I love The Matrix. (The first movie, of course. The others not so much.) One of the best scenes of the movie was when Neo was sat down, plugged into the Matrix, and force-fed a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in a matter of hours, finally opening his eyes and saying to Morpheus, “I know kung fu.”
In A Shot of Faith {To the Head}: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists, author and Christian philosopher Mitch Stokes attempts to do the same to us. The idea according to Stokes is that if you can download the secrets of philosophical kung fu, then you can defend yourself (and your faith) from the attacks of militant atheists, who see a belief in God as a danger worse than child abuse. ”Believers must be armed with answers,” he says, “for themselves as much as for those who don’t believe.”
Stokes chooses as his weapons three concepts aimed at undermining our atheist enemies: rationality, intelligent design, and absolute moral standards. In the first part of the book, he makes the argument that a belief in God is actually rational based on our properly functioning cognitive faculties, senses such as memory, observation, perception, deduction, and credulity. He then goes on to look at the issue of intelligent design. Even outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins admits that a non-designed origin of life is “many orders of magnitude more improbable than most people realize.” In fact, Stokes explains, what understanding we have of the universe and life runs counter to the idea of natural, unguided evolution, which only concerns itself with the survival of the species. Evolution, he says, “seems to have left us wholly unprepared for particle physics.” Finally, Stokes looks at the problem of evil and the claim that a loving and all-powerful God would never allow evil to exist, and since evil obviously does exist, then God cannot. But for atheists to believe evil exists, he claims, they must first explain what evil is and where it came from. After all, if unguided evolution is true and we’re no more than “chunks of matter” as Dawkins puts it, then the existence of morality makes no sense.
Does Stokes achieve his goal of effectively arming Christians to wage intellectual kung fu on atheists? Yes and no. He does a fairly good job of deconstructing atheism from a philosophical standpoint, but his execution is often muddled and lacking in cohesion. He even contradicts himself at times. For example, in the preface he states, “Science without good philosophy — as you’ll learn in this book — distorts and stunts our growth. At its best, unaided science results in idiot savants.” But then in Chapter 20 he says, “Science can study what humans do, but not what they ought to do.” So should science include philosophy or not? If it should, to avoid being “unaided”, then you have to accept that science will come to various conclusions based on that philosophy. But if science isn’t able to do that, if it can only observe what humans do, then how does it make scientists idiot savants?
The occasional contradiction aside, A Shot of Faith is marred by several different problems, the first being that it’s a philosophy book. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with philosophy, but atheists tend to only want to talk in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. Defending a “sciency” attack with philosophical terms like “evidentialism”, “epistemic”, “cognitive faculties”, and “sensus divinitatis” is probably not gonna get you very far. Second, the organization of the book makes it difficult to use practically. If the purpose of the book is to arm believers with the tools to defend their faith, then such tools should be practically useful. But each section feels wholly and completely separate from the others, and Stokes struggles to bind them together into a single line of thought. Third, in presenting his arguments, Stokes rarely presents the atheist counter-argument. I would’ve liked to have seen him answer his own arguments with a rebuttal and then address that rebuttal; don’t just say something is so and move on. And fourth, Stokes leans way too heavily on his mentor, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Anytime he paints himself into a corner, he just whips out Plantinga’s answers on the subject. I wanted to hear what other Christians had to say, but we rarely got that, nor did we get much Scripture to back him up.
The biggest problem of the book, though, is the premise. Even if it were possible to use these philosophical “weapons” to defeat atheism the way Stokes claims, would we really be winning? We may be able to win the argument, but in so doing, do we ultimately lose the war? Philosophy is fine, but without love, our words mean nothing. No matter how eloquent we may be, we’ll never be able to argue someone to heaven.
While A Shot of Faith gives readers of all backgrounds a lot to think about and can certainly help to strengthen the faith of believers, I’m not sure many atheists would be as convinced. That said, if you’re interested in Christian apologetics, this is probably a worthwhile introduction.
[Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."]
Previously:
Evolution and the null hypothesis
On debating an atheist
The Vatican: Evolution compatible with Christian faith
Should evolution be debated in public schools?
