Reaching the Secular Mind: An interview with Ravi Zacharias

Derek Morris: In your book, Can Man Live Without God?, you suggest that there has been a concerted effort by some secular thinkers to prejudice the minds of this generation against a belief in God.¹ What strategies are these secular thinkers employing to promote their antitheistic views?

Ravi Zacharias: Those strategies come overtly as well as subtly. The challenge to the concept of theism can be traced through certain philosophers of the last century like Nietzsche, the Huxleys, Bertrand Russell, and then the existentialist writers like Sartre and Camus.

It can also be traced with a little more subtlety though on a widespread base in certain academic settings. I could name one of the Ivy League schools which has a promotional video right now where the closing statement is given by a student saying that one of the most fulfilling results of attending that university was to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. That is in a promotional video! You can also go to places like Oxford where people like Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins unapologetically state that their goal is not merely to talk about the ideas of God's non-existence but to convince even those who believe that theism is essentially irrational. Dawkins, in his Voltaire Lectures to the British Humanist Association a couple of years ago, talked about religious belief as being a kind of virus in the human software.

The effort to prejudice minds against a belief in God also comes through powerfully in much of the entertainment medium today. Its desacralizing of sexuality, respect for parents and family, and the sanctity of marriage, of word, of deed has a way of moving minds away from a belief in God. These sorts of notions come in rather subliminally, but people absorb them, and be fore you realize it, you are no longer shocked by things that ought to shock your sensitivities.

Then there are the law courts and the legal system, where there is a loss of the crucial sense of life's essential value. Here both birth and death have largely lost their moral focus, and human is sues are decided largely on the basis of pragmatic legal interpretations and en tangled judicatory argumentation. Here the underlying ethic is often seen in terms of money or unduly influenced by the results of a survey.

The cumulative effect of all of this has seemed to lower the moral convictions of young minds especially. Young teenagers who have hardly gained the maturity to respond to complex moral choices are now confronted by options that fell their ethical presuppositions long before they should have the possibility of having to face them.

DM: What are some of the ways that secular people have sought to make sense out of life apart from God?

RZ: Nietzsche was alert to this inevitable question. He said, in his parable called "The Madman," "Is not night and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?"² In other words, the dawn of this idea was going to be a kind of darkness. What is going to lighten your path along the way? Or, as Nietzsche expressed it, "What sacred games shall we have to invent?"³

Malcolm Muggeridge summarized it well when he said that it will be either megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for plea sure. If God is dead or out of the picture, that is basically what we're left with. Politically, we see the drive for power, and culturally, we see the drive for plea sure. But people are too sophisticated to simply admit that these are their most meaningful reasons for living. They dress it up. So you tend to end up with sophisticated pragmatic philosophies which direct contemporary humanity to simply do whatever works.

In a kind of reaction to the emptiness of this kind of Godless pragmatism, we see the entry of a strain of spirituality which comes in through the back door in the form of all kinds of mysticism. Some of the Eastern forms of mysticism have come in because they facilitate a form of ethics without God. So our pragmatic bent or our mystical bent become the substitute for the theistic commitment.

DM: It seems that many Christians, including preachers, are reticent to share their faith with secular people because they believe that their non- Christian friends and neighbors are experiencing a fulfilling, contented existence. Yet, you suggest that "for many in our high-paced world, despair is not a moment; it is a way of life."⁴ Why does an antitheistic worldview so often lead to despair?

RZ: It may not be an anguished despair, but it is a surrender to a pointlessness of existence. It is a Despair with a capital D. Existentialists admit that. Camus commented that death is philosophy's only problem. Jean-Paul Sartre said that life is an empty bubble, floating on the sea of nothingness. On his deathbed he admitted that his philosophy of atheism turned out to be unlivable. He rejected its ramifications, albeit very late in life.

The reason that an antitheistic worldview so often leads to despair lies deep within the human heart. Solomon said in Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity into the heart of man. We long for such a quality of coherence that denies death the capability of swallowing up all the affections, all the loves that we have, thus rendering life pointless. So this hunger for coherence and transcendent meaning is a very real one. The moral sense within the human mind compels us to seek a basic sense of significance not just a contrived significance but an essential, authentic significance. This has been observed and proven time and again.

