As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I know only that, in leaving this world, I fall for ever either into annihilation or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be forever assigned. Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I ought to spend all the days of my life without caring to inquire into what must happen to me. Perhaps I might find some solution to my doubts, but I will not take the trouble, nor take a step to seek it; and after treating with scorn those who are concerned with this care, I will go without foresight and without fear to try the great event, and let myself be led carelessly to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future state. Blaise Pascal
If the world didn’t suck, we’d fall off. Unknown
As we go about our lives, it is amazing to consider all of the things we take for granted. We wake up every morning simply assuming that gravity will allow us to drop our legs off the side of the bed and that our slippers will be where we left them the night before. We stumble to the shower on feet that we haven’t even thought about since the last time we stepped on a nail, breathing air that we just assume will contain the exact mixture of oxygen and nitrogen to allow our brains to function correctly as we judge the shower’s water temperature with our astonishingly complex neural system. We then preform an elaborate cleaning ritual under water that we assume is uncontaminated and, without thinking, balance our bulky, heavy collection of muscle, fat and bones on just 5% of our body’s outer surface area (the soles of our feet) on a soapy, slippery surface. All of this happens before the first cup of coffee! We can’t consciously think about every detail of our existence, however, and this is something we understand instinctively.[i] We operate as if gravity is real and we usually never see it as it is (for example, the cup that I broke dropped – it wasn’t rapidly pulled to the tile floor by the earth’s gravitational field). These physical realities aren’t the only aspects of existence that we take for granted though; we operate daily on assumptions of spiritual/existential truths that we may or may not be aware of and, just like gravity, they are both real and necessary.
As normal as it is to take certain truths about the nature of physical reality for granted, our “spiritual” assumptions may be even deeper. Pascal Boyer, a non-theist working at the departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis and a Guggenheim Fellow, recently cited cognitive and evolutionary studies attempting to explain our human affinities for religion that reveal how we are naturally equipped with “tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.”[ii] In short, through his extensive studies, Mr. Boyer has come to believe that we are actually born with built-in spiritual beliefs and that “religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities.”[iii] He finds that it actually takes more work to disbelieve in God and our own immortal souls than to believe because “disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions.”[iv] And where does working so hard against our nature get us? Dr. William Lane Craig illustrates the consequences of a complete denial of this metaphysical gravity in the second chapter of his book Reasonable Faith entitled “The Absurdity of Life without God.” He first quotes another Pascal (Blaise) to illustrate the human condition and show how insane it seems for humans, sprinting toward the grave, to ignore the possibility of God and other spiritual realities.[v] He then shows the bleak answer for our existential problem shared by most of our leading scientists and psychologists: “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.”[vi]
This grim answer that allows for no truth outside of our natural senses has consequences that extend beyond the initial shock of hopelessness and despair. Dr. Craig goes on to show how life itself is stripped of the properties we take for granted as we live and interact with others. Because this naturalistic view dissolves any hope of the soul’s existence after death and completely denies the existence of God and all other spiritual truths, meaning, purpose and value become fairy tales that we should no longer hold onto as we “grow up” intellectually. The atheist intellectual, Bertrand Russell, put an honest face on the predicament when he wrote:
That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve the individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.[vii] [Emphasis added]
However, meaning, purpose and value are integral to us as humans and they can’t really be escaped or unlearned no matter how poetic or long our sentences may be! Russell’s “firm foundation” is the real illusion because it cannot exist in reality as he portrays it. Even the idea of “despair” loses all meaning and becomes, like the rest of the cosmos (and Russell’s writing), a pointless curiosity that no one can appreciate. Albert Camus, the French absurdist philosopher, gave some sad commentary on those who would stare into existence without God: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” He goes on to explain that “dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [normal life], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”[viii] For Camus, once everything supernatural is erased and there is no part of existence that can’t be observed through a microscope or a telescope, the last great philosophical question is: Should I kill myself? Camus equates suicide with mankind’s last visit to the empty confessional admitting, in effect, that life is both painful and meaningless.[ix] Albert Camus did not, however, commit suicide.
Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and other celebrated atheists often complain that there isn’t enough evidence to believe in God but what if they are the evidence they are looking for? What if they are hung up looking for the forest in the trees but all along they should have been looking in their own eyes? Or, even more sinister, perhaps they did only they didn’t like what they discovered?
