Advice for Interdenominational Dating and Marriage

Here are seven things to know about what the Antichrist will look like.

“Follow the science” has been a pillar of the secular creed for some time—reaching a crescendo in the last decade as “Science Is Real” became a core confession in those briefly ubiquitous creedal yard signs. But these pseudo-religious, virtue-signaling appeals to science were always selective to the “science” that supported certain political views. It was never “follow the science wherever it leads, even if it contradicts my bias,” but rather “follow the science when it leads to my side.” But bias-confirming “science” isn’t science. True commitment to the scientific method means openness to confronting your bias—even having your mind changed. And as much as it may surprise ears conditioned by years of “faith vs. science” narratives, unbiased science has always been a friend to faith, not an adversary. Unbiased science has always been a friend to faith, not an adversary. This truth is increasingly unavoidable the more science discovers about the natural world. Science isn’t an obstacle to faith. As it has been in history before, it’s becoming again: a powerful draw into faith—an ally in evangelism, apologetics, and discipleship. A new documentary, The Story of Everything (in theaters April 30 to May 6), does a great job showing why. The Universe Began. Things That Begin Require a Cause. Lee Strobel serves as executive producer of The Story of Everything. The film is narrated by Stephen C. Meyer and based on his best-selling book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe. The film features interviews with an impressive roster of scientists, cosmologists, and philosophers—John Lennox, Brian Keating, Sarah Salviander, and James Tour, to name a few. Meyer helpfully walks the viewer through a history of “the problem” of the universe’s beginning, citing Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Fred Hoyle, Allan Sandage, and many others along the way. With a title that riffs on the 2014 Stephen Hawking film, The Theory of Everything, The Story of Everything makes a powerful case for the mounting scientific evidence that an intelligent first cause—something outside space and time—created the universe. What evidence makes this conclusion harder to refute? On the cosmological level, it mostly has to do with the undeniable fact that the universe isn’t infinite but finite—it began to exist at a point in the distant past. And as philosopher Timothy McGrew puts it in the film, “Whatever begins to exist is caused to exist by something else.” If the Big Bang set the universe in motion, what set the Big Bang in motion? The “philosophical stopping point” of a first cause is a real problem for materialists—one they try to solve with far-fetched theories about multiverses and simulations. But these theories are simply “appealing to something supernatural to avoid the supernatural.” The simpler explanation is the theistic story: that an intelligent God outside space and time created space and time and everything in it. The Universe Is Intricately Tuned. Who Is the Tuner? The most compelling evidence presented in the film—and arguably the scientific frontier most threatening to the materialist worldview—concerns not the celestial but the cellular. The vastness of the cosmos is one thing; the complexity of the most minuscule building blocks of life (protein structures, DNA, RNA) is a whole other level of “wow!” It’s a “wow!” becoming more and more jaw-dropping with every discovery. Scientific evidence is mounting that an intelligent first cause—something outside space and time—created the universe. Cells were once thought to be amorphous blobs, but now scientists know a cell is “an enclosure of a sophisticated information storage, transmission, and processing system.” The informational character of molecular structures feels notably similar to binary code, which raises a question: If there is code in nature, who is the coder? Information indicates a programmer; it arises from consciousness, not material processes. From the stars to the cells, and everything in between, the fine-tuning of the natural world everywhere speaks of an intelligent design. Rising Generations Won’t See Science and Faith in Conflict Films like The Story of Everything helpfully summarize how science points to a Creator. But I suspect the younger generations won’t even need to be convinced. Science may have posed a threat to Christian apologetics in previous generations, but it won’t pose the same challenges for the next. The narrative that science and Christianity conflict already feels passé. For my kids’ generation, the conflict will probably only register as a curious period of history from the 19th and 20th centuries—from Darwin to Dawkins—when the “two books” of Scripture and nature were oddly pitted against each other. Insofar as science studies the natural world and further uncovers its intricate mysteries, science will lead people toward God, not away from him. It’s only the science that focuses on technological transcending of the natural—transhumanism, transgender interventions, artificial wombs, and so forth—that will lead people away from God. The former reveals the logic of God’s created order. The latter replaces it. The God-transcending, God-replacing form of science is alive and well, especially in the AI sector. But even those foolish paths of scientific hubris are bound by the immovable laws and logic of God’s reality. We’re seeing this now with the rapid collapse of the “science” behind transgender treatments and sex-change operations, which obviously lead to tragic outcomes. When you go against the grain of God’s design, you get splinters. There are two paths for science: Seek to understand and marvel at God’s reality, or seek to overcome it and get burned. There are two paths for science: Seek to understand and marvel at God’s reality, or seek to overcome it and get burned. I pray that many Christian young people today will pursue the former path—the God-honoring science modeled by Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, and Newton that enhanced theology and never sought to replace it. I pray that kids today will find heroic the sort of science modeled by Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, who recently led humans deeper into space than they’d ever gone. Glover is a scientist at the top of his field but also an outspoken Christian who speaks of “the beauty of creation” rather than a random nature. His faith even seems to have rubbed off on his nonreligious coastronauts. Glover’s impromptu Easter dispatch from space (in an interview with CBS News) captures what The Story of Everything also conveys. Our planet is privileged, unique—one might say, graced. The perspective from space underscores it: You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. . . . In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist [in] together. I love the image of an oasis. In the vast, cold darkness of the cosmos, we’ve been given a vibrant home, Earth, that isn’t only bountiful but beautiful. And the more we learn about our home—including our bodies within it—the more it feels less like a random wilderness and more like a master-planned garden. Less like an empty void and more like Eden.

