In a comment on my post on The Golden Compass (and moreover the lacking of apologetics training in youth classes), Justin of Mission in Marseille brought up an important issue:
“…I do not think that apologetics can save our faith in our secular (aka atheist) society, simply because it’s human wisdom (meaning limited, not false). I believe what we should focus on is training our kids to see things in the light of God’s plan. Teach them to search for truth, holiness, beauty and, above all, Jesus’ presence in their lives.
If our heart’s deepest (i want to say only) desire is to know God, I believe he will give us strength to overcome this world. Look at the first Christians. Very few of them could publicly defend the truth of the Gospel with rational thought, but they did demonstrate it through their lives. And the Roman Empire could do nothing to stop them!
I do think apologetics are essential, but more useful for atheists than Christians. We can, and should, convince someone that Christianity is intellectually justifiable. But the next step is learning to trust God even when it doesn’t make sense.”
When confronted with anti-Christian arguments, the response of most Christians is that “you’ve just got to have faith.” While total faith in God is a very noble thing that we all should aspire to have, this doesn’t stop their opponent from blasting them for being “blind” or “ignorant to facts.”
On the opposite side of the coin are the Christians who, when their faith is challenged, go off like a firecracker and start presenting apologetic arguments. These arguments are countered by their opponent, and the result is logic taking a back seat to lengthy and complicated debates where both sides are convinced they are correct and refuse to give up.
In reality, the two extremes combine. There is a place for apologetics and a place for faith. As the lengthy debates show, both theism and atheism are intellectually satisfying and logically responsible (although atheism is not perfectly so). That’s the place of apologetics: to get theism and Christianity to an intellectually fulfilling level. However, something comes after the intellect and the logic.
The famous atheist Richard Dawkins stated “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” That might be, but there is something all humans yearn for more than intellectual fulfillment. This is what separates theism from atheism. Both appeal to logic and reason, but only theism appeals to something higher. One might call this something “spirituality.” It is this something that gives Christians the quiet assurance they possess, not the endless debating of the apologist.
Here’s another way of looking at it: science has many uses. It can tell us about the galaxies far across the universe, or tell us the nature of the tiny cells that make up our bodies. It can observe, analyze, and experiment. It can tell us the what, when, where, why, and how of an object, but there is something it cannot do. Although it can tell you the why of something, it can not tell you why it is. It can tell you why, when a bird flaps its wings, it lifts off the ground. What it can’t tell you is why the bird even bothers to flap its wings. It can tell you why, when given a population of organisms with many different alleles, natural selection will occur and the more favorable traits will survive in the population while the less favorable traits will not. What is can’t tell you is why the fittest even bother to survive.
It is the same with apologetics. Apologetics can tell someone why we believe what we we believe, but it can’t tell someone the nature and strength of that belief. We can tell people time and time again why we believe what we do, that two thousand years ago one man who claimed to be the Son of God was killed and rose from the dead. We won’t get anywhere, however, until we start telling them what it means.
