Book Review – Generation Ex-Christian

Paperback: 208 pages

Publisher: Moody Publishers (October 1, 2010)

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Drew Dyck on Twitter

Recent statistics on the religious commitments of young people are alarming. Surveys show that 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claim no religion, and 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the ages of 18 and 22. The church is losing its youth at a disturbing rate. But behind every statistic is an individual story, and Drew Dyck contends in Generation Ex-Christian that most of these “leavers” fall into one of six broad categories: Postmodernists, Recoilers, Modernists, Neo-Pagans, Rebels, and Drifters.

He devotes a chapter to each, which includes a description of the category, interviews with those who fit the category, and advice for how to reach out to each type of leaver. I found the interviews compelling and appreciated how they brought what could be merely abstract concepts to life. If you’ve spent much time sharing the gospel with different kinds of people, you will quickly recognize many of these “types” of non-believers (though Dyck acknowledges that every person has a unique story).

I was most interested in the Modernists leavers, who appear for the most part to be new atheists. As part of his research for this group, Dyck attended a meeting of the Wheaton Atheists Group and describes his interaction with the skeptics there. One of the members, a young man named Dan, admitted that he had grown up in the Assemblies of God and had just recently left the faith.

What had caused his crisis of faith?

“I always believed the earth was 6,000 years old,” Dan said bitterly. “But now I know it’s not.”

For years Dan tried desperately to maintain his belief in the young earth theory. He read material from Answers in Genesis, a Christian apologetics organization, consulted his pastor and people in his church. But ultimately he said he just couldn’t deny what he saw as the evidence that the world was much older than 6,000 years.

“That’s when I realized that Christianity just wasn’t true,” he said.

Inwardly I cringed at the false-alternatives scenario that Dan had set up in his mind. For him, one geological question (which the Bible doesn’t even address explicitly) was the deciding factor for faith.” (79-80)

I cringe as well when I hear those kinds of stories and lament the fact that peripheral matters like the age of the earth are taken to be reasons for rejecting the gospel. But I’m discovering that these kinds of stories are common.

Another atheist, Shane, had been drifting from his Christian faith for some time. What pushed him over the edge was the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

“I’ve heard this from people in the atheist community, over and over again. September 11 made us all realize that you can’t be a fence-sitter on this issue. We realized that religion is causing these problems. It’s holding belief in things which are not empirically verifiable. That’s what’s wrong.” (104)

Dyck ends the chapter with several pieces of good advice for reaching out to Modernist leavers. He encourages listening carefully and asking questions of skeptics, and not assuming common ground that doesn’t exist (e.g., the belief that the Bible is reliable or inspired). Relevant and suitable questions to ask include those that encourage a skeptic to follow the logical consequences of their worldview, including the loss of objective meaning and morality (some skeptics will deny this, but many don’t and readily admit it).  It will likely be necessary to point out the consequences of adopting a non-God worldview.

Dyck also wisely encourages Christians to confront atheists with the fact that they themselves have a worldview that requires defending and offering good reasons for. In my experience, the majority of atheists believe that their skeptical position is somehow neutral ground that requires no justification to hold. But as long as anyone is making a positive claim of any kind (e.g., God doesn’t exist, Christianity is false, etc.), he or she is under the same obligation as the Christian to provide reasons and evidence for their claim. If someone just doesn’t know, then they should adopt the agnostic, rather than the atheistic, viewpoint.

The other chapters of Generation Ex-Christian are as good as this one, so I heartily recommend this book, especially to those who need help understanding and reaching out to the leavers they know.

The first chapter can be downloaded here.

— Reviewed by Chris Reese.  In the interest of full disclosure, I work for Moody, the publisher of Generation Ex-Christian.

Philosophy Word of the Day – Wave-Particle Duality

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“The quantum description of matter ascribes a wavelike aspect to particles of matter. In some circumstances, for example in the photoelectric effect, particles behave primarily as if they are mass points. In other circumstances, they display diffraction and interference as if they are waves. The quantum wavelength of a particle is inversely proportional to its mass, and an object’s wavelike aspects will be significant whenever its quantum wavelength is larger than its physical size. Therefore, large objects like cars have imperceptible wavelike attributes but subatomic particles, such as neutrons, have significant wavelike aspects. It is more accurate to view the quantum wave aspect as being a wave of information (like a crime wave) or probability than an undulatory quality.”

John D. Barrow, Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

The Missing Links – Dec. 26, 2010

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• A plethora of good articles on philosophy of religion can be found at Last Seminary.  Also see their Science and Religion collection.

 

• Three papers by philosopher Michael Murray (HT: Wintery Knight):  “Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993; “Who’s Afraid of Religion?“, Inaugural Lecture delivered March 30, 2006. Franklin and Marshall College; “Seek and You Will Find“, in God and the Philosophers. Thomas Morris, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994.

 

• Victor Reppert shares some good insights on faith and evidence, in response to John Loftus.

 

• Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig debate Quentin Smith and Richard Gale on the nature of science and its relation to religion.

 

• Parchment & Pen highlights some of the content from Paul Copan’s latest book Is God a Moral Monster?

 

• C. S. Lewis “once described the giving of praise and thanks as ‘inner health made audible.’ He felt that it was the most ‘balanced and capacious minds’ who found it easiest to praise others, while it was misfits and malcontents who found it hardest to offer praise and thanks–to others or to God (Reflections on the Psalms, 94-95).” An interesting look at Lewis’s numerous thank-you notes to fans and readers at the C. S. Lewis blog.

