Answers to the Questions

In one of my classes we have been given the task of writing a letter to the famed atheist Richard Dawkins. We were subject to read his book The God Delusion and respond in a letter form to Mr. Dawkins himself. Many before me have had to write this exact same letter and it was none the easier for them. We are becoming apologists in this letter in a sense and that is something of a daunting task.

I have a firm belief that God is real, that he sustains us, he is Creator, and he is not three gods but three Persons in one God. He is all encompassing, the Father who created and sustains everything, the Son (a physical person of God in flesh) who came to dwell among us and to suffer what we suffer so that no one can say that God doesn't understand, moreover he died and rose again so that we would not have to endure Hell. Also, the Holy Spirit (a non-physical person of God dwelling withing us) that makes his temple in us to guide and direct us in this crazy mixed up world. These all coincide as the One True God.

To relate that to a person who has dug so deeply into atheism it seems too hard to dig them out through reason and proof other than testimony; hard proof, seems like an unachievable task. Dawkins puts on this stone-faced assurance that there is really no god. He almost does it to the point where he makes the reader think that he has already proven that natural selection is extremely more plausible than any belief that there is a Foundational God from whence all things came into existence.

It is like writing a letter to a brick wall

His book jumps from one subject to the next so quickly it is hard to get an apologetic thought in your head before you are having to defend another matter of theology. 

How then will we defend the faith when we are really in a situation where defending it is all you can do? When a person shoots question after question at you without giving you a moment to answer (this usually means they don't really want to hear your answer). When someone seems to have so many facts that right then and there you cannot explain yourself even though given time you could have. 

What happens when all you have is a moment, a pivotal point in time where someone could really see a side of God they had never thought about but instead we weren't ready with the answer?

Obviously we don't have all the answers. Nobody does, no witnesses to the creation story or how the earth came to be. No person has come back from the dead (other than Jesus) to tell the world that God is alive and he is the Alpha and Omega. 

How much more essential is it that we find our answers to the hard questions that we can answer as logically as we can when talking to a logically based person. Scripture even calls us to be ready and subject to questioning.

Are we ready?

All to God