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Up Close and Personal With God

“But What About Edwina?”

One of my favorite children’s books of all time is called Edwina: The Dinosaur Who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct. Written and illustrated by the marvelously talented Mo Willems, Edwina is the story of a very good and kind dinosaur. She plays with the kids, helps little old ladies cross the street, and, best of all, bakes delicious chocolate chip cookies to give away. Everyone loves Edwina. Everyone, that is, except young Reginald Von Hoobie-Doobie. Along with having the best name in all of children’s literature, Reginald is the town know-it-all, and he is on a mission to convince everyone that dinosaurs are extinct. To accomplish this he gives speeches, hands out flyers, and even stages protests in the streets. The funniest picture in the book is of Reginald holding a handmade sign while standing in front of Edwina buying an ice-cream cone for a little girl. The sign reads: THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.

In another scene, Reginald lectures his classmates about just how totally extinct dinosaurs really are. But as soon as he begins to speak, the kids start asking questions. Beth McFeeder pipes up: “‘What about Edwina? She’s a dinosaur.’ Then Tommy Britcher says, ‘Yeah, Edwina can’t be extinct. She bakes chocolate chip cookies for us!’”171 Even the teacher gets in on the act, suggesting that Edwina might be making cookies for them right at that moment. At this, the class empties to go find some cookies, leaving Reginald with his notes.

I can relate to those students. Every time I read Edwina, Reginald Von Hoobie-Doobie reminds me of a typical religious skeptic. That is not to say that believing in God is like believing in the current existence of dinosaurs, of course, but Reginald’s attitude of staunch disbelief in the face of clear evidence, particularly the evidence of personal experience, is strikingly similar to that of most skeptics I talk to. Frankly, I often find myself thinking, I appreciate your earnestness, and I understand that you think you have a really good argument, but seriously, you are trying to convince me that God doesn’t exist? After all we have been through together, and after he has been so good to me? Good luck with that.

Seemingly Strong Evidence That Is Rarely Shared

When it comes to supporting a Christian worldview, the evidence of personal experience is somewhat of a paradox. On one hand, most of the people I know who have a very strong faith seem to base that trust largely on what they consider to be divine intervention in their lives and direct personal encounters with God. They point to answered prayer, mystical experiences, miraculous healing, and providential guidance as the key events in their lives. While they usually have many other good reasons for belief as well, ultimately it is their personal experience that provides the foundation of their faith. It seems that experience plays a major role in convincing people that God is real and ensuring them that he is good.

Sociologist Christian Smith supports my thesis. After conducting a wide-ranging study of American believers, he concluded, “Very many modern people have encountered and do encounter what are to them very real spiritual experiences, frequently vivid and powerful ones. And these often serve as epistemological anchors sustaining their religious faith in even the most pluralistic and secular of situations.”172 Even in a culture full of Reginald Von Hoobie-Doobies telling us that God doesn’t exist, people keep on believing because they know him experientially.

On the other hand, these encounters with God are rarely used in evangelism or apologetics. They may be considered, on a personal level, the most solid piece of evidence one has for belief, but they seldom get entered into a discussion as data that skeptics might also want to consider. Indeed, they are often not even shared among fellow believers as a way of strengthening one another’s faith.

For example, J. P. Moreland tells the story of an episode that took place while he was speaking at a large church about how to nurture confidence in God. During a coffee break, a member of the ministry staff told Moreland about how he had been miraculously healed several years before. The young man’s chest and hands had been fractured in an accident at a machine shop. At the hospital, he was X-rayed and told to return the next morning for more tests.

That evening, some Christian friends came to his house and prayed for his healing. Even though he was on pain medication, he could still feel pain; however, as the people prayed, the pain vanished and the swelling in his hands left. He was startled. The next morning, the surgeons took new X-rays, which indicated that the fractures were completely healed. The doctors also noted that the swelling was gone, something that just does not happen so quickly on its own. When the doctors compared the two sets of X-rays, it was clear that he had been miraculously healed! The fracture lines were gone!173

Interestingly, when Moreland asked the man if he had ever told anyone about this story, the answer was no. “He didn’t want to talk about himself or appear weird to people.”174

This is consistent with my findings as well. Apologists, evangelists, and other ministers of the gospel often have very strong personal testimonies of God’s intervention in their lives, but they very rarely share them with others. There are several reasons for this. We’ll start with the two mentioned in the story.

