While perusing Reformed.org last night, I happened upon this little gem by Cornelius Van Til (by little, I mean very long and no, I have never heard of the man before either). It’s essentially an apologetic essay written in the form of a role play conversation where he argues for the existence of God as a wholly reasonable conclusion. Here’s an excerpt that I really found myself agreeing with:
The fact that so many people are placed before a full exposition of the evidence for God’s existence and yet do not believe in Him has greatly discouraged us. We have therefore adopted measures of despair. Anxious to win your good will, we have again compromised our God. Noting the fact that men do not see, we have conceded that what they ought to see is hard to see. In our great concern to win men we have allowed that the evidence for God’s existence is only probably compelling. And from that fatal confession we have gone one step further down to the point where we have admitted or virtually admitted that it is not really compelling at all. And so we fall back upon testimony instead of argument. After all, we say, God is not found at the end of an argument; He is found in our hearts. So we simply testify to men that once we were dead, and now we are alive, that once we were blind and that now we see, and give up all intellectual argument.
Do you suppose that our God approves of this attitude of His followers? I do not think so. The God who claims to have made all facts and to have placed His stamp upon them will not grant that there is really some excuse for those who refuse to see. Besides, such a procedure is self-defeating. If someone in your home town of Washington denied that there was any such thing as a United States Government would you take him some distance down the Potomac and testify to him that there is? So your experience and testimony of regeneration would be meaningless except for the objective truth of the objective facts that are presupposed by it. A testimony that is not an argument is not a testimony either, just as an argument that is not a testimony is not even an argument.
How very true! Too often I find myself reasoning with people for their emotions, to prove Christ and His message charming and desirable in ideal, yet I lack the courage (and knowhow in some fields) to definitively assert God’s all-pervasive presence in all the Universe’s history through objective fact and compelling reasoning. Yes, I’ve even found myself lacking the desire to and unwilling to see the usefulness in seeking out objective retorts and reposts to common (or otherwise) arguments against faith in the God of the Gospel.
Ultimately, conceding to irrelevance is as good as surrendering arms in intellectual discussions of theological and metaphysical matters. We ought to be more and more diligent in learning the facts and viewing them in a God fearing manner if we expect to give testimonies of our faith to the unregenerate and slumbering saints (I’ve always wanted to use that expression and now I have).