Philosophy Word of the Day – Cambridge Change

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“A thing changes in a sense associated with Russell (hence, at Cambridge) if it satisfies a description at one time that it does not satisfy at another.  However, some changes are ‘merely’ Cambridge changes: if you outgrow me, then I satisfy the description of being as tall as you at one time, and I do not satisfy the description at another.  So, by the Cambridge criterion, I have changed, but I need have undergone no robust or substantial change, for I may have stayed at exactly the same height.

“The term was introduced by P. T. Geach (Logic Matters, 1972); a possible application of the notion is to make the unchanging (substantial) nature of God compatible with his (merely Cambridge) changing relations to the temporal world.”

— Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), 51.

The Chalcedonian Formula

The Chalcedonian Formula is “the theological conclusion of the Ecumenical Council held in Chalcedon (A.D. 451), which attempted to delineate the relationship between Christ’s humanity and his deity.  The church accepted the Chalcedonian formula as the orthodox statement about the person of Christ.”

— Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (IVP, 1999), 24.

Concerning the Incarnation, the creed states,

“We, then, following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body; consubstantial [co-essential] with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood; in all things like unto us, without sin; begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days, for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, according to the Manhood; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten God (μονογενῆ Θεὸν), the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from the beginning [have declared] concerning Him, and the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the Creed of the holy Fathers has handed down to us.”

Blessings to you as you celebrate Christ’s coming!

Philosophy Word of the Day – Transcendental Arguments

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Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions.

Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P.

Eighteenth Century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually credited with introducing the systematic use of the transcendental argument. His use of it included arguments aimed at refuting epistemic skepticism, as well as arguments with the more fundamental purpose of showing the legitimacy of the application of certain concepts—in particular those of substance and cause—to experience. Later scholars have developed a variety of general objections to the transcendental argument strategy. In response, some recent and contemporary philosophers have offered updated strategies similar in form to transcendental arguments, but with less controversial premises and/or more modest goals. (continue article)

— Adrian Bardon, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Philosophy Word of the Day – Naturalistic Fallacy

“The relation between is/ought, fact/value, objectivity/normativity, and science/ethics all touch on the notion of the naturalistic fallacy. In general terms, this notion is an expression of the philosophical argument that one cannot infer from the one to the other; one cannot infer from is to ought, nor can one make an inference from scientific observations to ethical arguments. Any such attempt means committing the naturalistic fallacy. Historically, David Hume (1711–1776) and G. E. Moore (1873–1958) were the primary advocates of the invalidity of a moral argument based on such an inference.

“. . . The term naturalistic fallacy goes back to G. E. Moore, who in Principia Ethica (1903) argued that the notion of the good could not be based by reference to nonmoral entities. The good is a simple, indefinable concept, not composed by other nonmoral parts. This is precisely the problem of the naturalistic fallacy, which points to nature or to some other nonmoral entity and argues that this serves as the basis of moral normativity. Thereby the difference between these parts is ignored, as is the invalidity of inferring from one to the other. By committing the naturalistic fallacy, one would substitute “good” with a nonmoral property.” (continue article)

— Ulrik B. Nissen in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

* It would seem that Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, largely falls into the category of the naturalistic fallacy.

Winner of “Moral Choices” Giveaway

Congratulations to Seth, the randomly chosen winner of Scott Rae’s Moral Choices!  Seth blogs at Reformed Seth.

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to enter and list the books you’ve enjoyed recently.  Look for another giveaway soon of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell.

Some of the interesting books you’re reading include . . .

- Russ Shafer-Landau’s Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?

- Has Christianity Failed You by Ravi Zacharias

- Who Made God? by Professor Edgar Andrews

- The Word of God and the Mind of Man by Ronald Nash

- Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

- The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer.

- Timothy Gombis’ The Drama of Ephesians

- The New Perspective on Paul: An Introduction by Kent L. Yinger

- Hard Questions by William Lane Craig

- Introduction to Philosophy: A Christian Perspective by Norm Geisler (aka The Geis!)

Some good stuff there.  If you’re looking for new things to read, you’ll find these and several other good leads in the original post’s comments.

Further Critiques of the “God Delusion”

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I’ve made reference to several fine critiques of the new atheists and their books (for example, here, here, and here), but I am always happy to add more—especially from those who are outside the evangelical fold, which hopefully serves to show that our own (similar) critiques aren’t simply payback in kind.  The one below comes from H. Allen Orr, a biology professor at the University of Rochester, in the New York Review of Books.

“Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins’s work, I’m afraid that I’m among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he’s actually more an amateur. I don’t pretend to know whether there’s more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins’s general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.

The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins’s failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins’s cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians). But if simple religion is barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy of serious thought.

The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).”

Book Giveaway – Moral Choices by Scott Rae

I used Scott Rae’s book Moral Choices in two different ethics classes in seminary and benefitted from it a great deal.  It’s now in it’s third edition, and thanks to the generous folks at Zondervan (@Zondervan on Twitter, Facebook here), I’m giving away a copy at Cloud of Witnesses.

As the subtitle says, the book is an introduction to (Christian) ethics.  In the first four chapters, Rae lays out some theoretical groundwork by pointing to various elements of a Christian approach to ethics, and then surveys various ethical systems such as utilitarianism, deontological approaches, and virtue ethics.  Chapter 4 provides a general framework for making ethical decisions.

Chapters 5 through 12 take up a variety of ethical issues and treat them from a Christian viewpoint.  These timely topics include abortion, cloning, euthanasia, sexual ethics, war, and economics.  Each chapter includes review questions, case studies for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and helpful sidebars.

If you’re looking for a concise but comprehensive survey of Christian ethics from an evangelical perspective, Moral Choices is one of the best in print in my opinion.

Giveaway Details:

To enter the giveaway, comment on this post and tell me the best book you’ve read recently.  (Please include your email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you win.)  Also, please share this post on the social media site of your choice (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  I’ll announce the winner this weekend.