Humility

The young church staff member didn’t want to gloat over his miraculous healing, and of course that’s the right attitude. We are not to glory in ourselves, as if our own righteousness or skill was responsible for a supernatural occurrence. However, that does not mean that we shouldn’t celebrate what God has done and share it with others. Indeed, remembering and celebrating God’s action is an important spiritual discipline for fostering greater trust in him. God filled the Israelite calendar with festivals and feasts for this very reason.

Proclaiming these acts is also an important part of reaching others. For example, in the first evangelistic sermon Peter ever preached (in the midst of an outpouring of supernatural signs and wonders at Pentecost), he emphasized the evidence of the miraculous: “Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22). Also, Paul consistently shared the story of his vision on the road to Damascus (e.g., Acts 22 and 26). Spiritual experiences can theoretically cause a person to be conceited (see 2 Corinthians 12:7), but guarding against pride does not necessitate that we keep silent about all that God has done.

The Weirdness Factor

I don’t know exactly what the young man was thinking in not wanting to be considered “weird,” but I suspect he didn’t want to be associated with charlatans. Again, this is understandable. Nobody wants to be lumped in with crooked “faith healers” and televangelists who make all sorts of fraudulent claims. However, the fact that counterfeits exist does not mean that the real thing does not. We can’t stop telling true stories just because other people tell false ones.

Playing by the Skeptic’s Rules

The desire not to appear “weird” may also be a sign of something more problematic: an implicit acceptance of many of our society’s secularist and naturalistic assumptions about life. As Clint Arnold has suggested, “Many Western Christians have adopted elements of an anti-supernatural bias, perhaps even unwittingly, through the influence of our prevailing culture.”175

One of the places this bias shows up is in our belief regarding what may reasonably be discussed in the public square. For generations we have been told that religious experiences are private matters that should be kept private. If you want to talk about them in your prayer meetings and church services, that’s fine, but don’t bring them outside those walls. The underlying idea here is that religious experiences don’t offer us any objective information about reality anyway.176

This is false, and we need to be very careful about implicitly accepting that lie by refusing to offer spiritual experiences as evidence in a worldview discussion. In doing so we are essentially playing by the skeptic’s rules; we are submitting to an argument format that presupposes there is no God in order to try to argue that he exists.

We also see this attitude in the reluctance of Christians to speak about apparent encounters with supernatural beings, a hesitancy to which I plead guilty as well.

In the 1990s, I spent several years working at a camp for inner-city youth. One night I got a call to come help with a rowdy boy who was causing trouble. When I arrived at the dining hall, I could see that this was no ordinary case. The boy was screaming, attacking people, and tearing the place up with a strength and zeal that just didn’t seem to fit his body. I finally got my arms around him in a bear hug, but it was all I could do to keep him from injuring me and the others around him. As he continued to flail and yell, the camp director, Heather, and I were at a loss as to what to do. The boy didn’t seem to be tiring out, but I certainly was. Heather decided to pray. I don’t remember what words she used, exactly, but I vividly remember what happened the millisecond she said “Amen”: The boy fell asleep. I mean, instantly. He was completely out, with his head resting on my shoulder. He went from cussing and punching to unconscious in the blink of an eye. We were shocked. I carried the boy down to the nurses’ station and put him to bed. Several hours later he awoke with a smile, laughing and joking. He seemed to be a brand-new person.

Now, none of us on staff had a particularly charismatic background. We were not ones to see angels and demons under every stone. However, we all came to the same conclusion about our experience that night: Supernatural forces were at work.

