A Dialogue with an Atheist

Part 2

Please see my previous post about my atheist friend’s question in order to provide context for this post.

Here is the beginning of my response (I cannot remember how I responded to my erstwhile friend). I don’t believe providing answers to troublesome questions of this sort helps very much. Even if they were answered satisfactorily, my buddy would replace the question with 100 others. Often we would move on to other topics to seek common ground.

He first became known to me in the basement of our church where we fed people under the “Out of the Cold” program in downtown Toronto. It was surprising to find someone in that crowd who had read Hitchens, Dennet and Dawkins as well as the Bible. We agreed to meet regularly for coffee and discussions. So my first point is that relationship (and not as a “method” of evangelism either) is far more valuable than a strong philosophical answer.

I loved that man - what there was of him. I say that because as smart as he was, his humanity seemed to have shriveled to the point where he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) appreciate beauty in the arts or anywhere else. Everything could be understood through a syllogism, algorithm or the sciences. He insisted that love was only transactional (all wives were merely prostitutes who exchange their bodies for benefits and all men use them that way) and our friendship felt very one sided to me. Being truly gracious was an illusion. We are gracious because we get rewarded either through the dopamine hit or promise of reward in the future. He was using me to bolster his assumptions about life and worldview and I was aware of that.

One of the great ironies here - At the same time, he wished out loud to me several times that his drug-addicted son would convert to Christianity, because he would see the good that it would be for him. He admitted that Christianity was valuable in that it did change lives for the better; whether it was true or not didn’t matter to him. The son never gave his Dad permission to introduce me to him.

On my next post, I will begin to address the question itself.