Fortified Faith Ministries

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Antony Flew, a famous atheist philosopher, and my mentor Gary Habermas were good friends. One time Gary asked him, "Tony, do you ever doubt the atheism that you hold and teach? Do you ever doubt whether atheism is true?" and he said, "Gary, I doubt it every day." Here was a guy regarded as the most influential atheist philosopher of the latter part of the 20th century who said he doubted his atheism every day. Something similar was answered by CS Lewis when he was asked in a BBC interview if he ever doubted whether Christianity is true. He said, "Sure, there are days when I think about it, and I think maybe atheism seems more plausible than Christianity." But I have to admit that when I was an atheist, I also doubted. And there were days when Christianity seemed more plausible than atheism.

My point is that it's not just Christians who doubt. Atheists doubt too. People who have other worldviews also doubt. Doubting is normal. It is part of the human experience.

When I went to graduate school, I was obsessed with finding the answer as to whether we could prove that Jesus rose from the dead using the standard methods used by professional historians. I was obsessed with that. My doctoral dissertation was about 260,000 words with over 2000 footnotes (the average doctoral dissertation is 60 to 80,000 words). It was crazy! I also engaged with some of the most brilliant atheists in our country, such as Elaine Pagels, a distinguished professor of religion at Princeton, and Bart Ehrman, a distinguished professor of Christianity at UNC Chapel Hill. I've had public dialogues with Dale Martin, the senior New Testament professor at Yale University. When I went to college, I had a lot of difficulties, but I wanted to go out and build a historical case and put it in front of the toughest skeptics out there to see if it could stand up to the toughest critical scrutiny. Today I'm convinced that it does.