As I said, people are not usually forthcoming with these kinds of stories. I think I’ve talked about this episode about twice in the fifteen years since it happened. However, interaction with the spiritual world is a much more common and widespread phenomenon than is usually acknowledged. If you ask around, I’ll bet you’d be surprised at how many people will have an experience to share. An article in the alumni newsletter of Biola University (hardly a bastion of wild-eyed demon-fighters) offers a good example. Holly Pivec interviewed six PhD-holding professors, all of whom believed they had witnessed demonic phenomena, from flying objects to supernatural knowledge.177 Moreland and Issler, also Biola professors (although neither was mentioned in the article), sum up my thoughts exactly: “We know many credible, honest people who have encountered angels and demons in various circumstances. The combined weight of their testimony has brought both of us to the point that we simply cannot doubt the reality of angels and demons even if we wanted to.”178 And why would we want to, anyway? The existence of angels and demons is clearly scriptural. We shouldn’t be shy about sharing these experiences as evidence just because the materialistic culture scoffs at them.179

Inherently Unreliable?

Another reason that Christians don’t share spiritual experiences is that they believe personal testimonies are inherently unreliable. Many people seem to think, “If it’s just my word, what good is that?” Well, assuming you are honest, it’s plenty good. The fact is, unless there are some valid reasons not to, we accept the testimony of others all the time. In general, we give people the benefit of the doubt. We don’t assume someone has been deceived or is lying. He might be, but as Groothuis notes: “The burden of proof lies on establishing guilt, not in establishing innocence.”180

Of course, some stories are better supported than others and therefore are more believable. For example, I suggest that if you use a story from your own life when talking to skeptics, it should be one that can be easily verified by others who were present.181 Also, in choosing which stories to recount (whether your own story or someone else’s), you should follow the principle of the credible witness. As Moreland explains, “A credible witness is someone we trust who is stable, reliable and informed enough to be qualified to testify to something, who has no reason to lie or exaggerate, and who is respected in the broader Christian community or among those whom you know well.”182

Too Subjective?

Another common reason for not sharing our personal stories is that the whole realm of spiritual experiences seems too subjective. We all know the door-to-door missionaries who support their truth claims by asking the potential convert to “pray about it” or by appealing to a personal experience (i.e., a “burning in the bosom”) that is supposed to validate their message. I once asked a couple of young Mormon elders why they believed their teaching to be true. They told me about how they had each gone on a mountain retreat before heading out on their mission. At one point during their stay they were sent into the woods in order to seek a “Joseph Smith experience” that would confirm for them that their religion was true and that they were called to proclaim its message. When I asked them whether or not they had had such an experience and if they could describe it, both struggled to answer before essentially refusing to comment any further. From what I could gather, either they didn’t have the same experience, didn’t have an experience they could describe, or didn’t have an experience at all. It was all very vague.

This kind of approach didn’t go far with me and won’t go far with a skeptic. It is simply too subjective to discuss. There is no way to evaluate what kind of experience, if any, the missionaries had, or whether their interpretation of it was accurate. As evidence, a self-authenticating experience such as this just isn’t effective in evangelism and apologetics. I don’t know if those guys were indicative of all LDS members or if they were in line with the official teaching of that church, but the fact that they couldn’t offer any evidence (historical, philosophical, archaeological, etc.) other than subjective experience to support their religious views was a huge problem.

However, orthodox Christianity does not have that difficulty. For one thing, Christianity does not rely solely on experience to support its truth claims. As we have seen, there are all kinds of different types of evidence for the Christian worldview. As a result, the personal experiences that Christianity presents as evidence are not self-authenticating. They are dependent on those other types of evidence for support and interpretation.

For example, if God reveals himself through nature and Scripture, then I can’t interpret my experience to contradict the truth found in these other places. I’ve heard of several pastors who left their wives and ran off with the church secretary after claiming they heard a “voice” from God telling them it was okay. From the perspective of a Christian worldview, this is ridiculous. As Blackaby rightly points out, subjective experience alone cannot be your guide.

