(Note: This post was originally written as a devotional column for my local newspaper)
Does God really exist? The vast majority of people in our
society, throughout its entire history, would almost certainly have answered
“Yes, of course!” In recent years, however, there have been a lot of folks
questioning that assumption. In the early 2000s, a spate of popular bestselling
books came out from writers known as “the New Atheists,” vigorously mocking
traditional religious beliefs and claiming that religion had been disproven by
science. However, to anyone who paid attention to how those books were received
among the writers’ colleagues in the academic worlds of philosophy, theology,
and yes, even science, the widespread sense was that the books were more
bluster and nonsense than anything else. Nevertheless, they seemed to hit a
mark: more and more people are abandoning traditional faith-perspectives in our
society (though on a global scale, the reverse is actually the case).
“Nones”—that is, people who say they have no religious aspect to their lives or
worldview at all—are one of the most swiftly-rising demographics in our
country.
All of this is not much of a surprise to anybody who has
been paying attention to social trends. Sometimes Christians might feel a
certain anxiety about such things, but I generally don’t worry too much about
it. Of course, I do want people to believe in the truth-claims of
Christianity—there is nothing so beautiful, life-giving, and true in the world
as the faith that I’ve been blessed to receive. But I don’t feel much anxiety
about the attacks of atheists and agnostics, because the plain fact of the
matter is that they’re bound to fall short (and that’s coming from someone who,
for a while at least, counted himself an agnostic!). God does exist, he has
revealed himself in history, in Scripture, and most of all in the person of
Jesus. In short, Christian truth really is true, and, as Shakespeare once put
it, “The truth will out.” Truth has a way of becoming known, simply because it
is true, as it presents itself over and over again to honest seekers of all
generations.
Let me give one rather striking example. Back in 1955,
theism (a belief in God) had been almost entirely eradicated from academic
philosophy departments in universities. A group of prominent atheist
philosophers issued a volume of triumphant essays at that time, essentially as
a statement of their triumph in their field. The book had as its editors two of
the rising stars and leading lights of those atheist philosophers: Anthony Flew
and Alasdair MacIntyre. Now fast-forward the clock sixty years, and guess what
you see? Both Anthony Flew and MacIntyre reversed course and became convinced
of God’s existence because of the evidence for it from science, logic, history,
and philosophy. Flew (once called “the pope of atheists”), issued a book before
his passing titled simply “There Is a God.” And MacIntyre became not only a
theist, but a Christian, and is now one of the leading theologians in the
world. The tide of God-believing philosophers has risen substantially in
university departments all over the world, to the point where a significant
majority of experts in the field of the arguments for whether God exists or not
(philosophy of religion) are of the opinion that he does. There is powerful and
compelling evidence that not only does God exist, but also that the biblical
story stands up to scrutiny: this creator-God loves us to such an extent that
he has called us, redeemed us, and entered our story to attain our salvation on
our behalf. I truly believe that “the truth will out,” the tide of
faith will turn again, as it always has before, and the great Christian revival
that is sweeping through the most unlikely corners of the world right now will
one day soon return to our shores.