I don’t believe atheism comes naturally. In fact, there is growing evidence that supports theism (the belief in God) as our natural “factory” setting. Atheism has to be taught. And, to be fair, it’s a difficult position to defend and a painful worldview to learn. It’s tough to prove a negative and even harder to live it consistently. Most people who identify as atheists would probably be better characterized as agnostics who despise judgmental religious people. So who teaches them their position? If we are born with a natural affinity for theism, where is the opposite taught with such skill and force? I believe it is a process that begins with a broken nature dealing with a sinful church and finally turning to a Godless science in an amoral culture.
Lessons from our broken nature.
You don’t need a belief in God or any religion to speak about our imperfect, broken human nature. A quick glance at the news will give you examples of atrocities on any given day. History is filled with betrayal, death, and destruction. But there really is no need to look too far- our own personal experiences in dealing with others usually gives us all the examples of flawed humanity we can handle. After all, “to err is human.”[x]
We all operate within a framework of right and wrong, fair and unfair, good and bad, true and untrue. Where these morals come from is a question for another chapter- suffice it to say, they are there. Occasionally people will cast doubt on the existence of any internal moral compass but they are fighting an uphill battle because the argument itself usually denies the premise. It’s sort of like calling someone who believes in the concept of truth a liar. C.S. Lewis does a better job of explaining this than I ever could in the first section of his book, Mere Christianity. Lewis begins by describing what happens when people argue, saying things like: “‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ – ‘That’s my seat, I was there first’ – ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ – ‘Why should you shove in first?’ – ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’ – ‘Come on, you promised.’” Lewis then goes on to note the responses to these appeals: “Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.”[xi] C.S. Lewis is really drawing on the moral arguments of Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant (among others) and if you suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye, you’re right! And, as Lewis so brilliantly illustrates later in the book, “Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.”[xii] Or, even more simple, try stealing from a thief! Try lying to a liar! The next time you meet someone who says there is no such thing as objective morality, ask to borrow some money and don’t pay it back (see how that turns out).
This is the moral framework that sets up the fact that we all fail to live up to our own standards. If you happen to be an agnostic, forget about the man-made religious standards or any revelations of divine morality, we’re thinking of our own standards right now. We all believe some things are right and some things are wrong and we’ve all chosen to do the wrong things at times. Sure, we rationalize the wrong choices until they are thinly veiled by our creative attempts at convenient “rightness”, but who are we kidding? And why is it so difficult to be honest- even with ourselves in private?! Why do we actually argue within ourselves the rightness of a thing that deep down we know is wrong? (And what is this “deep down” of which we speak?) If there’s nothing to question, why are we asking? And if it’s all just a social construction, why is it impossible for us to break free from the guilt? A psychologist writing about guilt gives this advice: “Stop trying to be perfect. Nobody is perfect…”[xiii] So where do we get the idea that a “perfect” can exist and why are we driven to match that to the point of mental illness?
The truth is we’re broken inside. It doesn’t matter which way you look at it (from a religious or non-religious perspective), there’s something wrong. People who believe in God think that their badness comes from not being perfectly obedient to heaven’s laws. People who don’t believe in God think their feelings of badness come from a system of lies that has been ingrained in them through evolution’s drive to survive. Either way it is inescapable: we all know that we are hypocrites. We all know that we have internal standards that we expect others to keep but that we mess up. This is part of the human condition that secular psychology has been struggling with since its inception. Our natural reaction to this internal drama is called guilt. Some even think it is the root of all psychosis. Leon Grinberg, in his study of guilt, writes that ”guilt in the earliest periods of life is what creates a disposition to mental illness, instability and crime”[xiv] and Freud actually taught that guilt itself was a mental illness![xv] He sought to educate patients until they understood that there is nothing to feel guilty about. He basically attempted to turn people into sociopaths. Perhaps Freud was influenced by Nietzche (even though he reportedly denied this) who taught that “evil just meant change. He said there was no such thing as guilt. All guilt was, said Nietzche, was fear of the consequences.”[xvi]
We know- possibly in a way that is difficult to explain- that this is not true. Our feelings of guilt are not merely the repression of our natural, animalistic desires. And we understand that the guilty feelings plaguing murderers on death row are the same kind that we experience to a lesser degree. As we imagine ourselves in their place, waking every morning in a cell to be reminded of the fact that we killed a family in their sleep or molested children in our basement (you know, think of something bad), we also feel a touch of the guilt that would accompany this imagined reality. In fact, it is difficult to really place ourselves in that imaginary position without guilt because the truth is, feeling guilt is not a mental illness but the inability to feel guilt certainly is! The very definition of sociopathic behavior is an absence of guilt in the person committing horrible and monstrous crimes.