What would it look like to be truly skeptical—to doubt not only the supernatural but the “scientific” and “rational”? According to Christopher Beha, former editor of Harper’s Magazine, it might look like a journey through the different species of “unbelief” only to arrive back at a cautious yet hard-earned faith in God, love, and meaning. That’s the path he traces in Why I Am Not an Atheist: Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Written in response to Bertrand Russell’s famous book Why I Am Not a Christian, Beha’s volume is part memoir and part intellectual history of modern secular thought. It’s anything but dispassionate or dry. Instead, it reads like a “there and back again” tale, following Beha from childhood faith, to “trying on” every form of atheism he could find, to making his way (tentatively) home to God. Beha recounts experiences that unsettled his belief: an angelic visitation he tried to dismiss as sleep paralysis, his battle with cancer during college, growing dissatisfaction with prominent atheist writers, and finally the transformative experience of love. The book is less focused on abstract proofs of God’s existence than on a practical question: Is it possible to live a meaningful life without God? Beha’s answer is ambiguous but hopeful, and worth reading. Scientific Materialism Beha argues that modern atheism can be broken down into two broad traditions. Neither is a “default” worldview into which reasonable people fall in the absence of religious belief. Both are systems of belief in their own right. The first system, which he calls “scientific materialism,” begins with the premise that all knowledge comes from the study of objective matter. This is the atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Carl Sagan, who famously declared that “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Materialism dismisses as superstition anything that can’t be measured, observed, or experimentally verified. Beha traces scientific materialism back to Francis Bacon. But it evolved through the political theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the philosophy of Auguste Comte, the utilitarian ethics of J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham, as well as the scientific theories of Charles Darwin. Though these thinkers differ, Beha sees a family resemblance: Reality is reducible to physical processes; every “why” can be reframed as a “how” and every “how” as a “that.” Therein lies the problem, argues Beha. Scientific materialism can’t answer the most important question: How should I live? Scientific materialism can’t answer the most important question: How should I live? The materialists who tried to answer suffered mental breakdowns, postulated absurdities, or became shockingly racist. Worse, materialism casts a shadow over freedom and mental experience, since it assumes that every phenomenon is reducible to physics, to cause and effect. You can’t believe in materialism without accepting that your beliefs are themselves caused by atoms colliding in your skull—making the whole worldview “internally contradictory” (44). Romantic Idealism The second atheistic system, which Beha dubs “romantic idealism,” seems more compelling and less internally incoherent. Here, subjective experience rather than objective matter becomes the starting point of knowledge. As Beha observes, [Romantic idealism] takes seriously, in a way that materialism does not, the question of what it means to view ourselves as the originators of whatever value and meaning exists in the world. This meaning-making project is the starting point of [the romantic idealist’s] work. They treat the nonexistence of God as a premise rather than a conclusion. (200) According to Beha, the romantic idealist lineage runs through figures such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Though not all were atheists, and they often stridently disagreed with each other, Beha links these men through a shared emphasis on the primacy of consciousness. The mind, not matter, is fundamental. Unlike materialism, romantic idealism takes seriously the human hunger for meaning. It gives “creative imagination a central place in the meaning of life” and brings the “why” and even “who” of philosophy back into the picture (252). Only, in place of God, the “who” is the human individual, conditioning or entirely creating reality and giving it meaning, and the “why” is a question only we can work out for ourselves. Leap of Faith in Love Yet constructing your own worldview is also “incredibly isolating.” When we base reality on our own consciousness, writes Beha, We each live alone. Other people exist as paper cutouts, characters in our world-making drama rather than fellow inhabitants of a shared world and we exist for them in just the same way. An unbridgeable gap separates us, and real community across the gap is impossible. (336) Beha didn’t have a mental breakdown like Nietzsche or conclude like Camus that suicide is the only