What's So Great About this Book called What's so Great About Christianity.

I read Dinesh D'Souza's What's So Great About Christianity last weekend. For people that want to read something in answer to the aggressive pro-atheist books published in the past few years, this is a good, quick and easy to understand response.

Atheist writers Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others have written polemics in the guise of reason seeking to evangelize atheistic worldviews. Their books have blamed religion in general and Christianity in particular for every evil that fills the world today and has filled the world for the past few centuries.

D'Souza does a good job, in my opinion, with the following basic points:

1. The widely accepted Big Bang beginning of the universe is entirely compatible with a pro-God worldview and is not inconsistent with Christianity.
2. Like the first point, Christianity and Science are not generally at odds with one another. Modern science was birthed out of Christian culture and institutions. All truth is God's truth is a phrase I've heard from pastors and preachers that I respect greatly and I tend to agree. D'Souza does not use this exact phrase (as far as I recall), but he effectively defends it.
3. Despite claims to the contrary by Dawkins and others, the great killers of the 20th century, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, were the product not of Christian tradition, but distinctly atheistic worldviews and philosophies. Evil and suffering are not easy for me to understand at all and they are not easy for may Christians to understand, but they have been a part of our world for all of recorded history. Christianity acknowledges and attempts to deal with this, both philosophically and spiritually. Claiming Christianity is the source of evil misses the boat badly. D'Souza does a good job dealing with this claim.

Areas which D'Souza explores less effectively (or at least these explorations were less convincing to me) included:

1. A trip through several philosophers including Kant. Kant had the right name in my opinion, because most of the time I kan't seem to understand what he is saying. The point in these chapters seemed to be an attempt to provide a philosophical proof for the existence of God. Some of it was interesting. A bunch of it was not understandable to me. And when I say that, I don't mean to imply that I don't think I'm smart enough to understand it. I just think it doesn't make sense.
2. D'Souza explores an understanding of man's built-in sense of right and wrong. Here he sounds a great deal like C. S. Lewis. Many of my friends cite Lewis' Mere Christianity as the greatest logical explanation of our nature, God's existence, etc. that they have read. And I don't doubt that Lewis' book is very convincing to many. Unfortunately, Lewis wasn't so convincing to me. Or at least this calm, detached, rational explanation isn't the Lewis book that impacts me so greatly. The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, and Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life were all much more convincing and meaningful to me. They spoke to the humanity of Lewis and how his humanity rather than his intellect needed and connected with God. And the last two showed how anger, failure, and eventually acceptance and joy are all a part of our communication with God. Regardless, the Lewis-esque arguments about morality and the ghost in the machine were not all that convincing for me.
3. And finally, the biggest challenge that I have with the book. D'Souza commits many of the same mistakes of arrogance that I find so intolerable from the atheists.

• Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens all write with a polemical style. They do not just lay out the facts and then leave the reader to decide. However, they claim that is what they are doing. They are, in my opinion, deceitful and arrogant in their assumed intellectual superiority. They assert conclusions when they are only offering opinion. They claim to report logic when they state personal preference. They explain gaping holes in their arguments by admitting they don't know why the evidence lands in a particular direction, but then claim their argument is still correct, because evidence will surely be found to prove them correct in the future. It is their arrogance and stubbornness that, in my opinion, leads them to be so strident in their claims.
• Unfortunately, D'Souza makes similar mistakes. At times D'Souza steps into making statements of absolute dichotomies (it must be either this way or that way and here is what is wrong with that way, therefore the world must be this way) when there might actually be ranges of explanations for a particular question. When D'Souza makes such glaringly deceitful claims of logic, he loses credibility in my opinion.

On the whole, though, D'Souza does an admirable job of confronting the atheists on many levels and fronts. And he does an admirable job of dealing with science in a way that is understandable, accurate as far as I can tell, and in a way that an honest discussion could follow.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone who has made their decisions about God based on the works of the modern atheist authors. You need to get another viewpoint. And for the commited Christian who finds herself in a discussion with people that are citing these authors and discovers that she can't answer their questions or assertions, D'Souza provides you with some excellent ammunition.

