Why I’m Still a Christian: Justin Brierley

Episode Transcript

FamilyLife Today® with Dave and Ann Wilson; Podcast Transcript

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Why I’m Still a Christian

Guest:Justin Brierley

Release Date:December 11, 2025

Justin (00:00:00):

A lot of Christians have to come to terms with some of the difficulties that they will inevitably find in scripture, perhaps in what they’ve been taught about science and faith. There may be a kind of an uncomfortable period where they’re wrestling with these things. I became a very devout Christian. I had to look into the intellectual arguments for faith. I found that as well as being something you can experience with your heart, Christianity is also made for the mind.

Dave (00:00:25):

Okay, Justin Brierley, I’ve got a question for you. You’re one of the smartest, most intelligent, brightest thinkers I know, and I’m not trying to butter you up.

Ann (00:00:35):

Justin, he’s not saying that about me. He’s saying this about you.

Dave (00:00:39):

Ann’s bright, but she’s also pretty.

Justin (00:00:40):

My cheeks are burning. That is a very kind thing to say, but it’s not entirely true. I’m glad I gave that impression. That’s very kind.

Dave (00:00:51):

Well, no, seriously, you’re a very good thinker and the question I had growing up, and I still think people ask is how can somebody as intelligent as you call themselves a Christian? That’s the question.

(00:01:04):

Your book is Why I’m Still a Christian. Tell me why you’re a Christian, because you’re a thinking man and often we think if you have a brain—I remember Josh McDowell saying back in the day, a lot of people think Christians have two brains. One’s lost; the other’s out looking for it, right? That’s what a lot of people think. But you’re very intelligent and you’re a Christian. How is that possible?

Justin (00:01:26):

Well, I would say it’s simply possible because being a Christian and being an intelligent, sane, rational person are not at all mutually exclusive and never have been. It’s only a relatively recent idea that to be a Christian, to be a person of faith means that you have to throw your brain in the trash can. Sadly, it’s a myth that’s been perpetuated, especially in recent decades by what you might call the new atheist movement, which was this very dogmatic anti-religious atheist movement that tried to paint people of faith as idiots, faith-heads, delusional as Richard Dawkins called it. So it’s not surprising that sadly that stereotype has been around. Now admittedly, there are obviously some Christians who perhaps fit that stereotype sadly. But having said that, I meet people of all faiths and no faith who are equally can be of varying levels of intelligence.

So the reality is there’s nothing particularly more special or less special about Christians when it comes to intelligence. All I would say is that in fact, the history of Christianity is filled with incredibly intelligent people who took their faith very seriously, but also took their areas of study, be it astronomy, mathematics, physics, or any other area of expertise, including theology very seriously and never saw some kind of disjunct between believing in God and being a Christian and being intelligent. So I would say it’s a shame that that idea has come into public circulation in recent years, but there’s really no warrant for it historically certainly.

Ann (00:03:06):

That’s so fascinating. And you’re saying it was just a couple hundred years ago that there was a movement. What happened? What was the movement?

Justin (00:03:14):

Well, I suppose it’s really even more recent than that I would say. It’s really in the 20th century that this idea came into public consciousness that to be a Christian meant you had to sort of throw away your intelligence in your brain, and sadly, I think it partly came because some people felt that some parts of the church, some parts of Christianity were sort of anti-scientific or anti rational in some respects. The reality is that there’s always been a mixed bag when it comes to Christians as I said. There are some who are more or less open to science and reason and that kind of thing. But as I’ve said, the reality is there have always been incredibly intelligent Christians in all areas of academia, science, arts, literature and so on. I mean, there’s very little in fact that exists in our culture historically that Christians haven’t had a hand in producing, whether it be the sciences, the universities, the healthcare system, the education system, great works of art and literature. They all have the stamp of Christ, the Bible and Christianity on them. So you only really have to point some of these skeptics towards the history of Christianity to show that there’s very little reason to say that Christians are unintelligent or whatever. The opposite is true. Some of the brightest people down the ages have been very happy to call themselves and act out their Christian faith.

Ann (00:04:47):

As we share stories of God’s faithfulness, remember that your generosity helps make this possible, and when you give to FamilyLife, your partnership helps more homes experience hope and joy in Jesus. So visit FamilyLifeToday.com or call 800-FL-TODAY to join us and make an impact. Okay.

Dave:

We really want you to give.

Ann:

Let’s get back to the conversation.

Dave (00:05:13):

We really need you to give.

Now is your journey to faith a long one? I mean, give us a little history. Was it a thinking journey, a feeling journey, all the above?

Ann (00:05:28):

That’s a good question because your book is called Why I’m Still a Christian: After Two Decades of Conversations with Skeptics and Atheists–The Reason I Believe. So take us back to the beginning.

Justin (00:05:40):

Well, for me it’s definitely been both a feeling and thinking journey. I suppose I was raised in a church stream that was more on the feeling end, if you like. It was into sort of an experiential form of Christianity. So I was raised sort of expecting to feel God move and to see God in the lives of people in a very direct experiential way, which I’m very grateful for because I do believe obviously that God acts in those ways and that we can have genuine experiences, emotional, spiritual experiences of God. So my own conversion at around the age of 15, having always been brought up in the faith and gone to church with my parents, but it really became my own around the age of 15 when I had an encounter with God. It was as I’m sure is the case for many people who were brought up in church, it was through the ministry of a wise youth pastor.

(00:06:29):

It was specifically on a weekend away for our youth that I just really sensed that God was there for me. And from that moment on, the lights kind of came on and I was just absolutely invested in this search for God in praying, in trying to understand the Bible, and wanting to live my life for Christ. So that was the beginning for me. I’d say it was a very much a sort of wham bam moment actually in my case. You talk to my wife; she’s got a very different story of just a dawning growing interfaith over a period of many years. She could never put a specific date on it, whereas I would say I do have one of those moments where things came alive for me. But having had that, if you like, experience that spiritual emotional experience, I did find my intellect having to sort of catch up in the years thereafter because I became a very devout Christian.

(00:07:28):

But as soon as I went to university especially, and I went to Oxford University, so it’s a place where there’s a strong Christian presence, but there’s also a lot of skepticism, a lot of atheists around. I soon had my beliefs questioned and raked over and encountered a lot of objections to Christianity, and that was really when I had to really do the hardest work of starting to look into the intellectual arguments for faith. And to my, not surprise, but at least to my great pleasure, I found that actually as well as being something you can experience with your heart, Christianity is also made for the mind that there are brilliant Christian thinkers who have answered all of the objections that people have leveled over the years. And so I was able to discover wonderful thinkers like GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and many others who obviously are known for the way in which they’ve enabled Christians to think rationally and to defend their faith from an intellectual position. So that was the journey for me, an experience that then my intellectual side had to catch up with as well.

Dave (00:08:32):

I mean, do you find that as you talk to a lot of people, I mean you have the show where you really debate and have conversations with skeptics and atheists. Is your journey pretty common? Because my journey mimics yours. I didn’t go to Oxford. I went to the Oxford of the United States called Ball State University. I’m kidding. But I had an encounter with Christ in college, even though I grew up in church, I had an encounter. I start getting involved in ministry and then Ann and I commit as we get married to go into full-time vocational Christian ministry. Now I’m on another college campus basically going to the campus every day sharing the gospel and sharing Jesus. I come home one day—I don’t think we were married five, six months—and I’m like, “What have we done with our lives? How do we know this is even true?” I mean, I was at a crisis of faith, and I remember Ann looked at me and said, “You better figure this out for the both of us.”