At times as I’m leading a seminar, someone will get upset with me and say, “Well, I don’t care what you say; I’ve experienced such and such.” I respond as kindly as I know how by saying, “I do not deny your experience. I do question your interpretation of what you experienced because it is contrary to what I see in the Word of God.” . . . Every experience must be held up against the Scriptures.183

Also, Christian experiences should be held up against the long tradition of the church. In order for an experience to have evidential power in a discussion, it should have been experienced by many others before you. As Michael Novak writes:

The experiences of Christians are not always merely “subjective.” Sometimes they are, and such opinions are likely to be brushed aside by others. But sometimes certain experiences awaken memories of yet others, well recognized in a long tradition. Sometimes, personal experiences meet other criteria that lift them from the merely “subjective” into what might be called the “intersubjective.”184

For example, many times in my life I have opened up the Bible “at random” and the first words I read seemed to be God saying exactly what I needed to hear at that very moment. In one instance I remember vividly, I was feeling particularly discouraged. My ministry was not “taking off” the way I had hoped, and my seemingly endless graduate studies were putting a financial strain on my family. While most of my peers were buying houses and getting well established in their careers, I was struggling to get by on student loans and low-paying jobs. I was seriously considering throwing in the towel and going to find a “real” life. I slumped in my chair and let my Bible fall open. I read the first passage I saw:

Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge. . . . My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad indeed; my inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right. Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always be zealous for the fear of the LORD. There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.

Proverbs 23:12, 15–18

I can’t tell you how encouraged I was in reading that (or how many times I have returned to meditate on that passage over the years).

Now, you might say that I just got lucky, or that this is not proper biblical hermeneutics. Doesn’t this kind of approach to Scripture contradict what I said in chapter 8? I don’t think so. For one, my understanding of what God said to me does not contradict the literal or spiritual sense of that text. Also, and this is the main point I am making in this section, there is a long tradition in the church of God speaking to people in just this way. I personally know many people who have had this experience, and it goes back to the beginnings of the church. Let’s return to the story of Augustine’s conversion for a good example.

Augustine had been wrestling with God a long time, but had been unable to break free from the “sordid and shameful” habits of his youth and surrender his life to God. However, one day, while crying out to God in a garden in Milan, Augustine heard the voice nearby of a child singing over and over again the words “Take it and read.” As he recounts in his Confessions, Augustine took this as a

divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall. For I had heard the story of Antony, and I remembered how he had happened to go into a church while the Gospel was being read and had taken it as a counsel addressed to himself when he heard the words Go home and sell all that belongs to you. Give it to the poor, and so the treasure you have shall be in heaven; then come back and follow me [Matthew 19:21]. By this divine pronouncement, he had at once been converted to you.

So I hurried back . . . opened [the Bible], and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell: Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites [Romans 13:13–14]. I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.185

Notice that not only did Augustine have a similar experience to me, but the same thing had already happened to Antony. This is the type of “cross-referencing” that needs to be characteristic of experiential data.

We can also judge experiences by the objectively measurable results they produce. For example, one of the more famous “personal religious experiences” in the New Testament is Saul’s meeting with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). After Saul saw light from heaven and heard a voice telling him what to do, he turned from being a persecutor of believers to the world’s greatest missionary. Several aspects of the story make Saul’s experience more than just subjective. First, although the men traveling with Saul did not see Jesus, they heard something and clearly shared in his experience enough to be shocked by it (Acts 9:7). They could testify that Saul wasn’t just making stuff up. Second, they could see the change that came over Saul. This character transformation is part of the data that must be accounted for. The fact that millions of people over the years have been changed in a similar way to Saul after claiming to meet Jesus, and that these experiences were predicted in the Old Testament (e.g., Ezekiel 36:26), takes these experiences even further away from the realm of the completely subjective.

Let’s move on to apply these principles to a few specific examples as we walk through our usual discussion steps.

