCollins, 1994.
______. The Problem of Pain. London: Fount, 1977.
Murray, Michael J., ed. Reason for the Hope Within. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
Nicholi, Armand. The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. New York: Free Press, 2002.
Sire, James R. Why Good Arguments Often Fail: Making a More Persuasive Case for Christ. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000.
Zacharias, Ravi, and Norman Geisler, eds. Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.