Ann (00:09:34):

Well, Justin, here we are in full-time vocational ministry, we have Bible studies going on. We are pouring into these students at the University of Nebraska, and when I walk in the door, he has his Bible on his lap. He goes, “How do we even know it’s true? Maybe this is just all a hoax and a lie, and what if it’s all like a joke and we’re giving our lives to this?” And that’s why I was like, “Oh boy,” because I didn’t need that. But that’s why I told Dave, “You’d better study and find out.” And it was great, and I needed it too just to know why do I believe? What does that mean? How do I defend my faith?

Justin (00:10:14):

I would say your story is not uncommon in that sense, Dave, because I’ve met so many Christians for whom certainly like me, like you, they’ve kind of gone on that more intellectual journey, maybe even years into the beginnings of their Christian walk. And it might be a particular set of circumstances that lead to that. It might be suddenly being exposed to difficult arguments and objections. It may be being around a new crowd, moving city, whatever it is. For many young Christians, it’s simply leaving the family home and the Christian bubble, if you will, sometimes and being exposed to a more sort of secular questioning kind of environment at university or work situations. So yeah, I’ve met many people for whom that’s been the case. The good news is that the most frequent thing I find is that Christians who are on that journey find that there are good answers to the kinds of questions they’re asking.

(00:11:10):

Now, having said that, I think a lot of Christians have to come to terms with some of the difficulties that they will inevitably find in scripture or perhaps in what they’ve been taught about science and faith. And there may be a kind of difficult, often uncomfortable period where they’re wrestling with these things and having to put the pieces together and even having to question some of the assumptions they were maybe raised with or taught with in order to accommodate new information. So it’s not necessary an easy journey by any means, but as I say, the majority of cases I find people manage it, people do it and actually come out with much stronger faith actually in the end than what they had.

On the converse though, I do find people, and especially in those conversations I’ve had over the years with atheists and Christians on my shows, many people who actually kind of do the opposite. They haven’t had the experience but their approach in Christianity kind of at a more intellectual level, it’s the intellectual questions that are starting to open up the possibility that there might be a God, starting to open up the possibility that there may be a need for Christianity to make sense of life.

(00:12:17):

And that’s interesting because it goes to show that not everyone sort of has the experience followed by the intellectual kind of search. Sometimes the intellectual search absolutely precedes the experience, and that would be the case of someone I’ve mentioned, CS Lewis, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th century for whom he went on a long intellectual search as an atheist before becoming a Christian. And it was really at one level it was his intellectual eyes being opened to the truth of Christianity that brought him to faith. And later there were experiences that helped to confirm that, but it was really an intellectual journey first and foremost. So it does depend on the person and not everyone’s going to have the same journey.

Dave (00:13:03):

Yeah, I mean for my journey way back—I mean this is 40 some years ago—Mere Christianity was pivotal. Reading his journey and his thinking was very helpful. And I wouldn’t have said this at the time, but I had an experience and it was real. I mean, I had real faith. And then several years later, I’m sort of piecing together the intellectual side of what I believe, and today what I experienced could be called maybe, maybe not, deconstruction. I’d love your thoughts on that because in some ways I deconstructed and rebuilt from the ground up and it ended up in a very good way. And often you hear that word and you’re like, “Oh, that’s a bad, bad thing. People are going to walk away,” and that can happen, but sometimes it’s like it’s healthy.

Ann (00:13:51):

Well, it’s what Justin said, some people get stronger.

Dave (00:13:54):

Yeah.

Justin (00:13:54):

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I’ve included a whole chapter in this book on the concept of deconstruction because it’s been something of a buzzword over the last five to 10 years, hasn’t it? And I’ve met in the course of my career hosting these conversations between Christians and non-Christians, many people who are somewhere on that journey of deconstruction, people who are perhaps questioning the faith they were raised with or have rejected it entirely in some instances. And I suppose like you I think there are perhaps two different types of deconstruction. There’s a healthy one and there’s maybe a more unhealthy one. I think the healthy one is where we go on a critical sort of inquisitive, curious sort of journey, looking perhaps at some of the assumptions we’ve had but never merely questioned growing up and that sort of thing. And that can actually be a very healthy thing, I think, because actually I don’t think we are always meant to remain the same Christian that we were perhaps when we were growing up or in our early adult years. We all naturally go on journeys where our story changes over time.

(00:14:58):

But that can be a good thing. I’ve often seen that deconstruction and then reconstruction is almost being like the way in which a caterpillar turns from a caterpillar to a butterfly. It looks like everything’s gone wrong, it’s been bound up in a cocoon, but actually that process is actually creating something more beautiful and stronger that will come out the other side. And for me, I’ve met many people who have certainly gone through a difficult testing time with looking at their faith, you could call it deconstruction, but who have been able to build something much stronger and actually deeper as a result of it. I would include myself on that. There have been lots of occasions over the last 20 years when I’ve met objections and difficulties that have really made me scratch my head and even given me some sleepless nights. But actually I found on the other side of it, even though I don’t tend to have the answers to all of these questions, I’ve realized just how compelling and deep and rich Christianity is at its core, even while mysteries often remain.

(00:15:59):

So I do think there is a healthy form of deconstruction and it’s the kind of deconstruction which takes things apart but seeks to put them back together again in a stronger, healthier way. The type of deconstruction that perhaps is less helpful is the one that pulls things apart but just leaves the pieces scattered on the floor and doesn’t attempt to rebuild something because I think that is where you are sort of willing to perhaps question everything but not open to reinvestigating and putting the pieces back together. And it’s always sad when I come across stories of Christians who have perhaps because of poor teaching when they were growing up, a very one-sided view of certain theological issues have sort of decided well once that, if you like, that card has been taken out of the bottom of my stack of cards, it feels like the whole thing collapses and I can’t possibly put it back together again.

(00:16:50):

And I just wish sometimes that that person had a different starting point where perhaps they hadn’t been told that this one issue your faith stands or falls on, but they’d realized there’s a variety of ways in which Christians have understood that particular doctrine or issue. But there are some foundational things and those are expressed in something like the Apostles’ Creed. Obviously, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, the hope of salvation and resurrection for all people. These are, if you like, the core things. Okay, there’s a lot else that we can agree to disagree on actually as Christians, but sometimes I meet too many Christians whose faith is deconstructed because they were sort of inculcated into a faith where if it’s not my very specific interpretation of say the first chapters of Genesis or a very specific interpretation of the book of Revelation or something else, suddenly their faith is so fragile in a sense that it can’t stand the questioning or the objections that inevitably come. So for me, it’s about building on a firm foundation, and I believe it is always possible with that firm foundation to rebuild that faith into something stronger and deeper than before.

Dave (00:18:04):

Now, what would you say to your dad, to parents, and we’ve talked to many and we have a lot of parents listening to FamilyLife Today, and we’ve all tried to raise our sons and daughters into faith and do everything we can as parents to set them on a course to be Christ followers their whole life, and now they’re a teenager or maybe an adult, young man or woman, and they’re starting to, in our minds, we think deconstruct and walk away.

Ann (00:18:33):

And our fear is that they’ll leave all the pieces on the floor.

Dave (00:18:36):

Yeah, so talk to the parent who’s watching that, and it may be healthy, may not, we don’t know yet, we’re just watching, but it feels like they’re abandoning everything we’ve spent our lives, we’ve been on our knees praying to God that they would be men and women as adults walking, and now we’re wondering what’s happened. How does a parent respond?

Justin (00:18:55):

It’s such a difficult question and so much of it is so dependent on the children who are always different. I’ve got four kids, they’re all incredibly different to each other. They’ve all got their own very different ways of approaching faith, and the approach I take with one may not be the same as another because they experience things in a different way. I was saying before we came on air that my oldest son, Noah, has just got married this past weekend and he has a very experiential kind of approach to faith, very different to our 14-year-old Jeremy, who is much more of a sort of has to question everything and turn everything over intellectually. So I know that their journeys are going to be different, and so the way in which I approach and engage faith issues with them will likewise be different.

