Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. – Matthew 7:24
In the late fifties and early sixties, Christian thought in the universities was beaten, bruised and running scared. If there were Christian philosophers teaching and studying in the academy, they kept their heads in the sand. The reasons for this are many. Since then, thanks to a few brave (and wickedly smart) men and women, things have changed dramatically. Alvin Plantiga is one these who spent his entire professional career battling Christian thought back into mainstream academia.Thanks to him and many others like him, Christian philosophers now stand, once again, on very solid ground and can go toe to toe with the best thinkers on the planet. One of the things that Plantiga came to understand when the questions of God was brought to the table, was that the rules of the game were rigged. The skeptics were declaring that in order to prove that God exists, one has to start without God – as if God doesn’t exist – and work your way up to prove in fact that He does.
Plantiga refused to play by these rules however and decided to make his own. He could clearly see that where one starts with philosophical inquiry plays a large role in determining where one ends up. And so he started with God and began philosophizing from there. From this vantage point, he was able to argue that the world makes a lot more sense when looked at through the lenses of faith in a God than it does through those of the atheism. From the order of the universe, to the laws that govern nature, to the irreducible complexity found in organisms, to the moral code that seems to be burned on our consciences, things simply make more sense if there is a rational intelligent mind behind the universe orchestrating the many things that we observe and experience. Also, he noted that IF atheism is true and we are just the random bi-product of chance, then we have no reason to believe that our reasoning capabilities lead us to truth.
Today, some would say that faith in God is a blind leap in the dark. A good question to ask those who would make this statement is, “Where are you standing (i.e. what ground are you standing on) when you make this statement?” and “what position (there is a God v. there is not a God) makes more sense of our experience of life on earth? As I see it, to start with God is to go from blind footing to sure footing.
Challenge
As your out shredding, begin looking for the unwritten rules and definitions. What does it mean to be a rad shredder? What are the “important” things that we are supposed to invest in with our time and money? Is it ME or OTHERS oriented?