"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." -- C.S. Lewis
Sam Harris sees it his mission in life to eradicate every semblance of Christianity. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris calls faith "nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail." That is one of the more milder attacks against Christianity and religion in general in his scathing diatribe. It is Richard Dawkins who piles it on by defining faith as "a kind of mental illness", and he describes Christianity as an attempt to make a virtue of believing "not only in the absence of evidence, but in the teeth of evidence." At least for Harris, Dawkins and their ilk, we don't have to wonder where they are coming from. There is not a pretentious bone in their bombastic bodies.
Do Christians believe in God, like some people believe that the earth is still flat, or that man really did not go to the moon but landed in the Arizona desert, or that the moon is made of cheese and if man really did go to the moon they should have come back to earth with mozzarella on the bottom of their boots?
Sam Harris frames it this way: "Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."
Has science superseded Scripture? Maybe at one time man in his caveman days needed some superstitious ideas to make sense of the world, and so out pops of his kooky cranium a wide range of diverse explanations, chiefly among them a belief in gods and goddesses who control the universe and the destiny of mankind. Over time, one "god" emerges as supreme, and self-acclaimed sacred literature began to be developed to perpetrate this hoax on pre-Darwin man. But now since science has dispelled so many false notions and theories of how the world works (aren't you glad that your doctor does not practice bloodletting?), we can also dispose of all the myths and legends all under the umbrella of "religion." And since Christianity is the world's largest religion that holds more sway upon man, it is this particular myth that must be rigorously opposed and exterminated for the betterment of society and the full advancement of man.
What I have just described is the marching orders of intellectual atheism that finds many willing disciples in the field of academia, the very field that shapes the minds of impressionable, confused, and dumbed-down youth on our university campuses.
The engaging and bright college professor can use a convincing power point presentation in class that delineates on one side "faith" and on the other side "facts." He tells his class of freshmen that religion for example dwells on the side of faith, but education and their future careers depend upon the study of "facts", those things which are observable and verifiable. Faith is totally subjective and can not be proved, and what his class will learn in this higher institution of learning is totally objective and has facts and not myth on its side.
So what is a freshman who grew up as a church kid going to do? Will he melt under pressure, will he begin to doubt all he heard in his Sunday School classes, Vacation Bible School days, numerous church camps and mission trips, and youth group gatherings, will he come home one weekend to his parents a totally changed individual with cynicism and skepticism running through his veins to the shock of his parents, or will he be able to know how to stand his ground, defend the gospel and articulate his faith in a hostile environment?
It is not just college freshmen who need to sanctify the Lord God in their hearts, to give an answer or defense of the hope that is within them who asks them, and to do that with gentleness and grace. (1 Peter 3:15) The co-worker who says that all religions are the same and all believe in the same God, the cousin who dabbles in the occult, the new church down the road that says that preaching "thus saith the Lord" is archaic and demeaning and should be abandoned for a more conversational dialogue with no definitive doctrinal parameters, and the friend who has converted to Buddhism, are all prime examples of why if we don't know what we believe and how to express it rationally and passionately to an overly tolerant society, then we are blindly steering our ship to crash head on into the rocks of postmodernism.
This is why we need to have a Christianity for the Tough-Minded. And this is why we need to understand such things as modernism, postmodernism, world religions and intellectual atheism. We stand exactly in the same place as the apostle Paul when he entered Athens in Acts 17:16-34. The more things change, the more things remain the same. What we encounter today is not much different than what Paul witnessed on the campus of Athens University.
Our journey continues next time with a look at the challenges of modernism and postmodernism.
Yours in Christ,
Chris
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