Christianity need not retreat from investigation. Its central claim is that the Word became flesh, entered history, was crucified, and on the third day rose from the dead. That is not an embarrassment to be overcome. It is the claim we have been given to declare and defend.
For much of the modern era, Christianity has been treated as though it had lost its intellectual standing. Science had made God unnecessary, Darwin had explained away design, biblical criticism had dissolved confidence in Scripture, miracles belonged to a prescientific age, and the resurrection of Jesus might retain some private religious meaning, but educated people surely did not believe that a dead man actually walked out of a tomb. Christianity could perhaps survive as spirituality, morality, community, or therapeutic comfort, but as an account of what is actually true about the world, it was supposed to have had its day.
Something appears to be changing. A fascinating example appeared recently on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge podcast, where his guest was Charles Murray, the social scientist best known for books such as Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart. Murray is not an evangelist, theologian, or Christian apologist, which makes the conversation all the more interesting. He describes himself as having spent most of his life as a casual agnostic and recalls absorbing the assumption at Harvard that intelligent people simply did not believe “that stuff” anymore. Religion was not so much refuted as dismissed. The educated world had moved on.
Murray eventually began to wonder whether it had moved on too quickly. His new book, Taking Religion Seriously, describes his long and somewhat reluctant reconsideration, proceeding in two stages: first, taking God seriously, and then taking Christianity seriously. He considers the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, consciousness, morality, the soul, the historical reliability of the Gospels, and finally the resurrection of Jesus. Murray has not become Billy Graham. He remains cautious about calling what he possesses “faith,” but his intellectual trajectory is noteworthy. A man formed in an academic culture that regarded Christianity as something educated people had outgrown found himself compelled to reconsider it on the basis of the evidence.
Murray is hardly alone in reconsidering some of the assumptions inherited from the last century. Developments in cosmology, physics, biology, and philosophy of mind have complicated the familiar story that modern science steadily pushed God out of the picture. The universe appears to have had a beginning. Its fundamental constants are extraordinarily calibrated for the possibility of life. Living cells contain staggering quantities of information. Consciousness remains stubbornly resistant to reduction to electrochemical activity, while human beings continue to speak and act as though good and evil, reason and truth, beauty and human dignity are realities rather than merely useful evolutionary preferences. None of this writes the Nicene Creed across the sky, but it makes materialism considerably less self-evident than it was once assumed to be.
I was reminded of this recently while participating in a colloquium organized by the Discovery Institute (and sponsored by 1517) at Cambridge University. Much of the first part of the gathering concerned these same questions: the origin and structure of the universe, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, biological information, consciousness, reason, morality, and whether these can finally be explained in purely material terms. The cumulative case is significant. The old claim that science has somehow rendered God unnecessary is increasingly difficult to sustain. Some of the most interesting discoveries of modern science have instead reopened questions that an earlier generation confidently declared closed.
Yet Christianity does not end with the proposition that God exists. The Christian claim is not merely that there is an intelligence, designer, first cause, or moral lawgiver behind the universe. Christianity makes the astonishing claim that the One through whom the universe came into existence entered that universe: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Christianity therefore makes claims not only about what lies behind the cosmos but about events within human history. Jesus of Nazareth lived under identifiable political rulers, taught in identifiable towns, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried, and, according to the testimony upon which Christianity was founded, rose bodily from the dead.
Christian apologetics, therefore, moves from cosmos to Christ. There are good philosophical and scientific reasons to believe that the universe is not self-explanatory, but Christians can go further by asking historical questions about Jesus. When were the Gospels written? Do they preserve eyewitness testimony? How early is the proclamation of the resurrection? What explains the transformation of the disciples, the conversion of Paul, the conversion of James—the once-unbelieving brother of Jesus—the empty tomb, and the emergence of the Christian proclamation in the very place where Jesus had been publicly executed? These are historical questions, and they can be investigated using the ordinary tools we use to examine claims about the past.
Perhaps Christians need to recover some intellectual confidence here. For several generations, we have often allowed atheism, materialism, skepticism, and religious pluralism to occupy the position of neutral observer while Christianity alone is summoned to account for itself. Certainly Christians should answer objections; Peter tells us to be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15). But apologetics also requires examining the alternatives. Materialism and atheism are not neutral positions requiring no justification. They, too, make claims about reality, human beings, reason, morality, consciousness, and the universe, and those claims are subject to the same demand for evidence and coherence.
