This would be a good summer read for any high school graduate getting ready to head off to college in the fall or for anyone else who wishes to read a very accessible defense of Christian truth. It is a good presuppositional approach to apologetics aimed at the level of late-high school/early college-aged folks. This little book (133 pages) is actually a good antidote to the weakest part of Tim Keller’s “Reason for God” because it gives a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution where Keller simply tries to show how evolution and Christianity aren’t incompatible. Dewitt’s two main challenges to evolution go something like this:
1- It is posited by secular scientists et al that religion was an evolutionary necessity that helped humanity make sense of the world and therefore more equipped to survive. However, religion is now like a vestigial organ, no longer of any use to humanity and on its way to elimination from the human scene. But Dewitt responds by pointing out that, if this is the case, then evolution is the author of practical survival skills but also the author of deceit. Though our genes drove us to religion and equipped us to survive, they deceived us and failed to lead us to what is true about reality.
2- It is also theorized by evolutionary psychology that we are an unrealistically optimistic species and that we are this way because evolution has hardwired our brains this way. Dewitt quotes Tali Sharot from her TIME magazine article “The Optimism Bias”, “We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures… But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic.” In simple terms, hope is irrational. Again, Dewitt points out that if this is true, namely that evolution is the author of this practical survival mechanism in our brains, then it is also true that evolution has deceived and is deceiving us.
Dewitt rightly points out negatively that if evolution cannot be trusted to point us to an accurate view of reality about religion and even our own thoughts, then why should it be trusted to give us an accurate view in so many other areas? Or as he puts it, “…how can we break free from the illusion?” (pg. 114) But Dewitt also uses the data of the human impulse toward both religion and optimism to drive us to ask a positive, observational question: could we be hard-wired with this religious impulse and optimism because we are all yearning to return to Eden? We have this ache because we know this world is broken, that we are all participants in its brokenness, and that we are incapable of putting the pieces back together by ourselves. Yet somehow we feel that there is a place where all that is broken will be made whole and all that is sad will become untrue. And if there is such a place, and if we can’t get there on our own, then maybe there is Someone to do what we can’t, Someone to get us where we can’t go.
into a strategic retreat isn’t really strategy. It’s fear. Please take note of the word “main.” There are plenty of internet trolls out there who will speak out vociferously against the evils perpetrated by fundamentalist Islam. But a secular Facebook rant against Islam’s human rights’ violations or a few vitriolic anti-Islamic words in the comment section of a Mother Jones article doesn’t really qualify someone as courageous for standing against the aforementioned evils. What will the voices of public unbelief do when their words might cost them something? How will the internal resources that secularism provides assist the secularist who finds himself/herself suffering as a result of standing up for what they believe in? I honestly hope that secularists will find their courage and leverage their substantial resources to speak out against the most egregious sources of religious liberty and human rights violations.
Boat14 WV 