Brainwaves at dawn

Philosophers are funny people. They live in a sort of literary Spy Vs. Spy world—sniping at each other from behind the covers of their latest works. This Cold War of words is a longstanding tradition—literary critics since the days of Alexander Pope routinely took potshots at each other in the daily papers, each playing “Can You Top This” with a vitriol-dipped pen.

Last post, I examined (rather gingerly) James B. Walker’s 1889 The Philosophy of the Plan of Salvation. Bluntly put, while I admired the consistent logic of the work, I had no hope that it was responsible for converting a single soul from a godless state to one of grace. I feel very much the same way about that book’s 21-Century counterpart (at least, one of them) Ravi Zacharias’ pocket dynamo, The End of Reason. Ravi Zacharias is the premier Christian apologist of the age--he routinely hosts Q&A sessions at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and around the world. They're wildly popular and the Q&A line typically extends out the door.

This compact, very focused book is a page-by-page destruction of one of the most popular, depressing atheistic credos: Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. Harris pulls out all the stops, offering his own hybrid of yellow journalism arguments and time-tested questions (i.e. "if God is a god of love, why does He permit pain?").  Ravi calls him on every subjective swerve from pure logic or reason as he dismantles Harris' work.

Honestly, Ravi's title says it all—he contends (and I’m with him) that our century, and particularly our country and this generation is so far removed from the classic debate formulas as to reduce the arguments for and against God’s existence to the subjective. There’s nothing reasonable about it.

Ravi’s brilliant logic echoes his 19^th century predecessor in several key arguments, the crucial one perhaps being that something cannot come from nothing. Any flimsy arguments to the contrary are crushed under the juggernaut of Zacharias’ relentless conclusions. Ravi dismantles Harris’ feeble claims about Eastern religion with (it seemed to me) particular zeal, probably because he was RAISED on them and has studied them and actually knows what they mean when they say things—something Harris is really just speculating on. It is at this point that Ravi, normally very polite, inches towards sarcasm. He’s clearly disgusted with someone who doesn’t flinch at using illustrations and examples he obviously doesn’t fully understand.

Ravi states his case and attacks the hidden angry substrate of Harris’ work, blow-by-blow. He never swerves as he ruthlessly labels Harris’ examples what they are, even calling attention to those Ravi fingers as crass and vulgar, implying that Harris is not only poorly prepared but a boor and a shadow-boxer.

I suppose if my children had been led down the primrose path of ugly atheism by Sam Harris’s blockbuster, this book might be the perfect stocking stuffer. Alas, as Ravi acknowledges, atheism is an emotional reaction and a willful rejection. It’s not based on a one-two punch of science and logic—it’s a defiant stance, a raised fist to a God whose nature as Creator requires a response.

 “Science and religion do not have to be enemies,” says Ravi, “they are facets of one truth, whose source is God.” For me, that sums it up neatly. I’ll leave the pistols-at-dawn crowd to argue over the fine points while I watch the sunrise in the background and bless the Lord who created it all.

"Lean not to your own understanding..." Proverbs 3:5