Step One: Present the Data

As we’ve already seen, there are many different types of experiences you can present as data. Frankly, I struggled to decide what experiences to focus on in this section. For one thing, there are literally millions of testimonials available to choose from, many of them highly trustworthy and extraordinarily moving. How could I whittle it down to just a few? Also, what types of experiences should I focus on? We’ve already talked about, albeit far too briefly, seemingly miraculous healings,186 encounters with supernatural forces, and divine communication. I could also speak about the mystical presence of God as experienced by the great saints,187 dead children being raised to life in India,188 or the visions of Jesus occurring by the thousands among Muslims in the Middle East.189 These all have tremendous value as evidence for the Christian worldview.

In the end I decided to go with some experiences that might seem less sensational, but are more in line with how most of us experience God in everyday life. They primarily have to do with “personal providence”: the sense that someone powerful is watching over us and directing events for our good. These examples may not have the Wow! factor of some other experiences, but they are still solid pieces of evidence for the Christian worldview. They also have the benefit of coming across as highly authentic and verifiable.

I suggest that you share your own similar experiences or those of family or close friends. You will be sharing your own life. Hence, I think you will have an easier time getting the skeptic to (1) believe the experiences happened and (2) relate them to something he may actually experience (or has already experienced) himself.

Divine Protection

My wife and I enjoy Deadliest Catch, a reality TV show about a bunch of Bering Sea crab fishermen, some of the toughest guys on the planet. On a recent episode, Edgar Hansen, deck boss of the Northwestern, sensed that something was wrong with the boat. On a “whim,” he opened up a hatch on deck to find one of the compartments taking on water and almost full. A warning sensor that would have alerted the crew to this problem was broken. If they had continued working only a few more minutes, the ship would have become unstable and potentially sunk. Because Edgar found it when he did, they were able to pump out the water and save the ship. What I found interesting was the way the crew reacted. “Someone is watching over us,” Captain Sig Hansen asserted, and Edgar himself gave a hearty thank-you to God (or whoever he was thinking of as he looked to the sky) for keeping them safe.190

I’ve spoken the same words thousands of times in my life. It’s what I said when I heard how close my truck had come to crushing me, and it’s what I say almost every day while traveling the Southern California freeways I use to get to my office. Millions of people have had a sense that God (perhaps through angels) is working to keep us safe. Sometimes this takes more flamboyant forms (like the mother trapped in the Joplin, Missouri, tornado who felt an angelic “force” protecting her and her daughters from shards of glass191), but most of us interpret even the more mundane variety as instances of divine protection.

Divine Provision

Just a few moments ago, as I prepared to write this section of the chapter, the man from the office next to mine stopped by for a quick chat. Somehow the discussion turned to retirement plans and he asked me if I had one. “Sure,” I explained with a smile, “God is my retirement plan.” By that I meant that God had been incredibly faithful in providing for my needs thus far in my life, and I expected him to continue to do that until I died. My friend then launched into a story about his brother the missionary. I won’t go into all the details here, but the bottom line of the story was that at several points in his ministry the brother had found himself in a tight financial pinch. At every juncture along the way, money had “turned up” from an unexpected source, sometimes in exactly the amount needed.

That has been my experience as well. Indeed, the instances in my life that I consider to be divine provision are way too numerous to remember, let alone recount here. I’ll just offer one that is typical: About a year after launching Don Johnson Ministries, we started purchasing airtime to do a radio show in the Los Angeles area. It was a big investment for us, considering our support base was not very large, but we stepped out in faith. After about four months, it looked like we were going to have to take a step back. We simply didn’t have the funds to keep the show on the air, so on a Friday we decided that on Monday we would call the station and cancel the program. However, on that Saturday an anonymous check came in the mail for $10,000. It was by far the biggest donation we had ever received, and to this day I don’t know who sent it. I know who to thank for it, though.

This type of experience is really quite commonplace. There are several trustworthy sources for more stories like this one, including In Search of a Confident Faith by J. P. Moreland and Klaus Issler.