I was invited by one of the ten wealthiest men of today to speak in Hong Kong. This man is a Chinese tycoon, a multi-billionaire. He was hosting some dinners and luncheons for what they call the diamond collar group. These are the very successful business magnates, the cream of the cream as it were. As soon as I landed at the airport, I was invited to have dinner with this gentleman and I just threw the question across the table, "When did you become a Christian?"

He said, "Oh, about 18 months ago."

I said, "What prompted it?"

He replied, "I got out of my office building one day and was driving home. I thought to myself, 'My life is empty. I really don't have any purpose. I have all this money, but I don't have purpose in my life.'" He phoned his wife and they decided to go to church that evening. It was a weeknight, and they walked into the midst of a discipleship training group. After attending for a few weeks, they committed their lives to Christ!

If you go to any university campus when we hold our university forums, the place is full. It is packed. We've been to Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Ohio State, Indiana University. Wherever we go, the place is filled with students who are ready to take on challenges and ask questions. I think this is a sign of a genuine hunger. Recently, I did a Faith and Science lecture forum on God and the problem of evil. There were nearly two thousand in attendance on a weeknight. It was transmitted to nearly one hundred universities on a big screen. Over one hundred countries logged in on the Internet. This shows that there is a moral sense within us that wants to put the puzzle of life together.

There are some, of course, who say "All these issues don't matter that much to me." But it seems to me that when the chips are down, they are not able to live by the logical implications of their presuppositions. They only hide from them.

DM: Well, that brings us to the radical claim of Jesus. People are look ing for meaning in life, freedom from despair. And along comes Jesus and says"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." That claim seems strangely out of place to many in our pluralistic, postmodern society. And yet you affirm that "Jesus made a most reasonable statement when He claimed exclusivity."⁵

RZ: Truth by definition is exclusive. What people often forget, even in vast audiences, is that Christianity is not the only faith that claims exclusivity. Every religion that I know claims it. Hindu ism is exclusivistic in that it will not surrender the law of karma or the law of reincarnation. Buddhism was born rejecting Hinduism. Islam is obviously exclusivistic. Any time you make a truth claim, you are implying that something you have asserted conforms to reality. So truth by definition is exclusive. If a truth claim is made, the question is whether it is a valid argument or merely a whimsical assertion. When you are testing a truth claim, there needs to be logical consistency, empirical adequacy, and experiential relevance.

When Jesus made the claim to be "the Way, the Truth and the Life," He was making the claim that He, in His essential being, offered, asserted, and lived by that which conformed to ultimate reality. It is most reasonable that He made an exclusive claim. And Jesus is certainly the One who has been most tested and analyzed in history to see if His claims were true.

DM: You have asserted that "the Christian message stands or falls upon the authenticity or spuriousness of the Bible."⁶ So, as you are sharing with someone about the truth claim of Jesus, the witness of Scripture is crucial. What evidence would you share with a secular person that the Bible is indeed the authentic Word from God?

RZ: Here you've got 66 books, writ ten by about 40 authors over 1,500 years! It would be very easy, if someone wanted to destroy this Book, to find a blatant array of contradictions. I find it fascinating that whenever these Scriptures are challenged in an open setting, and people talk about contradictions, at most they come up with three or four, if they come up with any of any real substance. I have yet to find anyone who has made a substantial case out of the contradictions in the Bible.

Bruce Metzger, of Princeton University, one of the leading New Testament scholars of our time, made the comment that the legitimacy of the text, based on the earliest documents and what we now have, has an astonishing 99.4 percent of accuracy. In the Bible you have placed together about 5,000 pieces or documents. Looking at the evidence you know immediately that this is not a fabricated Book, post facto.

The next thing you see is that the Bible is a historic book, not just a mystical book. For a long time, scholars would talk about the character of Pontius Pilate being without substance in extra-biblical history. All of a sudden in recent times, we have discovered mention of Pontius Pilate in extra-biblical sources.