There is an interesting historical irony here. In 1976, the prominent atheist philosopher Antony Flew published The Presumption of Atheism, arguing that the debate over God should begin with atheism as the presumptive position. The burden of proof belonged to the theist. Unless sufficient reasons could be produced for believing that God exists, atheism or agnosticism remained the reasonable starting point. Flew’s argument captured the intellectual mood of the time remarkably well: belief in God was the claim requiring justification, while unbelief increasingly presented itself as the neutral position from which religious claims were to be judged.
Then Flew changed his mind. After decades as one of the philosophical world’s most prominent atheists, he announced in 2004 that he had come to believe in an intelligent, transcendent source of the universe. His position was closer to Aristotelian theism or deism than Christianity, and there is no good reason to claim that Flew died a Christian. Still, the reversal is striking. The philosopher who had argued that theism bore the burden of proof eventually concluded that the evidence pointed toward God. His 2007 book announcing the change was appropriately titled There Is a God. Flew had long insisted that one must follow the argument wherever it leads. In his own case, he believed, it had led him out of atheism.
Perhaps the presumption itself deserves reconsideration. If everything is matter, how do we account for consciousness, and why should we trust our minds to tell us what is true? If our cognitive faculties are the products of processes ordered toward survival rather than truth, why should we assume they reliably disclose reality? If morality is an evolutionary adaptation, in what meaningful sense can anything actually be evil rather than merely undesirable? If human beings possess no transcendent significance, what grounds universal and inviolable human dignity? If the universe is ultimately accidental, why is it comprehensible to rational minds at all? And if Jesus did not rise from the dead, what historical explanation better accounts for the evidence surrounding the birth of Christianity? Materialism, atheism, religious pluralism, Islam, and every other account of reality face the same fundamental question Christianity does: Why should anyone believe it is true?
Charles Murray’s journey thus has an interesting predecessor in Flew’s. Neither man should be made into something he is not. Flew did not become a Christian, and Murray remains hesitant about how to describe his present religious position. But both challenge the assumption that increased knowledge necessarily carries educated people from belief toward unbelief. In both cases, engagement with the evidence moved a prominent intellectual in the opposite direction. That does not prove Christianity true, but it does undermine the notion that unbelief is simply the position left standing once the evidence has been considered.
Christianity, moreover, places enormous theological weight upon events open to historical investigation. Paul does not tell the Corinthians that the resurrection is a useful symbol of hope or a religious truth insulated from historical questions. He tells them that if Christ has not been raised, their faith is futile. Christianity stakes its truth upon something it says actually happened. Its central claims, therefore, invite investigation rather than exemption from it.
The Christian does not merely say that the universe feels meaningful; he says there is a reason for its meaning. He does not merely insist that human beings possess dignity; he says human beings bear the image of their Creator. He does not merely lament evil; he has grounds for calling evil objectively evil. And he does not merely hope that death is not the end; he points to events outside Jerusalem and claims that death has already been defeated there. Christianity is not simply a collection of transcendent intuitions about what might lie beyond the world. It claims that the God beyond the world acted within it.
Here, Christian apologetics reaches its proper end. The goal is not generic theism, nor is it to demonstrate that religious people can still be intelligent in the twenty-first century. The goal is to “placard Christ,” as Rod Rosenbladt would say. The God suggested by the heavens is the God who has spoken, and the intelligence behind the cosmos is the Creator who entered his creation. The deepest problem confronting humanity is not simply that we have misunderstood the universe but that sinners stand before a holy God. Cosmology, intelligent design, philosophy, archaeology, and historical argument cannot solve that problem. It required a cross.
Christian apologetics can answer objections, test rival explanations, and show that belief in God is intellectually reasonable and that the historical claims concerning Jesus deserve to be taken seriously. But the Christian proclamation is finally not, “We have a better theory.” It is the announcement of John the Baptist: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Apologetics may bring us from the cosmos to Christ, but the Gospel tells us what Christ has done for us.
Our cultural moment may indeed be changing. The confident materialism that dominated much of the twentieth century appears less secure, and people who were taught that intelligent adults simply do not believe “that stuff” anymore are discovering that the questions were never settled. For Christians, however, the point is not to celebrate a cultural reversal. It is to invite our skeptical neighbors to consider the evidence anew: the universe, life, consciousness, morality, history, and finally Christ. Christianity need not retreat from investigation. Its central claim is that the Word became flesh, entered history, was crucified, and on the third day rose from the dead. That is not an embarrassment to be overcome. It is the claim we have been given to declare and defend.
