Is Atheism Winning?

Transcript Is Atheism Winning?

Kevin Harris: Well, Dr. Craig, atheism is winning. Lee Strobel said so. That is according to this blogger. When I saw this headline I immediately smelled a rat and decided I’d better check it out. It is a blog from January 2015. The blogger says,

Here’s some welcome news to start out 2015: Lee Strobel, the famed Christian apologist, says that atheism is winning and evangelical Christianity is “facing a crisis”: “We are facing a crisis in America. Skepticism is rising. Too many young people are leaving the faith. Few Christians are able to effectively share Jesus with others,” Strobel said in a statement released exclusively to The Christian Post. “At many churches, reaching spiritually lost people falls to the bottom of their priorities. “This is a crisis we need to confront — urgently!”

Dr. Craig: It is interesting, Kevin, how people can put a spin on someone’s words to make them say what that person wants them to say. Nothing in this paragraph says that atheism is winning. Look at each individual sentence. “We are facing a crisis in America. Skepticism is rising.” All of that is true. Among many young people skepticism is rising. But it is equally true among young people that interest in apologetics and the rational defense of Christianity is also rising. It is perfectly possible for both of these to be rising at the same time. In fact, just this past week I was speaking publicly at Rutgers University to a capacity crowd on the existence of God and the beginning of the universe. During the hour and a half of Q&A that followed my talk, one of the students got up and said, “Dr. Craig, I want to thank the philosophers and the thinkers of your generation for what you have done for us. You have made it easy for us to be Christians today because of the rational defense that you’ve provided for Christian faith.” I said, “Is that actually how you feel? That it is easy for you to be a Christian here at Rutgers?” And he said, “Yes, we’ve got good answers to the questions people ask.” I thought to myself this is absolutely marvelous. The resources are there and these Christians at Rutgers felt that it was easy for them to be Christians in the midst of this secular, eastern university. Of course, what Lee realizes is that many people don’t have access to these sorts of materials. They don’t read his books. They don’t visit ReasonableFaith.org. So he says, “Too many young people are leaving the faith.” That is absolutely true. Any that are leaving the faith is too many as far as I am concerned. And he says “Few Christians are able to effectively share Jesus with others.” The number of effective witnesses for Christ is not as many as we would like. In many churches, he says, evangelism is not a high priority. He said, “This is a crisis we need to confront.” Absolutely. But none of that says that atheism is winning. It just says that as Christians we’ve got to do better in sharing our faith, in helping our churches to make evangelism a higher priority, and in bringing the message to young people that faith in Christ is perfectly rational. I don’t think there is anything that would suggest that atheism is winning. Certainly, Lee doesn’t say that.

Kevin Harris: No. And, by the way, what you said about the young man at Rutgers reminds me of the kids who go to their parents and say, “Your generation, mom and dad, didn’t even have the Internet. What were you all doing?” And the parents say, “Our generation was busy building the Internet for you.” Sometimes we need to have that perspective of the groundwork that has been laid. It has been amazing, and so timely, the apologetics and philosophy renaissance.

Dr. Craig: You and I have talked at length about things like the Pew religion survey in North America, as well as surveys worldwide about the growth of Christianity around the world in various countries. I remember from a previous podcast we saw that the percentage of people who classify themselves as “none” when it comes to their religious affiliation plateaued sometime last year, and in fact has not continued significantly to increase.[1] I think that is extremely encouraging, and I hope will now begin to decrease in the future going forward. In fact, in many countries of the world, Christianity is actually increasing.

Kevin Harris: The Economist online says that miraculous numbers – Christians in China – is staggering. The growth of the Christian church in China. Some estimates are 10% per year since 1980. The numbers are so big it is often hard to even get a handle on.

Dr. Craig: Yes, and this is in an atheistic, communist country that Christianity is surging in its growth. I noticed according to this Economist article that one researcher at Purdue University estimates that by 2030 there will be around 250 million Christians in China. That will make China the largest Christian nation in the world. They will have more Christians in China than in the United States, or any other country of the world.

Kevin Harris: It said that in 2013 a group of Chinese intellectuals convened in Oxford and for the first time at this conference they included Christian intellectuals at the conference in response to the rapid growth of Chinese Christians.

Dr. Craig: We have seen this personally when we’ve been in China. We were at a conference of Chinese and American philosophers at Fudan University on their 100th anniversary celebration. During the course of this conference, the Chinese philosophers themselves said that China needs a new basis for a moral fabric for society. Confucianism is dead and cannot supply it; Marxism is bankrupt. They said “We should turn to Christianity to provide the moral foundation for the new China.” They insisted that Christianity is not a foreign religion. They said Christianity is an indigenous Chinese religion. It has been there, Kevin, for centuries. Therefore, it ought to be embraced openly and freely by the Chinese. So Chinese intellectuals themselves are saying this in China. It is just amazing.