Divine Control Over Events

In the spring of 2008, I went with a team of evangelists to hold outreach festivals in various towns and villages in southern India. Almost from the time I touched down, I was repeatedly warned about one of the locations to which I had been assigned. “You must be very careful about what you preach there,” several people said. “The political leaders in that area want nothing to do with Christianity. They are glad to have an American coming to town to put on a show, but they don’t want to hear about Jesus being the only way of salvation, or anything like that. If you speak in that way, there may be serious consequences. Please just give a more generic message that won’t offend anyone.”

This presented a dilemma, obviously, as I don’t run an evangelistic ministry and set up events halfway around the world in order not to preach the gospel. So we prayed about it and determined that I would just have to proclaim my usual message and let the chips fall where they may. In the back of my mind I hoped that perhaps word would not get back to the politicians before we finished the outreach and got back on the plane.

That dream quickly vanished when we arrived for the festival. There on the stage were all the dignitaries and political leaders of the region, including the man we had been warned about most. He had made a special trip to attend this event and would be saying a few words before I preached. My heart raced all through the singing time and leader’s speech (none of which I could understand), and as he finished up, I gathered my Bible and my notes and offered up one more quick prayer. Then a strange thing happened: The politician and his entire entourage left the stage and walked toward their cars. I quickly asked a local pastor what was happening. He explained that they had another meeting to get to in a distant city and would not be able to stay to hear me preach. What a relief! I praised God under my breath and went on with my message. The people responded very well, and at the end many came forward to talk to counselors about Jesus. However, that wasn’t even the end of the story. As I drove back to my friend’s house after the festival, he filled me in on the rest of the politician’s remarks. Before he left, the man had explained to the crowd that it was a very special night because Jesus was present with them. He encouraged the people to listen very carefully to me so that they could learn how to know Jesus.

It was an amazing experience, but it was hardly unique. We live in a world in which somebody powerful seems to be guiding events, and many of us experience this sense of providence regularly.

Step Two: Offer the Christian Explanation of the Data

This one is fairly straightforward. The Christian position regarding experiences of personal providence is that God is active in the world today, working for the good of his people. This is the clear teaching of the Bible from start to finish, and, with the possible exception of some groups that believe God stopped doing signs and wonders after the early church got established, is basic Christian doctrine. Indeed, for Christians in most of the world, the idea of a Christian life that doesn’t involve personal encounters with God and the supernatural realm would be considered so ridiculous as to be laughable.

Possible Objections

The main objection to this interpretation is almost inevitably going to be some variation of the “problem of evil”: If God can protect and provide food and direct history for good, why do people die of cancer? Why do thousands of children starve to death every year? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes devastate entire regions and wipe out so many innocent lives? Shouldn’t God do something for those people too?

These are emotionally charged and serious questions, so they can’t be ignored. However, they apply to the topic at hand only indirectly, so you need to be careful not to get sidetracked into changing the subject.

To illustrate, let’s imagine we are first-century fishermen living by the Sea of Galilee. One day, after tying up our boats, we run into an excited crowd of people who claim to have been miraculously fed by Jesus. “He turned five loaves and two small fish into a feast for five thousand people!” they exclaim as they rush around the lake in search of another free meal. Then we meet a couple of his disciples who claim that he calmed a storm and kept them from drowning. “Interesting!” you say to me, “I wonder if the stories are true. Let’s go check it out.” But I am not interested: “If there is a miracle worker in the region, why didn’t we get any food? And why didn’t this Jesus show up and save my uncle from drowning in this godforsaken lake last month? These stories are clearly false. I don’t think the guy even exists.”

I hope you can see the logical fallacy here. It does not follow that just because Jesus didn’t do a miracle for me, he did not do a miracle for anyone. Jesus could protect and provide food for some people and not others; there is no law of the universe that says if some people are protected and fed, all must be fed. So it is perfectly reasonable, should the evidence support it, to believe that Jesus exists and did a miracle for some people and not for others.