(00:19:50):

But what I would say is one of the mistakes I think parents sometimes make from an early point is sort of shielding their children almost from any kind of objections or questions around faith and even perhaps when they themselves raise questions, sort of pushing those down as though we shouldn’t really be questioning our faith. I think that’s a huge mistake because it won’t take long before inevitably that child does grow up and does inevitably encounter those kinds of things. The best thing that can happen I think, for a child is to have talked about those issues around the family table with their parents, with others perhaps who are helpful guides and mentors in this area at an age when they actually have access to Christians who want to help them on that journey. Once they’re as it were grown up and in the adult world, then they’re not necessarily going to immediately find those kinds of people around them. They may not have that opportunity. So whenever we have in our family, we practice very much if we’re together, if we’re having a conversation and it turns to issues around faith, Christianity, I want to hear, “Hey, what are your friends at school saying about faith?”

(00:20:52):

Why did your friends say they don’t believe in God? Tell me, let’s have a conversation about it and let’s absolutely get it out on the table and be very honest about the fact that we live in a secular, very often post-Christian culture and they’re going to be hearing these things inevitably as they grow up. Don’t try and shield them from it but do your best to do what 1 Peter 3:15 says, which is “Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the reason for the hope that you have” and that includes your children. So just I would say don’t try and shield them. Have those conversations as early as possible. Not that you’ll have all the answers either, but I think there’s a really good example you can set of being open to questions and saying, “I want to explore and I want to.” That alone, I think for a child, for a young person can make them realize, “Okay, it’s not wrong to question or to have doubts,” and hopefully we’ll produce something positive when it comes to how they engage those doubts and questions when they do inevitably encounter them. In the end as I say, there’s no magic formula though, and one of the best things you can do is still to continue to pray every day for your children as I do because they’re so different and we can’t control everything about them and the way they encounter faith.

Ann (00:22:10):

Well, even what you do, Justin would be a great springboard into great conversations with your kids about this. Tell our audience who maybe our listeners who don’t know what you do, tell them about your show. We’ve referred to it several times.

Justin (00:22:24):

Yeah. Well, over the years I’ve hosted a show called Unbelievable. I actually finished hosting the show actually just about two years ago, but for the best part of 20 years, I hosted conversations between Christians and non-Christians. And that’s really where the core of this new book comes from, Why I’m Still a Christian, because I sort of deliberately exposed myself to the best arguments from atheists, agnostics, people of other faiths, but also trying to bring on the best Christian representatives, opposite them and host and moderate these conversations. As I say, for about 17 and a half years, I hosted this show Unbelievable. And it was just a wonderful experience, a learning opportunity for me to be able to see these arguments being debated and discussed in real time and in the process sort of working out what I believe and how I would encounter and engage these various conversations and arguments.

(00:23:18):

And obviously it grew over that time. It began just as a radio show in the UK. We were early adopters of podcasting, however, and that was interesting because at that point a lot of non-Christian listeners started to listen to these conversations. And so I suddenly found myself with an audience, not just of Christians who wanted to hear these conversations, but atheist, agnostics, people of other faiths who were also tuning in via podcast. Eventually, like so many we also went onto YouTube, and we did public events and all kinds of things. But what I experienced in the process is that it’s okay to open up Christianity to question. It can sometimes be a disconcerting thing to do. It can feel uncomfortable sometimes. And I won’t deny, when we first featured this on a Christian radio station in the UK back in the day, there were a number of listeners who said, “Why do we have to have atheists coming on our Christian radio station?”

(00:24:14):

“There’s enough of them on the BBC already. Do we need them here as well?” And I understood that, but at the same time, there were a lot of Christians in the UK when we started this show who also said, “This is a really good thing. It’s getting us out of our bubble. We live alongside skeptical neighbors, friends, family members. This helps me to think about how I would have this conversation with someone who doesn’t believe.” So I think it’s had an immense amount of value for the listeners, for me, lots of non-Christian listeners, atheists who started listening. I think it’s managed to bring down some of the defenses for them. It’s opened them up to the possibility that Christianity may be true. And I have a number of stories of people for whom it was part of their journey to faith. So it was an amazing sort of 17 plus years that I hosted that show for, and I continue to have these kinds of conversations in the new shows that I host.

(00:25:06):

One of them is called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. We talked about that book last time I was with you guys. And as it happens, I’m just in the process of beginning a brand-new show that is very much doing the same thing of bringing Christians and non-Christians together. We’re hoping to launch that in the new year. So it’s always been a passion of mine because I genuinely think Christianity can stand on its own two feet intellectually, and it’s actually an incredibly evangelistic missional thing to do as well, to invite non-Christians into the conversation and see what God does with it.

Ann (00:25:41):

And we’ll have those shows in the show notes, the names of those.

Dave (00:25:44):

Yeah, how you can access those. Yeah, I have a couple questions based on that. First one would be, did you ever turn off the mic or the cameras after a show and think, “Wow, they made a really good point. I am struggling.” I mean, it was very well—

Ann:

It would make you doubt.

Dave:

—made you question your faith.

Justin (00:26:03):

Yeah. So look, I’m going to be honest and say this was a recorded kind of live as it were. It wasn’t scripted. You just brought on the two best people that you hoped could make the best case in this scenario, your Christian guest and your non-Christian guest. And then whatever happened in the next hour or hour and a half happened and I did my best to moderate and make sure everyone got their chance to speak and so on. But yeah, there was some occasions when the non-Christian maybe kind of came off better than the Christian, and that was always the gamble with this show. It was real life. And the reality is that’s how conversations are in real life. It’s not like if we engage in a conversation with our non-Christian friend, we always win. We always come out shining. No, sometimes we don’t. So yeah, that was the thing about this show. It was very real in that way.

(00:26:54):

Now I think on average if you listened over weeks or months or even years to that show, any non-Christian would never have been able to come away after all of those shows saying, “Well, Christians are just airheads and delusional” because they’re exposed week after week to intelligent Christians. Now they may not have been persuaded every week, and sometimes it may even have felt like the non-Christian guest did a better job than the Christian guest. But I would say that the overall, if you like thrust was it was actually a show that really helped Christians to feel like, “No, this makes sense.” And even helped atheist actually to realize there might be something in this. But you’ve asked me personally, were there any occasions when I was left scratching my head or with doubts? Absolutely, there were, especially I think in the early years of the show, and that’s probably because I was myself confronting some of these issues for the very first time. I hadn’t really thought about them.

(00:27:48):

So I was kind of processing as my guests were doing the debating. I think in later years, because I’d kind of done almost every topic from every different direction possible, I’d kind of done a lot of the thinking and processing for myself by that point. And I was able to more swiftly kind of understand where someone’s coming from, what the likely response will be to that, help to shepherd the conversation a bit so that both sides make sure that they’re heard and so on. And so in the end, I think that was more a factor in the early years. But absolutely, yeah, there were those moments. What I always found though is whenever I had a wobble, a real kind of difficult objection that I didn’t feel I’d necessarily found the answer to, I usually found that in due course I would stumble upon something or another conversation would help to clear something up.

(00:28:41):

And I almost always found I was not the first person to encounter this, that therein lots of Christians before who’ve probably done a great job of attempting to answer these questions. So as I say, not, it’s not that everything is answered for me. There are still some things I put in the mystery, difficult to answer jar. But what I found is that at the same time, atheism, non-belief in God has just as many difficulties. And the question is when we’re comparing these two worldviews, which makes best sense of the evidence that’s available to both of us, and after having these conversations, as I say for two decades, I am still convinced that Christianity makes best sense of the evidence that’s available to all of us. And that’s kind of where I stand.

