Gregory E. Ganssle

Summary: Makes the case that Christian faith, truly understood, is most congruent with our deepest human longings.

Gregory Ganssle believes that one of the most important questions we can ask is “what sort of person should I be?” and two other related questions: 1) what sort of person do I want to be? and 2) what sort of person am I becoming? These get at our deepest desires and commitments, the vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful toward which we aspire to live. In this book, Ganssle makes the argument that some of the basic human longings common to many of us are most congruent with the Christian faith. It is not that those who are not Christians, and Ganssle especially has atheists in mind, cannot embrace and pursue these longings. He argues that in fact they do, despite the fact that these longings are often dissonant with an atheist or materialist worldview, whereas they are consonant with a Christian worldview. He does not argue that this shows that Christian faith is true or that this “proves” Christian faith, but only that Christian faith is consistent with our deepest longings. He says, “There are many people who think that Christianity is false; I want to help people see that they really want the gospel to be true.”

Ganssle looks at four types of longings that he believes are consonant with the Christian story. The first is our value of persons and longing for relationship, that he sees grounded in a God who is personal and relational, the triune God, whose relationships are marked by submission and self-giving. The second is what might be called the problem of goodness, that we want goodness, even when we are faced with evil, that goodness seems somehow primary, that we want to be thought of as good, and and that goodness is good for us. The gospel is a story that grounds goodness in God, that accounts for our rebellion against it, and enables us to be what we long for.

We also long for and are drawn to beauty. We have a deep impulse to create things of beauty, that mirror the Creator. We long for beauties beyond what this earth offers in ways that suggest we are made for another world. And finally, we long for freedom, to live consistently with our sense of our best self, and the gospel proposes we are set free by truth, by a truth-shaped life, and enabled to live freely in the face of death because of hope. Ganssle concludes by proposing that if this case seems to make sense of our longings, then the next step is to determine whether the Christian faith is true.

What I like about this is approach is that he explores aspirations that are common to most or all of us. He raises what is a genuinely important question–how do we explain these aspirations? Are they just an artifact of our evolution and can they be explained in purely material terms? While he proposes that Christian faith is the best explanation, he recognizes that some may conclude differently and that each must decide what makes the best sense of our longings for love, goodness, beauty, and freedom.

His book poses a challenge for Christians as well. Does the kind of people we are becoming reflect the loving, good, beautiful, and liberating story we proclaim. Do we value people above programs–all people? Do we love goodness so passionately we pursue justice where it is lacking? Are our communities places that both celebrate beauty and evidence our hope in the beauty of the new creation? Are we consciously working to undo the personal and systemic evils that bind and limit people? In short, are we story-shaped people who find the fulfillment of our deepest longings in the story we proclaim? That, it seems to me, may be our most powerful apologetic.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.… (más)

Greg Ganssle, a philosopher affiliated with Yale University and the Rivendell Institute, has produced a careful, accessible, and fair critique of the arguments offered by the "new atheists": Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens. One virtue of the book is that it seeks "...to take a cooler, more reflective approach in engaging the nature of the case they offer for the truth of atheism (p. 177)." Ganssle successfully accomplishes this task. My favorite portion of the book is the final three chapters, which cover Darwinian stories of religion, three arguments for atheism offered by the new atheists which pretty clearly fail, and one which is, according to Ganssle, the strongest argument on offer from this group of authors.

Ganssle reconstructs this strongest argument, from Dawkins, in the following way:

(1) A theistic universe would be different than an atheistic universe.

(2) Our universe fits better with an atheistic universe than with a theistic universe.

(3) Therefore, our universe is more likely to be an atheistic universe than it is to be a theistic universe.

(1) seems to be on solid ground, and Dawkins argues that the long and slow development of complex biological life supports (2). Ganssle agrees, which means that this particular feature of our world fits better within an atheistic universe than a theistic one. However, he then argues that there are 4 other major elements of our universe that undermine (2) and fit better within a theistic universe:

i. The universe is ordered and susceptible to rational investigation.

ii. The existence of conscious beings with intentional mental states.

iii. The existence of beings with significant, libertarian, free agency.

iv. The existence of objective moral obligations.

He points out that there are numerous philosophers who would reject the very existence of one or more of these elements, and others that seek to give purely naturalistic accounts of them. But if these elements exist, they fit better within a theistic universe even if naturalistic accounts can be given. To see why this is the case, read this book. It is worth the time, even for someone familiar with many of these arguments.… (más)