Why There Is a God

The problem of our time, to riff off of G.K. Chesterton, is that “The truth hasn’t been tried and found wanting, it’s been unheard and left untried.” Witness the new wave of atheism that has been sweeping over the cultural landscape over the past couple of decades. At the vanguard are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens whose anti-God books have become popular best-sellers. In the preface to his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins made no bones about his goal: “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” In similar vein, my hope for this book is that unbelievers who open it will be believers when they put it down, and believers who open it will be more confident in their beliefs and better equipped to give voice to the truth. While Dawkins and his ilk take pride in claiming that their beliefs are based on reason and facts, not faith and just-so stories, beneath the patina of intellectualism is a blinkered commitment to (that is, faith in) their own just-so stories. Thus, breaking the spell of unbelief starts with dismantling intellectual barriers that have been erected to block out the light of truth. To equip the reader to do just that, this book, written for expert and layman alike, addresses truth from the ground up: from nature of knowledge and the knowledge of nature; to the competing narratives of naturalism and theism in explaining the origin of the universe, life, morality, and the metaphysical questions of meaning, purpose, and significance, and the role faith plays in all explanatory accounts and how God -- in particular, the Christian God -- is the “explanation” that best fits the facts, notwithstanding the age-old problems of evil, suffering, and injustice.