Dave (00:29:24):

Hey, you’ve watched and debated atheist skeptics for decades. So here’s my question. What advice do you give to Christ followers—again, a lot of our listeners and watchers are moms and dads and husbands and wives who are at a workplace, on a ball diamond with their other kids and maybe a conversation will start with somebody that’s an atheist or a skeptic. You’ve watched these conversations and the way that conversation goes is critical, not just answering questions with intelligence and evidence and apologetics, but actually how the conversation goes. What have you learned to coach us that are out in the real world and we don’t have PhDs and we didn’t go to Oxford, and yet we want to be able to honor our faith and our belief, and we want to have a loving conversation with somebody—

Ann (00:30:22):

A respectful one.

Dave (00:30:23):

—that goes well. You’ve watched this, you’ve done this. Coach us up. How do we have these conversations?

Justin (00:30:31):

Well, I would say that there’s going to be different approaches for different personalities, but on average I would point back to that 1 Peter 3:15 passage, which in a way was always the motto of the show, which is “Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you about the reason for the hope that you have, but do this with gentleness and respect.” And that’s exactly what you just mentioned, Ann. That wherever these conversations go, whatever form they take, we are encouraged, we’re commanded really to have them in Christ-like ways, gentleness and respect. So whether you feel like you are winning or losing an argument, let’s make sure that you don’t lose the person by acting in an arrogant, aggressive, rude way towards them, because then you probably are shutting off the possibility of continuing the conversation at a later stage.

(00:31:22):

I always want any conversation to end with the possibility of us picking this up again at some point because people are never won or lost in a single argument. It’s always a series of engagements and of course the way you act as much as the things you say that are making an impression on that skeptic or atheist or whoever it may be. So that’s absolutely critical, the grace and respect that we are commanded in 1 Peter 3:15. But then of course it is about having reasons for the hope that you have. So if you are being asked questions, then it makes sense to go and do some study if there are questions that someone’s asking you. Maybe listen to a podcast, read a book, watch the YouTube video, whatever it is that will help you to engage that. That’s assuming there’s a kind of an ongoing relationship probably with this person where they’re asking you something and maybe you don’t know.

(00:32:13):

And that’s fine. It’s okay to say, I don’t know. That’s a perfectly acceptable answer as a Christian. We’re not, as you say, we’re not all PhD apologists or anything like that. But I think the important thing is just to keep the conversation open and say, “I don’t know the answer to that, but would you mind if I go away and look into it and come back and we’ll continue this conversation?” And I think people respect that honestly. I think they often respect that more than you kind of pretending to know things you don’t necessarily know because that’s where you can really come unstuck if you’re trying to make out more than you actually do. So be humble but be open. Try to encourage those conversations to continue. And the other thing I would say is there’s always temptation when we are speaking as a Christian perhaps really hoping to convince and persuade the person opposite us of our faith.

(00:33:03):

There’s a temptation sometimes to not listen to what they’re saying, just to be there to kind of put your point across and make sure you ram your particular message home. And again, I think that can be actually quite off-putting to the person on the receiving end of that if they feel like they’re just there as a sort of project or a—I think the best kinds of conversations tend to be ones where you’re genuinely listening and taking in what that person’s saying, hearing what they have to say, being open to taking that on board and changing the way you would respond to them. And that’s why I would say one of the most important things you can do in a conversation is not just to answer somebody’s questions, but to ask your own questions of them, ask them why they believe what they believe, how did they come to those conclusions growing up? Is there a purpose to life? You may have a view on that. Ask them what they think the purpose of life is. You might find you’re having a whole different conversation, in fact, which kind of opens up things maybe that person hasn’t actually thought of before. And so I think it’s always going to be two way; that best conversations are in both directions where they may be asking important questions about your faith, but you kind of get to ask questions about their worldview as well. And that’s just as important in that way.

Dave (00:34:14):

Yeah, I’ve always found it interesting as you quoted 1 Peter, that he says to be ready to give a defense to everyone.

(00:34:23):

That’s a person. It’s not every argument or every pushback. It’s a person that you’re talking to show gentleness and respect. And it’s just what you just said. I’ll never forget early, I was a church planner 30 some years ago, and we started this church and it started growing. And I don’t remember maybe the first year, second year in, we were doing something on the weekend on apologetics and defending your faith. And I make a comment in the first of probably three sermons, I’m going to give this same sermon three or four times today. I make a comment about another religion and say, “Can you believe those people believe this?” and then I go on. This guy comes up to me in between services, and he wasn’t on our staff, but he was very involved in our church. Young guy, he’s probably 20 something and he goes, “Hey, my mom is in that religion that you said, “Can you believe they think this?” And she’s coming to church next week. Do you understand how that comment is going to make her feel? And I looked at him and I said, “Now I do. Oh my goodness, I am so sorry. That was so disrespectful.”

Ann (00:35:32):

And arrogant.

Dave (00:35:32):

So arrogant, so prideful. We are so much better thinkers than these ridiculous people. And I was like, “Thank you for that comment. It was just so wrong.” It changed the way I approach preaching and like you said, having a conversation with anybody that thinks differently than me, humbly love them and respect them and draw them out, like you said with questions that say, “Tell me more” and you’ll win their respect.

Justin (00:36:00):

And this was one of the things I found over the years of hosting these conversations with atheists and Christians was yes, it was often encouraging for Christians to hear the faith kind of being defended against a significant atheist voice, but actually I also made friends with a lot of atheists and agnostics in that time, both those who came on the show and people who were regular listeners via the podcast. And the reason they became friends was because they felt they were being genuinely, as I say, listened to, respected in the conversations. They weren’t being sort of just straw men were being erected to be knocked down. The best—I was trying to find their best spokespeople to come on and have these conversations. And so it led to, as I say, a lot of barriers actually breaking down because I think sometimes some of those skeptics had been only exposed to Christians or apologists or evangelists who had sort of been very dismissive of atheism or whatever, but taking it seriously and taking their questions seriously, I think enabled them to take Christianity seriously interestingly, enabled them to say, “Well, if he’s done us the service of taking our point of view seriously, I’m going to give him the time of day as well.”

(00:37:09):

And that led, as I say, to some really constructive relationships and much healthier conversations.

Dave (00:37:14):

Yeah, it’s hard to like the message if you don’t like the messenger.

Ann (00:37:17):

Yes.

Justin (00:37:17):

Yeah, exactly. And that’s not to say we didn’t have very robust disagreements. I’m not saying you have to kind of pedal your faith lightly or anything like that, but I think it’s about an atmosphere of respect for the people. Even if you disagree with their views or disagree with their, it’s about making sure that they know that you are engaging their arguments rather than them or their character. Let’s be respectful of that people are genuinely trying to search for the truth even if we disagree with their conclusions. And that can often be a good step towards a better conversation.

Ann (00:37:58):

Well, Justin, the thing that I remember about you, you were in studio with us the last time with your son who you were in the States, and one of the things I remember about both of you was that fact that you’re very interested in all of us, incredibly humble, kind and genuinely asking questions, and there’s an openness when you find that kind of respect. And you honored everybody that was with you and your son did as well. The one that just got married, Noah, he was the one with you, right?

Justin (00:38:33):

He was, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it was a great trip. Yeah, it was great fun.

Ann (00:38:36):

And I could tell by your son what kind of dad you were in terms of when you’re at the dinner table, you weren’t talking about other people, their religion, their race as being, “Can you believe they would”— kind of that same thing.

Dave (00:38:49):

Sort of like me in other words. That’s what she’s saying.

Ann (00:38:51):

No, you didn’t do that with our kids. You were never like that.