Another evidence of the authenticity of Scripture is the claims of Christ, which are so drastic. The most dramatic claim of Jesus is the Resurrection. If there were any possibility of completely dev astating the Scriptures, it seems the religious leaders and skeptics of the day could have done it on this front with a brilliant stroke of counterpoint. If the resurrection of Jesus was a myth, the disciples could have simply claimed a spiritual resurrection of Jesus, asserting that even though His body was dead, His spirit is present with us. How could you argue with that? It's a claim that has no empirical reference. But the disciples claimed a bodily resurrection, a claim that could easily have been disproved if it were not true by producing the body. The resurrection of Christ is so dramatic a claim that it made the disciples vulnerable to disproof if it were a false claim. This is not what myth is made of. Eleven out of the twelve of Jesus' followers were willing to die a martyr's death because they knew He had indeed risen from the dead, when prior to His appearance be fore them they had been hiding for fear.

So, in judging the validity of Scripture, you take the coherent message coming through over 1,500 years, you take the volume of documentation tracing back to the original, you take the history, the geography, the characters that are testable, and the miracles that are clearly attested to. The Scriptures are, without a doubt, a unique document.

DM: As we read the Scriptures, we discover that even the people of God are not immune to the problem of suffering. Many skeptics point to this problem of suffering as the greatest obstacle to believing in God. You address this issue in your book Cries of the Heartand suggest that "the answer to suffering is more relational than prepositional."⁷ Could you explain what you mean by that?

RZ: The problem of suffering is a most fascinating question to raise if we see ourselves to be purely the product of the random collocation of atoms. If we believe we are here by pure chance, why do we attribute a moral context to the problem of suffering? If anything, we should accept it as one of the most concrete aspects of our evolution. The reason we assign it to a moral context is that we are. unable to shake off our moral nature. There is that innate moralframe of reference. To raise the problem of suffering is actually to establish the existence of a moral framework, and a moral framework doesn't exist unless a moral Lawgiver Himself does.

Beyond these considerations, I don't think the question will be answered by logic alone. I think that there are prepositional answers, enough to dent the question and bring about a meaningful response. But when all is said and done, it is the Who of the Bible that you trust in and not just the What. It is the relationship that you lean on. There is enough in human experience to sustain that.

If you take a child into the hospital, and a big needle is about to be inserted into the arm, the child may scream and cry and grab your hand in the process, but the trust is still there. The power to keep moving on in life is born out of a relationship. Propositionally, the problem of suffering is only partially answered. The peace and the strength are found in the rational, experimental consideration of things.

DM: In your interaction with secular people, you have learned that "there is no point in arguing with a person who is determined to explain everything away. Nothing good can come if the will is wrong."⁸ How, then, should a Christian respond to such a person?

RZ: There are some people in whom skepticism is so imbedded that even when their defenses are dropped they still have a gut level feeling that their skepticism is well founded. So you have to allow for a process, a paradigm shift. That oc curs in several ways. First, by asking the person the right questions which they then are forced to live with and think through. Second, by not mocking the person's positions at that point but respecting the fact that there is an honest seeking. Third and I think this is very important the church should always be an authentic worshiping community be cause it is in the context of authenticity and worship that barriers are most likely to fall. It has to season the relationship, not dominate it.

DM: Some years ago, you stated that "communicating the Christian faith has become extremely complicated in our day. There are few accepted beliefs any more." ⁹ What practical counsel would you give to a person who is committed to reaching secular people with the Christian message?

RZ: Communicating the Christian faith to secular people is a genuine struggle for many in the ministry. The pastoral task today of shepherding a people is in itself a daunting process. So the most important step, before even the apologetics and outreach begins, is to be personally and consistently replenished. If you are not replenished consistently, then your ability to min ister to the person without Christ is going to be sapped.

A second step is to enable the church to be connected with society. With each enabler you produce, you are multiplying yourself exponentially. If you have a church of one hundred that is expecting you to do the outreach, it is going to be a very slow process. But if you are equipping them, you are moving on several tracks. For this reason your ministry should be challenging the church person at an intellectual and emotional level, always undergirded by the Scriptures, so that they have the confidence to reach out to others.

Third, I believe that those in ministry ought to be reading very widely. Expenditure of words without an in come of ideas will lead to conceptual bankruptcy. So reading is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It needs to be a top priority for those of us who are dealing with ideas and people.