And if guilt is just a psychosis that is holding us back, why on earth would evolution produce anything so limiting and self-destructive? Did psychological evolution simply misfire so badly as to leave many suicidal or is there another answer? What happens when someone afflicted with existential guilt visits many churches today?
Lessons from a sinful church.
Churches do a good job of preaching what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do but… they’re also filled with people who don’t live up to the standards that they teach. What many churches fail to do, and they get a big, fat F in this department, is to be honest about their failures. During the reformation, Martin Luther came up with a wonderful phrase to describe Christians as the church tried to fight hypocrisy: simul justus et peccator. This means simultaneously just and sinner; a living paradox where one is both a true saint (with a spotless, pure holiness that the perfect God accepts) and a true sinner (with dirty, nasty, selfish sins that everyone hates). In her pursuit for holiness, however, the church shies away from the sinner image as she projects that negative description on those outside her walls. Well, I say “the church” but everyone knows I mean the people! And though the drive for holy living is wonderful, the pressure to get there often forces people in the congregation to hide their sins so they can fit in. No one starts out with the goal to become a terrible hypocrite- it just happens along the way as imperfect people sincerely try to live perfect lives for God as part of an obedient community. From the inside this is tragic and the only way to survive is to find a smaller community within the church with the courage to be honest and the humility to leave judgement to God. From the outside, however, this looks like a huge, fake production that casts doubt on everything the church does and says with the sickening, self-righteous vomit of hypocrisy. If you find yourself agreeing with that last sentence, you’re in good company. In fact, most of the people in the churches caught in this trap of perceived holiness would agree with you in private. No one wants to be a hypocrite!
The Barna Group surveyed millennials (roughly defined as people 18 to 29 years old) in 2013 and 66% of them, both in and outside the church, believed that the American church is full of hypocrites.[xvii] Broadly defined, you really could consider everyone a hypocrite. We all have standards and goals that we expect out of other people but we don’t live up to. I don’t think this is the type of hypocrisy that polled group was talking about though… It is the hypocrisy that you can feel as judgement. If my friend Jack tells me that he has stopped spitting and that he hasn’t spat in three years, my first reaction is disbelief followed quickly by laughter. If he proceeds to tell me, with tears in his eyes, about how much better his life is since he quit spitting I will stop laughing and congratulate him. I still don’t believe he quit spitting but I don’t really care as long as he’s happy. It’s the next step that causes trouble. Jack goes on to explain how non-spitters are better people than spitters. He wants nothing to do with spitters, in fact, and he wants me to join him in his new group of spitless friends. After only a few moments I begin to realize that lately Jack hasn’t really been talking to me as a friend with no agenda except friendship, he’s been spitnessing to me! And, due to an odd mandible formation he was born with, Jack inadvertently spits every time he speaks! I point this fact out to him as the conversation starts to get heated but it is no use and our friendship is forever ruined as he walks away, wiping the spit from his shoes as a symbolic gesture representing my hopelessness.
That’s a silly way of putting the ugliness that many saw in someone like televangelist Jimmy Swaggart when he raged against pornography from the pulpit yet visited prostitutes in private. It is not difficult to find more examples but they only sadden us because part of the truth they discredit is something we trust deep down. Their judgment doesn’t primarily offend us because it is inaccurate (though it may be)- it offends us because they are not worthy to judge.
This leaves us with the shamans of modernity: scientists.
Lessons from a Godless science.
Though many scientists, doctors, physicists, etc. do believe in God, the overall structure of modern science runs on as if nothing exists outside of our natural realm. Supernatural answers are disqualified for serious consideration before questions can even be asked. And, when you’re working on a formula for longer lasting truck tires, there is no problem at all with this approach. The problems with this completely naturalistic approach begin to emerge when the scientific method is used to answer questions that transcend nature. It falls apart when the human soul needs repair.