Dave (00:38:54):

I only did that with strangers. That’s great.

Ann (00:38:56):

But I think we as parents set the tone to how our kids are going to interact with people of other beliefs or other thoughts. And I think it’s really important, as you said, to listen to their story, to be respectful, to be kind, because if we’re sitting at our tables downgrading and belittling people—which Jesus never did that. He was always willing to listen to the story, and there’s always a story behind the story. And so that’s one of the things that really marked me about you. I’m watching you and your son thinking “These guys are just cool.” Anybody would probably open their lives and their hearts to having a genuine conversation based on your respectfulness of each other. But I think—I mean I’m probably more judgmental than Dave is in terms of people that are like, “What are they thinking? How dumb can they be?”

Dave (00:39:48):

I don’t know. I’m pretty judgmental too. We’re both up there.

Ann (00:39:51):

But we set the tone in our homes.

Justin (00:39:53):

Yeah, absolutely.

Ann (00:39:53):

And I think that’s important.

Justin (00:39:55):

I think you’re absolutely right and I’m very glad to hear that that was the impression that we gave. I’m not saying we’ve always been the best role models by any stretch with our kids, but we have genuinely tried, I guess, to model hopefully that grace and respect that 1 Peter 3:15 talks about, gentleness and respect. And as I say, I think that also comes across to the people that you’re also talking to in the end as well, whether or not you convince them. I think for me it’s about making sure that you don’t close the door as I said to that conversation. There’s a well-worn sort of phrase that goes you can win an argument and lose a person. And I think that’s true. I think that’s what 1 Peter 3:15 is trying to say to you. It’s like, yes, there are occasions when as a Christian apologist or evangelist, you could sort of “demolish” the other person intellectually maybe. But if you’ve done that in such a sort of aggressive, demeaning, ridiculing way that they wouldn’t want what you are offering anyway, if that’s the kind of person you are, then I think, yeah, that’s where you’ve lost it. You’ve lost the person even if you’ve won the argument. And we are ultimately about winning people, not winning arguments. That’s what we’re called to do.

Ann:

That’s good.

Dave (00:41:17):

Well, I loved how you framed your thinking in this book about Why I’m Still a Christian. God makes sense of, and you have different areas. We can walk through some of them, but when you think of, okay, God makes the best sense of these different areas, pick anyone you want. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a top three or five, but I mean you open up with human existence. Walk us through.

Justin (00:41:44):

Well, I mean I very often if I’m being asked to present some of the core reasons for why I think it makes sense to believe in God specifically, I’ll point to three things, and these are three of the chapters in the book. The first one is human existence, as you said. The second one is human value, and the third one is human purpose. So any good preacher three points each beginning with the same thing.

Dave (00:42:07):

And they all start with the letter H. I like it.

Justin (00:42:09):

Exactly.

Dave:

Literation.

Justin:

So human existence, human value and human purpose. These are three aspects of our experience that I believe point to God and point away from atheism, the idea that there’s no God. And as I said at the beginning, it’s not that I have to kind of prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity is true to my skeptical friends and neighbors. It’s more that we are comparing and contrasting the things we both believe. Okay, so if I’m speaking to an atheist who doesn’t believe there’s a God, who believes, if you like, that this universe runs according to purely mechanical material processes, that there’s nothing more going on beyond that. I guess what I’m saying is well, if you take that view that we call naturalism, atheism, whatever, and we compare it to the view that there is a God behind the universe, there is a sort of a divine mind from which all of this brings, whose view is best supported by the evidence that’s actually available to all of us.

(00:43:08):

And so what I find in doing this is that the evidence seems to better fit the Christian view that there is a God than the atheist view, that it’s all just blind processes and material stuff that’s happening. And so the first place is human existence. The fact we are here at all seems to me to comport much better with the idea that there’s a divine mind behind the universe than that there’s nothing there; that we are here by the results of blind chance essentially. And I could point to a number of different things here, but one of the things I talk at some length in this chapter is that actually the very thing that’s often been used to beat Christians with science is actually one of the things that is I think most extraordinarily pointing towards the idea of a God, a divine mind behind the universe.

(00:43:55):

Because when you look at what it took just at a scientific level for humans to exist, it seems to me that it’s very hard to continue to believe that we are here by the result of pure chance. So there’s this phenomenon called the fine tuning of the universe for life. If you’re not familiar with that, I’ll try to explain it very briefly, but it’s the idea that when the universe came into existence, which is itself a rather remarkable fact, it was birthed with exactly the right values and parameters of the laws such as the force of gravity, the ratio of electrons to protons in the universe. There’s about 30 or 40 of these fundamental numbers basically that had to be dialed to just the right number, if you will, to allow chemistry, planets, galaxy, stars, and ultimately humans to exist at some point in this cosmos.

(00:44:51):

And if any of one of those, if you like numbers had differed from its actual value by an infinitesimally small degree, then we wouldn’t have life. We would have a universe that is completely inhospitable to the possibility of you and me. So the very fact we are here and that the universe appears to have been set up so incredibly precisely to allow life to appear, it looks like something’s going on. That does not appear to confirm the atheist view that we are here by chance. It seems much more likely that there’s some kind of a designer involved basically. And so we go in the book, I go through obviously some of the objections and responses to this view, but it is fascinating that the more we know about the universe rather than kind of excluding God, it appears that it’s actually raising the God question much more.

(00:45:43):

So I’ve met so many secular scientists who have said, this is the one thing that gives me pause, that maybe there’s more going on in our universe than just blind physics and chemistry because the chemistry itself depends on this incredible fine tuning at the beginning of it all. So this is just one area where I think there’s a fascinating sort of, and for some of my friends, this is a great way in to talking about God. They love talking about mathematics and science and the physics of the universe. For other people, it’ll leave them completely cold, obviously, and this may not be the place to begin. But for a lot of people I know this is the question, this is the tantalizing thing that opens up the God question.

Dave (00:46:26):

I can remember doing several sermons on this in the last 10 years about the science side of why I believe this makes sense just like you.

Ann (00:46:35):

I remember it because even if you say, if the sun were just a little bit closer, a little further from the earth, we would either be burning up or freezing.

Dave (00:46:44):

You adjust any one of those dials and you know better than I do. But here’s what I found fascinating. I walk off the stage and guess who runs up and really wants to talk and not debate me but hear more. They want to learn more. Guess.

Justin (00:46:59):

Yeah. It’s the young people.

Dave (00:47:01):

It’s the younger generation. The older are like, okay, good. Thank you very much. I’m going home. And the 15- and 18- and 20- and 25-year-olds are like, “This is fascinating. Can we discuss more? I have never heard this.”

Justin (00:47:13):

I get exactly the same reaction, Dave, when I do this in schools or youth settings. They love this and they love because it feels like, oh, this relates to what they’re actually learning in school. It’s like suddenly God and Christianity isn’t this separate thing that’s sort of somehow excluded from science and things. It’s like it’s involved. I mean, I have a particular video that’s had a couple of million views now over the years, and it’s called How a Dice Can Show that God exists. And I use the analogy of throwing a dice, and what are the odds, if you like, of throwing 70 sixes in a row? Well, it turns out it’s something like one in 10 to the 60. Okay? A hugely improbable thing to throw six 70 times in a row. And I liken this to the odds of the expansion rate of the universe, one of these cosmological dials, if you like, being just right for the emergence of life. And I say basically the odds are the same. If it differed from its actual value by one part in 10 to the 60, then we wouldn’t have life. Now, that short video is about four minutes long. Whenever I play it in a kind of public presentation, that’s the thing that the young people come after and say, “Where can I get that video? I want to show that to my friend” just for whatever reason. It really, for some people, it’s the thing that kind of turns them onto the whole thing.

