The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [11]
Who cared if scientific materialism taught that there is nothing other than matter and therefore no person could possibly survive the grave? I was too young to trifle with the implications of that; instead, I pursued the kind of immortality I could attain by leaving my mark as a successful journalist, whose investigations and articles would spur new legislation and social reform. As for the finality of death—well, I had plenty of time to ponder that later. There was too much living to do in the meantime.
So the seeds of my atheism were sown as a youngster when religious authorities seemed unwilling or unable to help me get answers to my questions about God. My disbelief flowered after discovering that Darwinism displaces the need for a deity. And my atheism came to full bloom when I studied Jesus in college and was told that no science-minded person could possibly believe what the New Testament says about him.
According to members of the left-wing Jesus Seminar, the same impulse that had given rise to experimental science, “which sought to put all knowledge to the test of close and repeated observation,” also prompted their efforts to finally distinguish “the factual from the fictional” in Jesus’ life. They concluded that in “this scientific age,” modern thinkers can no longer believe that Jesus did or said much of what the Bible claims. As they put it:
The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens. 37
By the time I was halfway through college, my atheistic attitudes were so entrenched that I was becoming more and more impatient toward people of mindless faith, like those protesters I would later encounter in West Virginia. I couldn’t fathom their stubborn reluctance to subject their outmoded beliefs to that “universal acid” of modern scientific thought.
I felt smugly arrogant toward them. Let them remain slaves to their wishful thinking about a heavenly home and to the straightjacket morality of their imaginary God. As for me, I would dispassionately follow the conclusions of the scientists and historians whose logical and consistent research has reduced the world to material processes only.
THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS
If I had stopped asking questions, that’s where I would have remained. But with my background in journalism and law, the demanding of answers was woven into my nature. So five years after my adventure in West Virginia, when my wife Leslie announced that she had decided to become a follower of Jesus, it was understandable that the first words I uttered would be in the form of an inquiry.
It wasn’t asked politely. Instead, it was spewed in a venomous and accusatory tone: “What has gotten into you?” I simply couldn’t comprehend how such a rational person could buy into an irrational religious concoction of wishful thinking, make-believe, mythology, and legend.
In the ensuing months, however, as Leslie’s character began to change, as her values underwent a transformation, as she became a more loving and caring and authentic person, I began asking the same question, only this time in a softer and more sincere tone of genuine wonderment: “What has gotten into you?” Something—or, as she would claim, Someone—was undeniably changing her for the better.
Clearly, I needed to investigate what was going on. And so I began asking more questions—a lot of them—about faith, God, and the Bible. I was determined to go wherever the answers would take me—even though, frankly, I wasn’t quite prepared back then for where I would ultimately end up.
This multifaceted spiritual investigation lasted nearly two years. In my previous book, The Case for Christ, which retraced and expanded upon this journey, I discussed the answers I received from thirteen leading experts about