Disrupting Skeptics

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, a colleague of yours has written an article on “What Moves Someone From Skeptic to Believer?”^[1] Jana Harmon is the author of this article and its research. She looks at various criteria that often move a skeptic to belief in Christ. You know Jana. She is a colleague of yours.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I’ve met her. And on a number of occasions she has actually attended my Defenders class. I first met her while she was working on her doctoral degree at the University of Birmingham in the UK where I did my own doctoral work. So I was interested to meet this young woman who was also working in my alma mater.

KEVIN HARRIS: She has a podcast called “Side B Podcast.” She's interviewed former atheists. She's up to about 18 or 20 I believe. She has been able to see various categories from their stories. Let’s look at some of these, and let's also see if you've encountered any of these in your own life and also how the work of Reasonable Faith potentially addresses these categories. She starts out by saying,

Sometimes we look at others and think, “They’ll never change their views, their lives, their decisions, what they believe.”

But she said there's so many former atheists that she's interviewed that that view has gone out the window. She's seen some people that she thought would never come to Christ and actually become Christians. She keys off of a book by Alan Noble called Disruptive Witness,

Alan Noble commends us as Christians to disrupt the presumptions of nonbelievers from an immanent way of looking at the world towards the transcendent.

I wonder if you'd comment on that – the difference between immanent and transcendent.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I'm not sure what Alan Noble means by that. The word “immanent” there is not with an ‘i’ meaning “something that's about to happen” but “immanent” in the sense that it is this worldly – it's within the world of our experience. Whereas it's the opposite of transcendent which is beyond the world which would point to God. So somehow he wants us to have a witness, I guess, that will point people beyond the mundane to the ultra-mundane.

KEVIN HARRIS:

Among the eighteen conversion stories . . . the atheists were not looking for God, not interested in spiritual or apologetics conversations until some form of catalyst occurred.  These “disruptions” that roused them towards a search fell broadly into four types: 1) Disruptive Witness, 2) Disruptive Longings, 3) Disruptive Crisis, and 4) Disruptive (non-crisis) Circumstance.

We'll look at these.

A Disruptive Witness catalyst occurs when someone’s preconceived presumptions about God, Christians, or Christianity are countered in an embodied and/or intellectual way.

DR. CRAIG: This is one of the missions of Reasonable Faith. When I founded Reasonable Faith I was deeply concerned with the spokesmen that were trotted out in the media to talk on behalf of evangelical Christians who were empty-headed and superficial and I thought, “Why can't we have an intellectually credible and articulate person speak for us in the public arena?” And it was then that I determined to found Reasonable Faith with this mission in mind – to provide an intelligent and articulate voice in the public square in defense of traditional Christianity. The debates that I participate in on university campuses would undoubtedly be one of the most disruptive ways of doing this. People come to these debates looking for blood on the floor, hoping and expecting the non-Christian to make mincemeat out of this Bible-pounding fundamentalist. And they are often quite shocked when it turns out that the non-Christian has no good arguments in defense of his view and no good objections to the arguments that I present in support of the Christian view. This really scrambles people's categories because it's the Christians who are supposed to be the emotional anti-intellectual types, and it often turns out to be the non-believer. This impression is only heightened when the non-believer then begins to misbehave and call names or get angry or use ad hominem attacks to which I try to respond as graciously as possible. I hope that this kind of a disruptive witness in a secular environment like a university campus is something that would prompt people to begin to explore Christian faith for themselves.

KEVIN HARRIS: She gives a couple of examples of this.

High school history teacher Frank Federico (Ep. 6) wanted nothing to do with God or Christianity. Belief in God was irrelevant and untrue. . . . science and religion could not be reconciled. Frank unexpectedly met a winsome, intelligent Christian science teacher who disrupted his preconceived categories.