This is not the way our human knowledge progressed through history; it is a relatively new approach (in the grand scheme). The arrogance that makes it possible is pretty standard though. Like most generations before us, we believe we represent the height of human advancement. Our successes mark the pinnacle of human achievement. And our superior knowledge reveals all ancient wisdom to be nothing more than incomplete truth shrouded in myth and fantasy. We, as humans, are now educated beyond the need for any belief in the supernatural and this includes ignorant ideas like immortality, love, heaven, hell, hope, sin, grace and God. Francis Schaeffer notes the turning point for our approach to knowledge in his remarkable book, How Should We Then Live. “Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, scientists in this stream of thought moved to the idea of a complete closed system. That left no place for God. But it equally left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behavioristic machine. Everything is a part of the cosmic machine, including people. To say this another way: Prior to the rise of modern science (that is, naturalistic science, or materialistic science), the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause-and-effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.”[xviii]
In a way, it is not science’s fault for this predicament. The discipline is being asked to answer questions that it has no business approaching. A mother’s love for her baby should not be reduced to biological theories about survival of the species. A drunk driver’s sorrow over the child he accidently killed is more than a psychological quirk that the professionals find amusing. Existence rises above mere biological life and something in us takes this transcendence in stride as if it were the most natural thing in the world. We are more than science would have us believe.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought about this situation while working against the inhumane Nazi social science active in Germany. He saw science throwing off all yokes and becoming a monster as it “emancipated itself from any kind of subservience. It is in essence not service but mastery, mastery over nature… This is the spirit of the forcible subjugation of nature beneath the rule of the thinking and experimenting man. Technology became an end in itself. It has a soul of its own. Its symbol is the machine, the embodiment of the violation and exploitation of nature.” Bonhoeffer was living through one of the most horrible experiments in “self-directed evolution” (eugenics) coupled with God-less science. The sins of Nazi Germany are not so far gone that we can’t remember their gut wrenching consequences. It is here that Bonhoeffer notes only “faith sees signs here of a human arrogance which tries to set up an anti-world in the face of the world that was created by God. In the conquest of time and space by technical science it sees an undertaking which sets God’s will at defiance. The benefits of technology pale into insignificance beside its demoniacal properties.”[xix] Science with God keeps the population self-controlled. Science without God leads to population control.
After evicting God from all equations, the answers we get concerning creation make almost less sense than those dealing with morality. Phillip Yancey skims through a few fragments of anecdotal evidence for the intelligent, purposeful design denied in the current scientific climate.
Scientists themselves who calculate the odds of the universe coming into existence by accident suggest such boggling figures as one in 1060. Physicist Paul Davies explains, “To give some meaning to those numbers, suppose you wanted to fire a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away. Your aim would have to be accurate to that same part in 1060.” Stephen Hawking admits that if the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had varied by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed. That’s only the beginning: if the nuclear force in certain atoms varied by only a few percentage points then the sun and other stars would not exist. Life on earth depends on similarly delicate fine-tuning; a tiny change in gravity, a slight tilting of the earth’s axis, or a small thickening it it’s crust would make conditions for life impossible.[xx]
The odds mentioned, 10 to the 60th power and one part in a hundred thousand million million, represent statistical improbabilities so staggering that, had they not represented the anti-theistic presuppositions for cosmology, they would automatically prohibit intelligent scientific discussion. In short, they would belong to science fiction. And these odds only take into consideration a few factors that we know and understand to some degree. Dr. William Lane Craig goes into much more detail about this in his book Reasonable Faith.
Science without God struggles to remain scientific because it is shaped as much by the answers it doesn’t allow as it is by the reality it interprets. But is our culture any better?
Lessons from an amoral culture.
If we can’t trust ourselves, the establishments of faith, or modern science we are left in the stew of culture. We simmer in blend of ingredients that changes by the hour and takes nothing too seriously as long as new phones are coming out and there are cute people to flirt with at the gym. Morals and beliefs and realities and theories change so often that nothing is certain except change. In fact, we are encouraged toward a self-centered skepticism that leaves little room for anything else. It is difficult to be anything other than agnostic in this swirling, superficial soup.
Trying to prove that our current culture is amoral (that it operates without any guidelines for a true right and wrong) seems like an insult to your intelligence. You already know this and the evidence is the immediate skepticism we feel whenever the current culture presents something to us that it claims is true and right. We know that what culture celebrates today will be despised tomorrow. What is celebrated one season will be exposed the next. The song everyone is talking about will be forgotten in a month and the book documenting fashion and technology is out of date before it prints.
Consider this: when we discovered that reality TV shows weren’t really real, no one was surprised. Scripts that would’ve caused a firestorm of indignation among the watching public sixty years ago can’t even manage to raise eyebrows today. We suspect that everything coming at us is scripted and crafted to manipulate us as consumers. And this culture will even stoop to borrow our own beliefs about right and wrong to steer us in the direction most profitable to the ones manufacturing whatever influence we are faced with at the moment. There is no line that it will not cross in this pragmatic manipulation. This includes, gasp, our very government!