Ann (00:48:34):

Well, if I was a mom, I would want to link to that video, which we’ll put in our show notes, and I would play that at the dinner table and then have a discussion.

Justin (00:48:43):

Yeah, absolutely.

Ann (00:48:44):

You could do this on each of your chapters of say, okay, here’s the topic. Maybe you don’t do it every night, but once a week, here’s the topic for the night. And if you have teenagers or even elementary school kids, they’re going to engage in this and it’s going to give them some tools to put in their pocket to defend their faith. I think it’s a fascinating discussion, and what you talk about and write about is fascinating.

Dave (00:49:06):

Alright, let’s talk the second H, human value.

Justin (00:49:09):

Okay, human value. I mean, this goes from looking out there in the universe to looking within, and it’s more about why do we believe in things like human rights? Why do we believe in the equality and dignity and value every single person? And so it’s a question about essentially morality. Why do we believe that there are some right ways to treat other human beings and some wrong ways to treat other human beings? Now, my atheist friend may say, well, just, it helps us to get along in a society. It’s just the way our culture has evolved or whatever. The problem is that isn’t always the way cultures have evolved. There have been lots of cultures in the past where people could be slaves, where women were very much second-class citizens to men, where the lives of children were cheap and dispensable. The fact is this idea of human rights, equality, value, dignity, that is so commonplace now in Western culture, it came from somewhere, and it’s very hard to understand that very concept of value, dignity, and morality without there being a God. Now, this is a bit more of a philosophical argument, so to some extent, whether this is helpful for someone will depend a little bit on their temperament, but for me, it is a very powerful argument. In fact, coming back to our friend CS Lewis, this is the argument that really convinced him that God existed, that moved him from atheism to believing in God. It’s sometimes called—

Dave (00:50:43):

Moral law/moral lawgiver.

Justin (00:50:45):

Yeah, the argument from morality. He said famously in Mere Christianity, one of my arguments against God was that the universe was so unjust, but he said, where had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. He said, what you’re saying is if you believe in right and wrong, justice and injustice, you can’t have those concepts in a universe without God. All you’ve got in a universe without God is just whatever happens, whatever nature throws up. And so if that happens to be a culture where some people are slaves and where women are second class citizens, and that’s just the way it is. There’s no moral law. There just is whatever nature produces. But most of us don’t feel like that. And CS Lewis didn’t feel like that. He felt, no, there really are right and wrong ways.

(00:51:35):

We should treat each other. That’s something we’ve discovered. It’s not something we’ve invented. It’s sort of baked in. And if you believe that, if you believe there are really right and wrong ways to treat each other, that human rights exist in reality, they’re not just something we’ve invented, then you should believe in God. And the reason for that is because this realm, if you like, of moral laws cannot exist in a universe that is actually just composed of atoms and electrons. If atoms and electrons is all that exists, then morality is just whatever we happen to have cooked up in our brains, and it’s just another result of atoms and electrons. There’s no right or wrong, could have gone a very different way, and it has in previous cultures and in cultures today, let’s be honest. But if you believe there are such things as right and wrong, that some cultures who enslave treat women badly and everything else are wrong to do that, then you have to appeal to something outside of nature. You have to appeal to a moral law that exists beyond the atoms and electrons of nature. And that means there has to be a law giver, something beyond nature, a super nature. And my best explanation for that is that there’s a God who is, if you like, baked into reality this moral law that we are all subject to. So for me, this is the one where it’s almost an argument that you—very often, this argument only really strikes atheists and skeptics when they’re actually confronted with real moral evil. That’s been my experience.

(00:53:12):

I think very often a lot of the skeptics I’ve met are kind of happy to say, well, no, but it’s all just ultimately evolution and psychology and social engineering or whatever. But when their daughter gets raped, I know that’s an awful example to use, but let’s be honest, this happens in the world. They suddenly come face to face with the fact that they cannot treat that as just the way the world is, the way nature is. They’d know that something wrong has happened

Ann (00:53:48):

That is wrong. They would say that.

Justin (00:53:49):

And their sense of injustice and anger, and it’s coming from a place where they recognize this is not the way the world should be. If you don’t think the world should be this way, that means there’s the way the world should be, and that means there’s a God behind it who’s saying, who’s kind of embedded a moral law, which when we come up against it, we know that there’s something deeper here, that there’s something more than just chemistry going on. So for me, that’s something that is both a philosophical argument, but also something I think people often encounter at an experiential level as well.

Dave (00:54:30):

Now, how do you respond to the pushback to that which might go something like, well, the law giver is the same one who endorsed slavery in the Bible and endorsed the devalue of women in the Bible. It’s in your book, that kind of pushback.

Justin (00:54:49):

Yeah, no, I totally get that. Well, the first thing I would say is one of the things to recognize is kind of when someone’s switching the subject, okay? Because at that point, you don’t have to, in a sense, be a Christian and believe in the Bible necessarily to believe in God. Okay? You could sort of never heard of the Bible or have big problems with the Bible. You could still believe there’s a moral law, and that only makes sense if there’s a God and CS Lewis, again, famously when he became a Christian, it was a two-stage process. He first of all became a theist. He just believed in God, but he didn’t necessarily believe in the God of the Bible. So in a sense, you don’t necessarily, this argument still works I’m saying regardless of those questions about the morality of the Old Testament. But what I would say is it’s important to also address that if it comes up, and I would say when it comes to the Old Testament, we have to be very careful about the way we understand it.

(00:55:51):

And that’s going to be a longer conversation with our friend about saying, well, there’s a lot of things that are difficult to understand in the Old Testament, but we have to understand them in context. And when it comes to slavery, for instance, we’ve got to understand that God is dealing with a culture in the ancient Near East where slavery was just a defacto part of life. And so although he never explicitly condemns it, nevertheless, what you find in the Old Testament is God putting things in place that actually regulate slavery. And it’s almost as though he’s moving people along at the pace that they can handle if you like, in a culture. What you get to and I think what’s important is to show the arc through the Old and New Testament and to show that what we end up with in the New Testament, again, it’s not an explicit denunciation of slavery, but it is a point at which Paul says in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew or Greek, slave or free.

(00:56:47):

There’s a sense in which everyone is equal in the eyes of God and under Christ. And that is absolutely, it’s important to point out to people that is completely radical in the culture that Paul was in. Where again, slavery was just an absolutely assumed part of life. The idea that masters and slaves were on equal footing in the eyes of Christ was unheard of in that age. And so it’s important just to help people to realize there’s something going on, there’s a trajectory, if you will. And then to perhaps point out that when it came to the abolition of slavery, both in the sort of early Middle Ages when it was effectively disestablished in Europe, that came from Christians who pushed for that. And when it comes to the transatlantic slave trade, that great scar on Christian civilization, it was also Christians who led the abolition movement, and they did it because of what they saw in the Bible about the fact that we are all made in God’s image and that there was this trajectory away from slavery.

(00:57:42):

Now these are complex issues, so these are not the kinds of things you’re necessarily going to sort of get to the bottom of in a single sitting. But why I would want to kind of help people to understand is that you can have your objections and important questions about the Bible but be prepared to meet it on its own terms, be prepared to really wrestle with it and try to understand it in its context. If you’re going to kind of reject God or Christianity on the basis of something you’ve read in the Bible, well make sure you understand what you’ve read and be open to perhaps changing your mind once you encounter new information about it.

Dave (00:58:20):

That’s great. Hey, before we wrap up today, I just want to say thanks for listening, watching and sharing FamilyLife Today. And an extra big thanks to those of you who support us financially. Your support helps bring hope to families worldwide and we honestly couldn’t do it without you. If you want to team up with us to help support this ministry, we’d be honored to have you in our corner. Just visit FamilyLifeToday.com or call one 800-FL-TODAY to give. Okay, let’s wrap up this conversation.