In the same way, one can reasonably accept that God exists and is active in the world while also accepting that he does not always perform the same acts on behalf of everyone. The problem of evil actually has no bearing on whether God exists or whether he interacts with his creation in acts of personal providence. As James Spiegel notes, even if the objection about evil were relevant, “it only undermines certain beliefs about the nature of God.” It does not disprove the existence of God. “At most, evil should prompt us to reconsider what kind of God exists, not whether God exists. To give up belief in a world creator because of the existence of evil is a blatant non sequitur.”192

Again, this is not to say that the problem of evil should be ignored, and we must be careful not to let “cold” logic override empathy and compassion for a skeptic who may be genuinely hurting and confused about why God didn’t act in a particular situation. It’s good and necessary to explore the issue of suffering. However, if you address the problem of evil, you should make it another topic for discussion rather than let it distract from the topic at hand, which is alleged personal experiences of the supernatural. You could say something like this: “I’d be glad to talk about why God allows bad things to happen,193 and if you would like to switch to that subject, I’m happy to explain the Christian teaching on it as well as why I think the Christian worldview has a much better explanation for the existence of pain, suffering, and evil than any other worldview. However, right now we are trying to explain the fact that people perceive a divine hand orchestrating the world to some degree, and I would prefer to finish that topic first.”

Of course, this only applies if you think the skeptic is presenting the problem of evil as a strictly academic objection to the Christian worldview. If he is speaking from a heartfelt need to figure out why God allowed something bad to happen in his life, then you probably want to switch to that topic right away.

Step Three: Discuss Alternate Explanations of the Data

As usual, it is impossible to predict exactly what theories you might get from skeptics to explain experiences of apparent personal providence. However, I think there are essentially only two positions. If the God of the Bible isn’t at work in the world than either (1) some other deity is directing events or (2) nothing is.

Let’s deal with option 1 first. The idea here is that experiences of personal providence might suggest a higher power, but they do not necessarily point to the God of the Bible. The author of our experiences could be the god of a different religion or some vague force that governs all. Maybe “fate” provided the money to keep the radio show on the air or perhaps Zeus sent an invisible thunder bolt that kept my truck from rolling over my head.

Certainly it is true that the experiences recounted in this chapter are not stand-alone, airtight proofs for the biblical worldview. In other words, if they were the only source of religious knowledge we had, they wouldn’t get us to Christianity. But they are not all we have, and I have never claimed that they are sufficient to get us to Christianity. Rather, they are one piece of data that fits well with many other pieces to build a strong cumulative case for the biblical worldview.

As William Alston points out, though no one strand of Christian evidence may be completely sufficient to keep the faith secure, “when combined into a rope they all together have enough strength to do the job.”194 He notes that one’s putative experience of God can be supported by appealing to

the witness of others who are more advanced in the Christian life, to the revelation of God in His historical acts, and to general philosophical reasons for believing that God as construed in Christianity does exist and rules His creation.

These sources combine to provide a believer with reasons

to suppose that there is a being of the sort she takes herself to be aware of in her Christian life, a being that could be expected to do the things she is aware of this being as doing. Conversely, when these more indirect (at least more indirect from her perspective) sources seem dubious, seem to provide at best a tenuous and shaky indication of the reality in question, she can fall back on her immediate, intimate sense of the presence and activity of God in her life to (rightfully) assure herself that it is not all the work of human imagination.195

So we interpret our experiences in light of truths that we have gleaned from other sources, and our experiences, in turn, support the trustworthiness of those sources. I have many good non-experiential reasons to believe the God of the Bible exists, but no similar reasons to believe Zeus does. Ascribing protective power to Zeus based only on my experience would be unreasonable, in the same way as ascribing protective power to Jesus would be unreasonable if I had only my experience. But I have more than that. Therefore, I am much more justified in positing that the Christian God is behind my experiences of personal providence than I would be in suggesting it was another supernatural force. (This would include more mainstream deities, of course, although I won’t take the time to go into a comparative analysis of world religions here.)

Option 2 is the preferred choice of most skeptics that I run into. A typical response generally goes something like this: “You might think there is some power guiding history and breaking into the natural world to help people, but there just isn’t. You think you saw a miracle, but you didn’t. You think God is watching over you, but he isn’t. You got lucky, that’s it.”

