Church Without Walls, Centurion, Saturday August 8, 2009
It was about 1:15 pm on Sat at the “Church Without Walls” where the Faith & Reason Apologetics Conference had entered its final day. I had spoken in the morning session on “Science and the Existence of God”, a talk which was received well and followed up with a good Q/A session. Lunch was over, and the afternoon session had begun.
I was still in the church foyer since I had until 3pm before my second speaking session when a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as an engineer who had heard my talk, wanting to speak with me. I will call him James, though that is not his real name. Both he and his wife had come to the conference, but he had to take her home as she had fallen ill. However, he came back to the conference alone, feeling the need to speak with someone. His wife was “born again”, he said, something that he didn’t quite understand. On the one hand, he said he believed in God, and was not an atheist, but on the other hand, he said he really didn’t see the need to become a Christian. Yet he had been drawn to the conference, and wanted to know what the “switch” was, i.e., the “button” that needed to be pressed in order to become a Christian. He explained that he thought he was a moral man, who was compassionate and cared for people so he didn’t see why he needed to be saved. “Saved from what?” was the way he put it. Furthermore, he pointed out how in the course of his business, he had encountered several individuals who dealt dishonestly in business who wore their Christian faith on their sleeve and was thus put off by the church and by people who made overt confessions of being “born again”.
As I got to listening and talking to him, I found also that he didn’t see why it was necessary to reject evolution, (which was a part of my position in my morning seminar) and said that “evolution worked fine for him”. In short, he was a “theistic evolutionist”, i.e. one who believed that God used evolution. In responding to him, I pointed out firstly that I agreed with him that one did not have to be a Christian to exhibit good morals. Many people of different faiths, or those of no faith at all have lived stable lives, cared for families, and for society at large. So whatever Christianity was about, it couldn’t be about living a life based on good values or morals. The Jews had the 10 commandments, the Babylonians had Hammurabi’s Code, and other civilizations had various laws of justice and ethical behavior. Even many Christians have wrongly elevated “good behavior” to be the defining characteristic of what it means to be Christian.
I then backtracked to the issue of evolution to show him why his view of human origins was partly responsible for his inability to understand why he needed to become a Christian. I asked him what he thought of growing old and dying, whether it had any special meaning at all. As expected, he said he didn’t think it was any thing significant: for evolution to work, death was necessary, and was inevitable in the struggle for survival – only the fit would survive( i.e. survival of the fittest) and the rest die out. So I pointed out how if evolution was true and humans evolved, then the death of humans was not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. However, the Bible taught that death was really God’s judgement on Sin (Gen 2:17; 3:19; Rom 3:23 & Rom 5:12), and that man was not really supposed to die at all. This is why it made sense that if Christ really paid for our Sin, then it followed as a matter of logic that the effect of Sin, which is death itself, had to be reversed. And this He did by His bodily resurrection, in the same body in which he had sustained his wounds(John 20:27). But accepting evolution effectively destroyed this logic by redefining human death as something ordinary. Thus my first point to him was, each of us are growing old and dying, and that is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong with us – we are reaping the “wages” of something called Sin.
Additionally, I asked him where morals came from. The notion that we should love not only our neighbors, but also our enemies, that we should be considerate of the weak and sacrifice ourselves for the good of others, turning the other cheek when wronged, seemed to fly in the face of what evolution would demand. Aggression and selfishness is what one would expect from millennia of “survival of the fittest”. We didn’t get here, according to evolution, by being kind and gentle to those weaker than us, but by a brutal process of survival. How then could God (if He really used evolution) then call such behavior in us as sin, and send us to hell for that ? Furthermore, evolution is about reproductive advantage –those organisms that are able to leave the most offspring are the ones which have the highest chance of survival –sexual promiscuity is the best way to achieve this end, a behavior manifested by most animals. If that’s how we got here, then why would God turn around and command monogamous marriage and condemn us for engaging in animalistic sexual promiscuity ? How is fornication a sin then? My second point was, “if evolution is true, you can’t really define sin, and there would be nothing from which you would need to be saved”
My third point was, “if evolution is true, you can’t have a soul that will survive after you die” I asked him if he could show where the human soul came from. Clearly evolution only claims to deal with how the physical body “descended” from apes, etc. It doesn’t even attempt to show how the soul that survives death comes about. I pointed out to him that we face judgement after the physical body dies (Heb 9:27), and thus either the Scripture is wrong, or evolution is wrong. Logically, if there is no soul, I could easily see why he couldn’t see the need to be saved.
As the dots began to be connected his expression changed, and he said he began to see the unreasonableness of holding to evolution and to the Christian God at the same time. We then got to talking about the “switch” or button for which he was looking: that Sin is not primarily against people, but only secondarily. Sin is primarily against God Himself. We see sin not when we compare ourselves with ourselves or with others (2 Cor 10:12) but when we compare ourselves with God Himself and with the life of Christ. God will judge us in wrath after we die, and the motive to become a Christian is simply this: Christ has paid for our sins, and we don’t have to be judged if we receive His salvation. We can flee from God’s wrath and take refuge in the work of Christ done to bring forgiveness. That’s the real reason to become a Christian.
James sat and thought about this for a while. I wrote down the references for him. He asked me what I thought he should do, and my answer was, get alone in a room and speak to Christ, acknowledging your sin and asking Him to save you. He said he believed in the resurrection, and so I told him, read the Gospel of John, and trust in Christ to save you from sin. He thanked me for connecting of the dots, saying it helped him, and said he would leave the conference now that he felt he’d received what he came to find. And I thanked God for James, for the Gospel of Jesus, and for the means to defend it.