Hey, one more. I feel like we’re coaching up moms and dads.

Ann (00:59:01):

I know, I do too. This is so good.

Dave (00:59:03):

God makes sense of human purpose.

Justin (00:59:06):

Yeah, I guess this is the why question, what are we here for? And I think most people ask themselves that at some point in their life, and again, when I compare naturalism, atheism to the Christian story, it delivers two very different answers to that question. Because on a purely atheistic view of life, there is no purpose actually to us or life or the universe. In fact, if you like, on a purely kind of scientistic naturalistic view, the universe is heading for a kind of extinction basically. In trillions of years time, we won’t exist, the earth won’t exist, the sun will have swallowed it up. Eventually the whole of the universe will just be one sterile void in what’s called the heat death of the universe. That’s kind of what we’re headed for. And at that point, you’ve got to ask, well, what was any of it about?

(00:59:56):

Everything’s going to be extinguished. There’ll be no hopes, fears, longings, whatever. And most of us feel like, no, I think life is about something. There must be some kind of purpose to this. It can’t just be a sort of, I don’t know, just a big joke that we are here, then we are gone and then it’s all over. So for me, I think the Christian view is that there is a purpose to life and that when people ask that question, which they ask across every space and time and culture, there’s an answer to it. And I think there’s a deep longing actually for there to be more. And again, it would be a very strange if actually that the answer to that longing was just, I’m afraid not. There is nothing. It is lights out and the end of the universe.

Ann (01:00:48):

Did you ever ask that question, Justin? Why am I here?

Justin (01:00:51):

I did. Yeah, I’ve asked that question. I think everybody has asked that question of themself at some level.

Ann (01:00:57):

Me too.

Justin (01:00:59):

But I’ve never as much as that question as a Christian that’s often been asked in a kind of help me make sense of this God, this life because it’s not looking the way I planned it or whatever. At the same time, I’ve never been able to reconcile myself to the atheist answer, which is there is no purpose. It’s essentially down to luck, chance. And I find it far more fulfilling to believe in the Christian story that actually whoever you are, even if you were born into a part of the world where you fell on the most difficult, you had the most hardest kind of life, that God’s justice will one day answer that. There’ll be some way in which God makes all things new. And it wasn’t just dumb luck or whatever, it’s actually that God’s going to put everything right again. Now, my atheist friend may say to me, well, that’s just wishful thinking, Justin, but I don’t think it is. It’s something that makes sense of the difficulty of life and often how unfair life is.

Ann (01:02:10):

I was just going to say I was in the second grade when I asked that question. I can remember where I was.

Dave (01:02:15):

I was 20 years old when I asked that question. That shows the difference between us.

Ann (01:02:20):

No, it’s because I had gone through sexual abuse and I remember being super sad and being in my bed thinking, what’s the point? I was eight years old. I remember thinking, “Is there a reason why I’m here?” And I remember asking God, “Are you real?” And I think people go through some hard times and they’re asking that question, why am I here? Well, is there a purpose? And I think that’s a good question. I think it’s a good question to ask our kids. If you’re asked this question, why do you think you’re here? Because everybody’s longing for the answer. And I love that you’re bringing this about to recognize like, people are asking the question and there is an answer.

Justin (01:03:03):

And what I would say really in summary with this, and thank you for sharing that experience of your own Ann, which I think those are the critical moments, aren’t they? When we are face-to-face, as we said earlier with evil and difficulty and trauma, the question is, well, is this all that life is or is there a possibility of healing and redemption? And most of us I think want to lean into the idea that there really is. And for me, the psychologists often tell us just on the secular scene, there are two things people need to live a fulfilling meaningful life. And those are love and hope. And the problem is that the atheist story doesn’t give you either of those. It’s kind of, you might get it, you might not.

Ann (01:03:49):

And it’s conditional.

Justin (01:03:50):

It’s conditional. But in the Christian story, at the very center of that story, those two things are given to you with outstretched arms. Firstly love, the idea that God himself gave himself for us on the cross to win us back, to bring us into relationship with himself. That is the most extraordinary act of love you could ever possibly think of. And that’s at the center of the Christian story.

And then hope on the other side of the cross is the resurrection. And for me that is the hope that whatever has happened in our life, whatever trauma, abuse we may have gone through, there is hope, there is resurrection, there is life, not just life after death, but life now in Christ. And for me, that’s the extraordinary thing about the story of faith, of Christianity, of God is that love and hope are given to us, not just in theory, but by a person, Jesus Christ. And for me, that is the ultimately answer to the why question, the purpose of life question. It’s not a sort of theoretical mathematical answer. It’s a person, it’s Jesus Christ. This is the purpose of your life.

Dave (01:05:02):

I mean, here’s an easy one that we can end on. It’ll probably take you 30 seconds, and you know this better than anybody. Probably the biggest pushback against Christianity and theism is the question of evil and suffering. And like you said, when it becomes personal, it’s even a greater, and we have people in our church, they just lost their daughter, 23-year-old daughter. The different things that happen in our life that bring the evil that’s out there into our family room, it’s so hard to understand how a loving, powerful God allows evil and doesn’t use his power to stop it. Again, we don’t have 25 minutes, but if you could give a short answer, and I know you write a chapter on this, what would you say, especially to the parent who’s losing hope because they’ve gone through or they’ve watched their children go through something and they just help me process this.

Ann (01:06:04):

I’m thinking of Davey Blackburn who we recently had on who was a church planner. He and his wife were planning a church. He goes to the gym to work out; he comes home to find his wife and unborn baby murdered.

Dave (01:06:17):

Oh gosh.

Ann (01:06:19):

And yet, I mean his story of redemption and forgiveness, it was remarkable. But so there are people that are struggling through those questions.

Justin (01:06:30):

Oh gosh, wow, you guys certainly saved the biggest one for last. But yeah, it is a huge question. And let me be honest, there are no easy answers to this. People have gone back and forth. It’s the oldest book in the Bible; the book of Job is exactly on this question. So what I would say is I do in the chapter where I deal with this issue, I do go to some of those more philosophical if you like, what sometimes technical theodicies, ways which people can kind of intellectually approach this question. Why would an all good, all loving God allow evil and suffering in the world? And I think there are some helpful intellectual answers for that. But in the question, I’m sensing from both of you that there’s also the sense in which for the parent who is suffering because of some terrible tragedy, that may not be where you start with those kinds of intellectual answers.

(01:07:22):

The best thing you can often do obviously in those situations is to simply weep with those who weep, and it is to be with people and not necessarily to try and answer all of those intellectual questions. When the time does come for those kinds of conversations, I think there are some helpful ways to frame this. One of them, particularly from a Christian perspective is to say, sadly, we live in a world that is broken. It’s broken, and whether we are Christian or not a Christian, none of us are, if you like, immune from the fact that we live in a world that is as scripture says, currently ruled by the forces of darkness. There are so many forces that are if you like, in opposition to God, and we are in the midst of, if you like spiritual warfare, a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil.

(01:08:11):

And it’s not simply that God can just click his fingers and everything is put right, because actually God’s sort of given a level of freedom to our world, both in the spiritual and in the physical realm. There’s a kind of, sadly we live in a world that’s kind of in that in-between where some things that are very good for our planet, like the way in which the tectonic plate shift to renew the surface of the earth with minerals can also reek devastation when we build cities on them and earthquakes occur and so on. It’s almost like, but it’s exactly what is described in the Bible. In Romans 8 you’ll see Paul saying that this is the creation, groaning. It’s this idea that we live in between sort of the fall when everything seemed to go out of kilter in our world and that new creation when Christ will put all things back together.

