The Value of Defending the Faith

Many question the value of apologetics in bringing a person to faith in Jesus. They may say you can't argue someone into the kingdom. Of course, it's all God's doing, but some individuals have been impacted greatly by a clear defense of the faith. The following is a good example by Francis Collins, a physician/geneticist, who was the head of the Human Genome Project. This highly educated individual thought he had it all figured out until someone gave him a book to read. Here's the story as told by Collins. Let's consider the impact of that one person who handed him the book; we can have that same impact in the lives of those around us.



Perhaps the books that have changed my life most profoundly are a couple of books written by the Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis. Not about science, actually, about faith. When I was 27, I was a medical intern; I was a pretty obnoxious atheist at that point. I began to realize that while in other parts of my life I didn't make decisions without accumulating data and then looking at it, I hadn't really done that when it came to this very important decision about, "Do you believe in God, or not?"

Because I had no real grounding for that, I discovered in college that I couldn't debate those who said, faith was just a superstitious carry-over from the past and we've gone beyond that. I assumed that must be right, and I promoted that same view. And at 27, particularly as a medical intern, watching so many tumultuous things happening around me -- young people dying for terrible reasons that shouldn't have come to pass -- you can't avoid noticing some pretty scary questions that don't seem to have answers. So I decide I'd better resolve this.

Somebody pointed me towards C.S. Lewis's little book called Mere Christianity, which took all of my arguments that I thought were so airtight about the fact that faith is just irrational, and proved them totally full of holes. And in fact, turned them around the other way, and convinced me that the choice to believe is actually the most rational conclusion when you look at the evidence around you. That was a shocking sort of revelation, and one that I fought bitterly for about a year and then finally decided to accept. And that's a book I go back to regularly, to dig through there for the truths that you find there, which are not truths that Lewis would claim he discovered for the first time, but he certainly expresses them in a very powerful way to somebody who is not willing to accept faith on an emotional basis, and I wasn't.