Here is the bottom line: No matter how extraordinary your evidence, the skeptic (at least of the normal materialistic variety) will simply deny that your experience was supernatural.

These kinds of skeptics will never admit that an experience should be interpreted supernaturally. However, it is very important to note that this is not due to a reasoned evaluation of the evidence, but rather an a priori rejection of the very possibility of the supernatural. They start with the premise that God doesn’t exist and reason from there that nothing could possibly be responsible for directing our circumstances. The presuppositions of the materialist regarding the nature of reality and how we gather knowledge preclude him from ever seeing God in day-to-day events.

To be more accurate, it’s not that he will never see God, it’s that he is forced to conclude that apparent (and what many would consider to be obvious) acts of divine providence are actually just all fluke coincidences. This is not an easy thing to do. Trying to interpret all of life materialistically is a continual fight against our intuitive sense of the meaning of common situations. As atheist extraordinaire Friedrich Nietzsche admitted in an illuminating passage called “Personal Providence,” denying the reality of a divinely authored personal providence is a struggle:

There is a certain high point in life; once we have reached it, we are, for all our freedom, once more in the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom, and no matter how much we have confronted the beautiful chaos of existence and denied it all providential reason and goodness, we still have to pass our hardest test. For it is only now that the thought of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force and the best advocate, appearance, speaks for it—now that we so palpably see how everything that befalls us continually turns out for the best. . . . Is there any more dangerous seduction than to renounce one’s faith in [distant gods that don’t concern themselves in human affairs] and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of worries and personally knows every little hair on our heads and finds nothing nauseating in the most miserable small service?196

Having denied that God exists,197 Nietzsche is saying, atheists must also deny that existence has any purpose.198 Logically, they have to believe that life is ultimately chaotic and meaningless. There is no good and powerful deity directing the affairs of men; we are “free” to do what we want. The problem is that it doesn’t seem that way. According to the plain appearance of things, someone is directing our lives for good. Therefore, in order to hold on to the belief that there is no god, we must deny what our senses tell us. Instead, Nietzsche goes on to write, we should either take credit ourselves for the good that befalls us or chalk it up to “beloved Chance: he leads our hand occasionally.”199

Let’s glance at a quick example to remind ourselves what this advice looks like in real life. Klaus Issler relates the story of Jason, a student of his who didn’t have enough money to continue his doctoral studies. Jason prayed and asked God to provide the amount of his tuition bill: $2,117.60. A few days later his wife, Heather, was looking through some letters that her senile grandmother had written to her but never mailed. In them she found some bonds that totaled $2,000. That was amazing, but what was even more so was the fact that when they deposited the bonds in the bank, the actual figure turned out to be “$2,117.60! The bonds had appreciated.”200

According to Nietzsche, Jason and Heather should either pat themselves on the back for so wisely providing for themselves, or be thankful that they just got lucky. And that is exactly the problem with naturalistic explanations of personal providence. Jason and Heather clearly did not provide the money for themselves, and if they just got lucky, there is no one to thank, even though the situation obviously and loudly cries out for gratitude. Skeptics may “thank their lucky stars” but does anyone think that is a rational sentiment?

That is why unbelievers so often anthropomorphize the concept of happenstance. Nietzsche used the pronoun he to talk about “beloved Chance”; others discuss supposedly random occurrences by thanking “Lady Luck” or “the hand of Fate.” Why do they do this? Because the apparent reality of the situation is obviously personal and purposeful. It makes no sense to talk about blind chance as “leading our hand,” but that sounds much less counterintuitive than to talk about our experiences of providence as if they were the result of impersonal, meaningless forces.

The natural reaction to Jason and Heather’s story, as Nietzsche admitted, is to ascribe the act to a benevolent God. Naturalistic skeptics have to work hard to avoid this conclusion. Their worldview does a terrible job of accounting for the data of these experiences, so if they continue in their beliefs, it is in spite of the evidence, not because of it. That is the bottom line for many skeptics, a point we will focus on briefly in the next chapter.