Politics and politicians, two very relevant and important factors for the way we live, are also soaked in our distrust and disgust. We will vote for someone we know is a liar because we think he/she is the best of the liars. We have given up hope in the idea of honest rule because morality is simply one more tool for manipulation in the hands of campaign teams. Most people honestly believe that nothing is sacred in the political world and I would have to agree with them. The “sincere convictions” of politicians will change overnight as new polling data hits their desks. If you don’t believe this, try an informal poll. Ask 40 people if they believe a politician who is totally honest can be successful and watch for signs of doubt as they attempt to answer. A nationwide election survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 1958 asked the following question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust government in Washington to do what is right.” 73% answered “just about always” or “most of the time.” As you read that last sentence, what just happened in the back of your mind? Did you think people in the 50′s were more naive and gullible or did you think they were just more idealistic? You probably didn’t think they were right… That same poll in 2004 (after trending down like you’d expect) revealed just 46% could answer that government was fairly reliable.[xxi] To be fair, though, the question has almost become meaningless as the concept of the word “right” has devolved in relativism to simply mean “right for ________.” In our current culture right and wrong no longer exist on their own- they are relative to individuals. What’s right for me might be wrong for you, right? The amoral culture reflects and feeds this soul destroying system. Morality in the hands of many politicians is just another tool to attack competitors and beguile voters to gain power. Government has become another show on the reality TV network and public servants have made the public their servant.
Even news broadcasts are seen (and rightly so) as heavily biased in one way or another, all the while touting their evenhanded treatment of events. When faced with the hard choices of what to cover, what to ignore, and what angle to take, media outlets are not above influence. Their advertisers affect coverage almost as much as their audiences and ideologies. Three different broadcasts can spin an event three very different ways. Or they can completely ignore something we think is important and use that time for trivial celebrity “news” that gets better ratings. The more conscious we are of this, the less likely we are to trust the vignettes presented to us daily. This is just one more symptom of our culture’s illness. Lacking absolutes, the media is ultimately controlled by money. After all, the news is business and the stockholders really care more about the bottom line than any naive notions about truth!
In our culture, “right” and “wrong” still exist like ghosts from the past but they have no force behind them. These concepts are no longer concrete and absolute (something is never always right or always wrong) so the larger ideas of good and evil are also disappearing. Or, as Nietzche so eloquently and amorally builds the atheistic reality, good is just another word for power and evil is code for change. Laws follow the path of least resistance, attempting to quiet the loudest protesters and satisfy the largest number of dangerous people. And Nietzche would be proud of our politicians as they pursue office (i.e. power) as the ultimate good and shy away from meaningful change as if it were truly the new political evil.
What now?
With these factors all coming together to teach us how to be hopeless atheists or disheartened agnostics, why doesn’t this book just end now? Why not run from the void being created by a Godless existence into the arms of distractions, ambition and entertainment? I think it is because we know we are being lied to. We know there is more! There is more to us than moral failure and there is more to the church than simple hypocrisy. And even though the trend for science and culture may be against faith, it doesn’t unmake the reality that forms our foundation. We know there is more. In an attempt to illustrate this, I am focusing on meaning, purpose and value while touching lightly on some other slippery subjects that I believe point to an answer that transcends everything else. Hopefully giving shape to the vague and shadowy more that warms us in love, thrills us in birth, haunts us at night, and chills us in the cemetery.
[i] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 251.
[ii] Pascal Boyer, “Religion: Bound to Believe?” NATURE 455 (23 October 2008): 1038-39.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 67.
[vi] Ibid., 71.
[vii] Bertrand Russell, Why i Am Not a Christian and Other Essays On Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Touchstone, 1967), 107.
[viii] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3,6.
[ix] Ibid., 5.
[x] Alexander Pope, The Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33.
[xi] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: a Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the Three Books, Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2015), 3.
[xii] Ibid., 6.
[xiii] Ph.D., Steven T. Griggs. The Psychology of Guilt (Ambivalence Turned Inwards). 2011.
[xiv] Leon Grinberg, Guilt and Depression (London: Karnac Books, 1992), 48.
[xv] Philip Rieff, Freud, the Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1979), 278.
[xvi] Tom McNeight, Beyond Psychosis (London: Chipmunkapublishing, 2009), 57.
[xvii] “What Millennials Want When They Visit Church,” Barna Group, https://www.barna.org/barna-update/millennials/711-what-millennials-want-when-they-visit-church (accessed June 28, 2015).
[xviii] Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? the Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 146-147.
[xix] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 99.
[xx] Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News? (MI: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2014), 178.
[xxi] “Trust in Government,” Gallup, http://www.gallup.com/poll/5392/trust-government.aspx (accessed June 28, 2015).
© 2015 Michael Nathan O’Neal – All rights reserved.