"Does God Exist?" Debate at Biola

After reading Melissa's post about the William Lane Craig-Christopher Hitchens debate at Biola last weekend, I thought I'd throw in my two cents.

Hitchens says he wants to be an atheist because he loves freedom. As someone who has traveled the world reporting on injustices and oppression committed in the name of religion, he has the right to come to that conclusion. Nothing is more repulsive than the misogyny, the slavery, the brainwashing and war advanced by religious groups -- except the fact they're claiming to do it in God's name. Hitchens, thank you for hating that, because I know God hates that too.

The problem is that a life of atheism is not a life of freedom -- it's just a new kind of oppression. You are no longer bound by the shackles of "religious ignorance," but you are left with a void, a life of no eternal significance, a short-sighted purpose. At the end of the day, there is no redemption for the sinner; there is no vindication for the victim. Life is wretched and cruel, and we're all alone in our despair.

Freedom in Christ is redemption. It's the assurance that even the pain and agony of our short lives is being woven into a tapestry of grand proportions. We don't see the sense in it now; but in the grand scheme of God's redemptive plan, it has been worked out for the good of those who love him. We see just the threads of that tapestry; God is doing work beyond our lifetime to restore his fallen creation, and some day the senseless will make sense.

Hitchens would call this wishful thinking, but I'm thankful William Lane Craig offered compelling evidence why our faith is reasonable, why this narrative of audacious hope is reasonable.

In the end, we as humans don't understand freedom. We think of freedom in small and fallen ways, like the women's liberation and free love movement, like the hedonism of college life. We find that our best stabs at freedom -- our best attempts to shrug off the "captivity" of the Christian life -- merely shutter us in our own personal prisons and cut us off from the meaning of the big picture. It's a lonely and shriveled existence, and we can't understand how in the world we got there.

My prayer is that the "Does God Exist?" debate puts a pebble in the shoes of Hitchens and the other atheists and religionists who have experienced false freedom, false enlightenment. I hope their quest will lead them straight to a cross and an empty tomb.