He opened the door to the truth of it. “This unforeseen positive encounter was the catalyst that began his intellectual search towards truth” and led him to Christ.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. That personal testimony of one's life is so powerful. As a teenager and a non-believer I thought that Christians were nothing but church-going hypocrites until I met a girl in my German class who was a radiant Christian and who shared with me the love of God. It was so attractive and wonderful. I could see the difference that it made in her life, and I remember she would often say to me later after becoming a Christian that our lives are sometimes the only Bible certain people ever read. That was a good reminder to be living in such a way as to be a catalyst to faith in Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is where she mentions our friend Peter Byrom and his encounter with your work as another example of a disruptive witness catalyst in the more intellectual form

DR. CRAIG: Peter was a Richard Dawkins disciple. He began to look at my work and began to have doubts about Dawkins. There's a very famous YouTube video where he confronts Dawkins at a speaking engagement and asks him a question, and Dawkins skirts the question and avoids it and treats it dismissively. And for Peter that was really confidence-shattering in Dawkins and the New Atheism. There is a new book coming out to which Peter has an essay contributed on how Richard Dawkins has led people to faith. It's a whole series of testimonies of people who have come to Christ through the witness of Richard Dawkins, and Peter is one of them. It was just wonderful to see the transformation take place in his life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Peter sends us articles and ideas for podcasts all the time, and we appreciate it. The next category is the disruptive longings catalyst. This may occur, Jana says,

when someone actually understands the logical ends of their godless worldview, whether existentially or intellectually.  They may have lived in a godless reality for a while only to find their lives dissatisfying and empty, prompting a sort of emotional or existential dissonance. This existential longing becomes the catalyst whereby someone becomes willing to reconsider their options and opens the door towards the possibility of God.

DR. CRAIG:That was certainly my experience, again, as a non-believer. I felt the darkness and the despair of a world without God – a life in which there was no meaning, there was no purpose. My life was doomed to end in death and destruction, and the entire human race would eventually go extinct in the heat death of the universe. I just couldn't see any meaning or purpose or value in life. So I had a deep longing for something more, and that was why the message of this girl in front of me in German class resonated with me so much – because the message she shared and lived really spoke to these deep-seated longings in my spirit. We get letters like this from people who were atheists or agnostics all the time where they say, “It just became clear to me that life is meaningless – that there's no purpose if there is no God.” And this has prompted them to come to faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: She gives a very interesting account. She interviewed Jack Barsky,

a former atheist, KGB undercover agent, and successful business executive, had all of the trappings of worldly achievement and excitement.  He considered himself too intelligent to believe in God, yet he was left with deep personal dissatisfaction and emptiness after a failed marriage.

He went into a kind of an existential crisis – “what's all this worth?” – and it led to his opening the door to God in his life. But she also says that there's a disruptive longings catalyst that occurs in a more intellectual form where somebody starts thinking through some of the philosophical questions. Is that right? I mean, everything's going fine but some of the things that keep them up at night they start to think through and find that there's something missing.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. That's why I have this talk called “The Absurdity of Life Without God.”^[2] It's just a totally negative talk where I argue that if atheism is true that life is ultimately without meaning, value, or purpose, and moreover that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of such a worldview so that the agnostic or atheist finds himself mired in a deep existential predicament from which he can have no escape. This is my best attempt to speak to the sort of “whatever!” mentality of so many youth today who don't think about these questions, who are apathetic, who are content to just get along in life and experience life's pleasures without really intellectually exploring these deep questions. I think if we can arouse them to really think about these big questions it can help to produce this longing in their life that may lead them ultimately to Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: I wonder if you could address this quickly. You and I know that any religious system or apologist could use these criteria. Like a Muslim, say. When the person encountered a nice, winsome, intellectually sound Muslim, that disrupted them and they became a Muslim. I mean, you can use this for anything. But that doesn't take away from the principle, I don't suppose.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, no, not at all. Because she's not suggesting that this is a criterion for truth. She's talking about effective evangelism. That's all. This is an article about evangelistic approaches and what is most effective. And that could be used by anybody in support of their worldview.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. It occurred to me that maybe this disruption that can occur in people's lives would be a strategic prayer. Perhaps we can pray for these disruptions in people's lives.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. One of the great differences between us and the adherent to another world religion is that we must never forget that the Holy Spirit is at work through these disruptive influences to draw people to himself. This is not just, as Noble would put it, an immanent affair. Rather, the transcendent and sovereign God through his Spirit is using these things to help to draw people to himself.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we look at all these disruptions, a lot of things that Reasonable Faith is doing and that you have done in your work I think provides for some of these catalysts.

DR. CRAIG: I certainly hope so. We are doing our best to disrupt the caricatures and the stereotypes of Christians in our secular Western culture and to show ourselves to be authentic and open people of goodwill and charity toward believers and unbelievers alike. It is our hope and prayer that God will use this to be a catalyst in bringing people to himself.^[3]