This past Sunday I preached a message I called Skeptics Sunday at Grace Church. Using the doubt of Thomas as my lead-in, I addressed a couple of the issues raised by skeptics of Christianity. Obviously, there wasn’t enough time in one message to address all of their claims, so I had to limit myself to these two: The presence of evil contradicts the existence of God, and Science has disproven religion.
In addressing the first claim, I walked our congregation through the very basics of Alvin Plantinga’s argument from God, Freedom, and Evil. In that book, he demonstrated that it is possible for an omnipotent, omniscient, good being to allow the presence of some evil for the purposes of either preventing a more serious evil or allowing a greater good, thereby revealing an internal contradiction within the old problem of evil.
Jesus has left his wounds in our hands.
In addressing the second claim, I stated that it’s not possible for science to disprove God’s existence because science deals with the material and natural, whereas God is spirit and supernatural. God lies beyond the purview of science. But the real issue, as I see it, is that we Christians have, in general, made the science/faith issue about creation and evolution, and we are trying to win an argument. For a people whose king willingly lost his life on a Roman cross, trying to win arguments is a grave mistake. Jesus won a lot of arguments, but nobody he bested ever entered the kingdom. In fact, they all sought to kill him.
Our task is not to win but to woo. Jesus told Thomas, “You have seen and so have believed; blessed are those who have never seen but still believe.” People today will never see the risen Lord the way Thomas did, but they will see us. Jesus has left his wounds in our hands. Let us be sure to bear them faithfully.