(01:09:06):

But we live in this in-between time. The question is, has God abandoned us to just live in this broken world? Well, no he hasn’t. He’s entered that broken world himself and been broken himself. And this for me is at the very center of the Christian hope, even for the person you just described who came home to find their wife and unborn children murdered. For people I’ve met who have seen equally tragic and horrendous things, often they’re not. The thing they cling to isn’t a philosophical argument or theodicy. The thing they’re clinging to is the fact that God knows what it’s like. God has suffered injustice, has suffered violence, has suffered rejection, persecution, betrayal, and a violent death. And in the process, even though this was the last person that should have happened to in the world, he did something extraordinary. He bought redemption, beauty, love, and hope out of the worst things that we could throw at God.

(01:10:12):

So for me, at the very center of the Christian faith is Jesus. And that is the thing ultimately that for me answers this huge question. It’s that God himself stands at the epicenter of all of history and says, I’ve experienced this, but I’ve done something about it. And what I did on the cross begins, sets in motion the putting together of this world again. And that’s what you and I are here for. Yes, we live in the midst of broken difficult times. We will experience tragedy and difficulty, but we do it in the hope that there is going to be a day when all things are put right and we are part of that putting right. We are the people God is calling to help him put the world back together again. And this isn’t easy, as I say, I wish there was a simpler, just a kind of philosophical answer I could come up with, but actually that’s what Christianity is. It’s saying, I’m going to join myself in this broken, bombed out world. I’m going to join with the forces of love and hope shown in Jesus to say, this is not the end of the story. Even though the story doesn’t look good now, God’s got something different in mind in the end.

Dave (01:11:22):

It’s interesting, Justin, as you were just sharing that I’ve never had this thought before. Why do people wear crosses around their neck? It’s just this religious symbol and it’s sort of a good luck charm. But as you just described that I’m like, oh my goodness, a cross around your neck or any symbol of the cross is the symbol of suffering and evil, love and hope mixed and it’s been conquered. I was always like, you should wear an empty tomb around your neck, not a cross, but the cross really is that symbolic symbol that says, remember this, God entered and he dealt with it right here and it didn’t end there. He did raise, but that symbol is the answer to that question of suffering and evil.

Justin (01:12:12):

Can I tell a really quick story?

Ann:

Please.

Justin:

I know we’re out of time, but just your comment there, and it’s someone I tell in the book and it’s in the chapter on suffering. I met someone called Will Pearson Gee several years ago who sort of had a kind of vaguely nominal faith growing up and into his adult years, but he would never really have considered himself a Christian. And then tragedy struck Will when, while he was away overseas. His wife and child, one of their children were involved in a tragic car accident that took the life of his wife and his child, and obviously his world fell apart at that point. And he told me when I interviewed him, these are his words, I quote him in the book, he was asked to identify the bodies in the mortuary and he said this.

(01:13:04):

He said, they pulled back the white sheets, and I ranted and I screamed, and I wept. Then I looked at them and I thought, this cannot be the end. There was so much life, particularly in my little boy. He was such a handful. I just couldn’t believe it was the end of him. At the time, I was definitely a nominal Christian. I believe there was some higher power, some greater being beyond myself that I could call upon and might listen to me, but I really had no idea about God’s character or whether he cared about me. But then my eye was drawn to a very simple crucifix on the wall of the mortuary. It was a sign of the Christian faith to which I’d been exposed since I was a child. But at that moment, it’s like a penny dropped and it suddenly became not just a cross, but a sign of hope for me. I then realized that if there was all this talk about resurrection and life after death, I needed to find out more about it.

(01:13:59):

And that was tragic as those events were, and he wouldn’t wish them on anyone. This was actually the turning point in Will’s life that led to him becoming a Christian and in fact, today being vicar in the Church of England. And for me, it’s one of those really difficult stories, but one in which that imperative in Romans that God works all things together for the good of those who love him that good can often come through incredibly difficult circumstances. But ultimately, I believe God is bigger than all of this. And that somehow, perhaps not in our lifetime, perhaps not even in eternity, but somehow God has a picture that we cannot see from our perspective. And just very occasionally we will get a glimpse as in Will’s story, that there was something bigger at work going on amidst the tragedy of that story.

Ann (01:14:53):

Wow.

Dave:

What a beautiful way to end.

Ann (01:14:55):

Yeah, and I’m thinking if you’re listening as a parent, these are the conversations we want to have with our kids because the world’s having them. They’re watching them on YouTube, on TikTok, on everything. And so just to have these discussions as a family and to not feel threatened by it, but to equip our kids like let’s have this conversation. You could do a chapter of the book. You could listen to parts of this, watch it.

Dave (01:15:21):

And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “I’m not Justin Brierley. I can’t answer these questions.” Well, he wrote a book for you.

Ann (01:15:27):

Yeah, and we have this on YouTube that you could watch as a family, parts at a time.

Dave (01:15:31):

Go to FamilyLifeToday.com, get his book Why I’m Still a Christian in the show notes. Click there and maybe get one for your kids as well.

Ann (01:15:39):

Justin, I’m wondering, would you pray for us? I just feel like we ended in such a tender place of suffering and how the cross and Jesus is the vocal point for our faith.

Justin (01:15:50):

Absolutely.

Ann (01:15:51):

Thanks.

Justin (01:15:52):

I’d be delighted to.

Father God, we come before you knowing the limits of our intellect, our ability to understand, knowing that your ways are far higher than ours, and yet you have given us minds to try to grapple with these big issues. But you’ve also given us hearts where we experience both great joy and often great suffering too. But you came in person to experience this life, its joys and its sufferings with us. You came to show us that we can love God with our heart, soul, and mind. And as we go forward, whether through trials and difficulties, through intellectual questions and objections, I just pray for anyone listening, anyone who is experiencing that in their own life and perhaps in the lives of their children, friends, family, neighbors, just that they would know that you are the God who is with them in both their heart and in their mind. The journey of our life, the journey of our intellect. You are Lord of it all. And we may not have all the answers. We may not come up with everything, but we can trust that you have given us yourself and your spirit and a mind in which we can seek you and seek to understand you. Help us to do that with humility, with reverence, with curiosity, with gentleness and respect when we engage it with others. And we ask all this in the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Ann (01:17:31):

Amen.

Dave (01:17:32):

Amen.

Ann (01:17:32):

Justin, what’s the name of your new show going to be?

Justin (01:17:35):

Well, you are one of the first people to hear this actually. We only decided this very recently, but the new show is going to be called Uncommon Ground.

(01:17:44):

And we’re shooting it for both video and audio in an absolutely beautiful location called Yarnton Manor Oxford. It’s a stately sort of manor, 17th century manor, beautiful surroundings and long form discussions between really interesting people on both sides of many of these issues. So I’m really looking forward to that. Look out for that on podcast, on video in early 2026. We’ve got some fabulous guests joining us, some of whom I’ve already mentioned today on both sides of these issues. So yeah, it’s going to be great. I’m really looking forward to getting back in the middle of those kinds of conversations.

Ann (01:18:22):

That’s exciting. Thanks for being with us.

Dave:

Sounds great. Thank you.

Justin (01:18:26):

Thank you, guys.

Ann (01:18:30):

Hey, thanks for watching and if you liked this episode—

Dave (01:18:33):

You better like it.

Ann (01:18:34):

—just hit that like button.

Dave (01:18:35):

And we’d like you to subscribe. So all you got to do is go down and hit the subscribe button. I can’t say the word subscribe. Hit the subscribe button. I don’t think I can say this word.

Ann:

Like and subscribe.

Dave:

Look at that. You say it so easy. Subscribe. There it goes.

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