And finally, for the person that is simply seeking to understand this whole "God" thing and thinks that people of faith don't have intellectual curiosity or a strong understanding of science or a well-developed philosophical worldview, you need to read this book. And should someone in this last group happen to be reading this blog entry, I want to give you a little sample of what you will encounter in this book.

If you subscribe to the idea that the universe is roughly 15 to 16 billion years old and was created as an explosion of incredible magnitude, then you basically ascribe to the idea that space and time have a beginning. And up to now, logic, science and philosophy all ascribe to the idea that any effect or action must have had a cause. And if there was a cause, the cause came before the action (with the exception of some strange stuff in the quantum world). So, if the universe had a beginning and the beginning had a cause, then there is something out there that exists outside of time (remember, time didn't exist before the Bang) and has the power to create that beginning. By definition, something that exists outside of time and with that kind of power would be from our viewpoint both eternal and omnipotent. Can it be that a scientific conclusion that there was a Big Bang, lead one to deduce that there is something that has the characteristics which humans have ascribed to God for a very long time? Intrigued? Read the book.

Obama

I just finished reading Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. It strikes me as remarkable in a lot of ways.

First, I find some things in common with a man that is incredibly different. An African father, raised for awhile in Indonesia, a family tree that I can't follow, experiences as a youth and young man that are so far outside my experience that I thought I was reading a novel at times. And yet, I find quotes that resonate and feel so familiar.

"Why don't you come by on Sunday?"

And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.

How much that sounds like my own youthful reaction to sincere invitations to church or Sunday School or belief.... And perhaps in ways that I am reluctant to acknowledge it still sounds like me today at times.

And when he went on safari with his sister to the great rift valley in Kenya...

Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky.

It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcaked backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water's surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.

And most of all the stillness, a silence to match the elements. At twilight, not far from our camp, we came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture's wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest. And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death. If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word - that time before Babel."

I've never been to the rift valley or Kenya, but still my thought of early man and my thoughts during encounters with the natural world stir my mind in similar ways.

A second thing that strikes me as remarkable is that this man can write. He can think and he can read. He is an intelligent man. I believe that many of our national public leaders are intelligent men and women. However, it seems to me that it does not always work out to their advantage to appear to be too intelligent. For if their intelligence shows up in ways labeled as academic or aesthetic, they will be saddled with terms like elitist.

And yet, here is this guy that wrote a book that stitches together complex ideas around colonialism, multi-culturalism, the plight of blacks in America, encounters with spirituality and faith, and more. This isn't a book about apple pie and flags. And it isn't a simple story of I was young and made mistakes, but then I followed the advice of my mother or father and worked hard and joined the church and now I'm ready to be your leader. This book is way more complicated.

And a third remarkable thing, it looks like America is going to make this man the next President. Our presidents have been diverse in some ways. We've had crooks for presidents and we've had fools and we've had incredible statesmen and we've had principled leaders - and perhaps there is some bit of all these qualities in most of our presidents.

But we've never had anything remotely like this man. A man who identifies himself as black. A man that is one generation removed from Africa. A man who's name sounds like that of a hated enemy of our country. A man that admits to having experimented with drugs in his youth. A man born into the lower middle class of America. A man who won scholarships to the finest schools in the country and then turned around and used his passion and knowledge to work in one of the most economically and socially challenged communities in the country.

This man is new ground. And maybe at the last moment our country will decide they can't handle this much change. Maybe this is just too far and too fast.

But maybe not. Maybe we are ready to take a step beyond the racial and cultural stereotypes of our history. Maybe we are ready to take a step beyond the name calling and profiling that have been with us for so long. Maybe we are prepared to take a chance - a chance to believe what Barack Obama says.

He mentions in the new forward to this book that the world changed on 9/11. But while the world changed it also continued with the same struggles that have beset for us for years. It seems to me that Barack Obama proposes that more than policy and more than values and more than a litany of simple solution, our future is to be found in community and the discussion that informs and helps animate our community.

Just maybe we can trust that a man that understands our collective needs and struggles and helps us connect across our differences this well can also lead us in that discussion and help us redefine our community.

What I do know is that history returned that day (9/11) with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried - it isn't even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life - the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us - is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know, I have seen , the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder - alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware - is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of the lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.