Kevin Harris: He concludes his blog:

Even if Strobel’s center is built, I don’t expect it to make any difference. The decline of Christianity is happening for larger cultural reasons that have little to do with how persuasive evangelicals are in one-on-one conversations, and reversing it would require far more drastic changes in politics and tone than anyone’s even willing to suggest. But it’s heartening to see this trend has spread so far that even the biggest names in apologetics are beginning to take notice of it.

Dr. Craig: Certainly, I think in the United States we do face tremendous cultural forces that are against Christianity. I think that the entertainment industry (I am thinking here of Hollywood) promotes values that are antithetical to a Christian world and life view, in particularly Christian ethics in many cases. A materialistic consumerism in our culture is also something that is antithetical to a Christian worldview that emphasizes developing the spiritual life and that part of one’s personality. It certainly is true that, I think, Western culture is decadent. This is where I agree with the Marxist Islamic critique of Western culture. I think Western culture is decadent. It is horribly materialistic, consumeristic, hedonistic. These are tremendous cultural forces that are almost impossible, it seems, to overcome. But I think we try our best to try to present Christianity in a winsome way that will enable us to win as many people as possible and to resist these sorts of cultural forces. That is what I think Lee wants to do with this Center for American Evangelism. He wants to use all sorts of means for helping to change the culture. I’ve been tremendously encouraged by, for example, the responses to our YouTube channels.[2] We are getting millions of views on these YouTube channels. The responses that we get indicate that many people come to faith or they come back to faith after watching some of these debates with non-Christians that I’ve participated in at various universities. So having a presence on the Internet, I think we need to do better in the area of film and in music to provide a counterbalance to the secular forces in the entertainment industry in order to have the Christian world and life view be a potent force in our culture. Certainly there is much work to be done.

As this fellow admits, when you are raising funds or promoting a new project like Lee here is doing, naturally you do tend to emphasize the crisis that needs to be addressed. You want to rally support, and a way you can do that is by telling people we are facing a crisis that is real. This doesn't mean that this is just inflated rhetoric. But I think we are in a kind of cultural war in North America and in the West.

I think increasingly the center is emptying out. Certainly atheism and secularism are increasing, but at the same time so is evangelical Christianity. It is the fence-sitters in the middle that, I think, are kind of emptying out to either side. That is why these old line denominations that used to be so culturally dominant in the United States, like the United Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and so forth, are in free-fall today. Those denominations which do not have a biblical message that culturally challenges our society are the ones that are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Kevin Harris: Bill, if we compromise enough, anybody can be popular. If Christianity and the church in America wanted to be more popular with who? – with Hollywood or with this decadent society, all we’d have to do is just change all our values and say, Yeah, perfectly OK, have sex with who you want as many times as you want with whoever you want. Just be nice about it. Sure.

Dr. Craig: I think you do see this sort of accommodation in the Prosperity Gospel, frankly. I think that represents a significant accommodation to American consumerism and materialism and downplaying the importance of suffering and spiritual discipleship and these sorts of values. I don’t think that that kind of Christianity is going to be sustainable over generations. It may be popular the first generation now, but after awhile the emptiness of that sort of thing, I think, will be keenly felt. So I tend to agree with my colleague J. P. Moreland that the church who tries to accommodate itself to culture in that way in order to fill pews is ultimately digging its own grave.

Kevin Harris: We want the culture to come along.

Dr. Craig: We want to change culture.

Kevin Harris: You want to change culture. We want to preserve culture. Bill, this is such a thing with me – in the church we have to be careful. If people are going to stumble over Christianity, let them stumble over the real stumbling blocks of it – the cross of Christ and our need to be selfless and humility – and not let it be heady trivial sensibility type things. That is what we often emphasize. In the 70s the length of your hair was tied into your Christianity. If you had long hair, that was something that was baggage put on us young people at the time that didn’t have anything to do with Christianity. Yet, these sensibilities and these mores and these localisms and political footballs and sacred cows get all plugged in there. That is often what is rebelled against in the world. They don’t see a clear picture of Jesus anymore. Let them stumble over who Jesus really is, if they are going to stumble. He is not one to stumble over, unless you just really have a problem in your heart. Did you get my rant there? Did you get what I’m trying to say?

Dr. Craig: Yes! Authentic Christianity does present people with a stumbling block, right? The point is to make people confront that genuine stumbling block rather than cultural caricatures that detract from who Christ really was and is.[3]