serious philosophical question. But he was afflicted with the chronic anxiety common to his heroes, reliant on alcohol, and less attracted to the existential romance of self-creation. Ironically, that’s when actual romance found him and led him back to God (sort of). Meeting his wife was the death knell for Beha’s atheism. Her love was real to him in a way nothing else ever had been. And for something so wonderful to come from outside his head must mean that there really were things outside his head. If the love of this woman was real, why not the love of God? Meeting his now-wife was the death knell for Beha’s atheism. Her love was real to him in a way nothing else ever had been. In Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, Beha found the final piece, a shocking alternative to both scientific materialism and romantic idealism: Yes, faith in the Christian God is absurd and unprovable from the outside. But so is every other worldview. “Belief,” Beha writes, “is something that we must live out. We must keep choosing it, and we won’t know until we are done whether we have chosen correctly” (382). That choice ultimately led Beha back to the Roman Catholicism of his childhood, and to the Christian mystic teaching that not only is God love (1 John 4:8) but love is God (or the summation of his nature) (369). Yet by the end, the Christianity Beha professes still seems to owe as much to romantic idealism as it does to the book of Romans. ‘Not an Atheist’ Isn’t Enough Beha seems strangely nonchalant about the fact that his wife prefers not to go to church or share in his beliefs, though Christianity traditionally holds that such people are in spiritual peril. He argues that a person who doesn’t really believe in Christ but goes through all the motions would functionally be a believer. And he seems unconcerned about sin, hell, or the judgment of God, all of which readers will be left thinking of as optional frills to open-ended faith in a nonspecific deity: “I try to act as though it were true,” Beha writes, “which I take to be a form of belief” (389). It’s possible to read this as the faith of that father of a demon-possessed boy whom Jesus commended (“I believe; help my unbelief!” Mark 9:24). It’s also possible, and probably right, to see Christopher Beha as a smoldering wick God will not extinguish (Isa. 42:3). He may, like C. S. Lewis, be on his way through a vague theist phase that will end in orthodox belief. Yet after reading a book like this, we’re still right to wonder whether being “not an atheist” is enough. What about revelation? What about Jesus and his “hard sayings” (John 6:60; 14:6)? Can we really experience and introspect our way to faith, or do we need Someone to reach in from outside and reveal truths philosophy could never have discovered? Is faith enough if someone glosses over the doctrines that make up the faith? Christianity’s answer is clear and stubbornly exclusive. Why I Am Not an Atheist is an effective, often moving account of how unsatisfying it is to put some other idea—whether matter or mind—in God’s place. But it should also leave readers wondering whether its author is truly ready to let God define himself. It’s also a reminder for Christians that being spiritual can never substitute for the belief in the gospel.

Courtney Doctor talks with Wendy Alsup and Vaneetha Rendall Risner about their experiences of divorce. They share the Scripture passages that helped them keep going and talk honestly about what to say (and what not to say) to someone going through a divorce. They explain why it can be hard for a newly divorced Christian to go to church and why it’s vital to go anyway. Resources Mentioned: Walking Through Fire: A Memoir of Loss and Redemption by Vaneetha Rendall Risner I Forgive You by Wendy Alsup Related Resources: This Was Never the Plan: Walking with God Through the Heartache of Divorce by Vaneetha Rendall Risner Hope When Your Spouse Divorces You Why I’m Going Back to Church After My Divorce A Case for Being Honest with Your Elders When Shame Remains After Divorce Discussion Questions: 1. How has divorce affected your family or close friendships? What were the hardest spiritual or emotional struggles you or those close to you faced during that season? 2. What promises of God are especially important to remember when walking through deep disappointment or loss? 3. If you knew a friend was going through a divorce, what might hold you back from reaching out to her? 4. In what ways have you seen the church support women (and their children) walking through unwanted divorce well? In what ways could the church provide more support or encouragement to the marginalized or hurting? 5. What suggestions from this conversation helped you understand how to walk with friends or family navigating divorce? 6. In seasons when you cannot control outcomes for your family, what does it look like to trust God? 7. What does gospel hope look like in the aftermath of something as painful as divorce?