Is God Real? By Lee Strobel. Book Review.

 Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life by Lee Strobel

A bestselling author's new book offers a tantalizing taste of reasonable support for belief in the divine.

Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life was published by Zondervan in October, 2023. The book has 256 pages, inclusive of twenty-seven pages of notes, fourteen pages of study questions, and an eight-page bibliography. Author Lee Strobel holds a BA from the University of Missouri and a Master of Studies in Law from Yale. Strobel was an investigative journalist for fourteen years. He won a public service award for his coverage of the Ford Pinto crash trial.

About forty years ago, Strobel's life dramatically changed direction. His wife converted to Christianity. Strobel was an atheist and he did not approve of his wife's new path. He determined to use his investigative skills to prove Christianity wrong. Instead, he discovered that there is evidence to support Christianity. At age 29 he converted, left journalism, and became an apologetics author. Several of Strobel's forty-plus books are best-sellers. In total, his publications have sold fourteen million copies.

It's easy to see why Strobel's books sell so well. His writing is smooth and easy to read. Though Strobel's work could be understood by the average reader, he tackles life's big questions. In a typical Strobel book, he provides a brief sketch of his own reasons for wanting to explore a given spiritual quandary. He then travels to a university campus to present his confusion and curiosity to a world-class expert. Strobel interrogates these men who have devoted their lives to the material he is researching. Strobel, ever the investigative journalist, asks the kind of questions we would ask if we were in those elite settings. Strobel records these conversations in question-and-answer format.

In books like The Case for Christ, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Faith, and The Case for Heaven, Strobel includes extensive bibliographies that direct the reader to further resources. For example, in Is God Real? Strobel's bibliography directs the reader not just to popular publications of Christian presses like Zondervan, but also to hefty tomes published by scholarly and secular houses like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, Michigan State University Press, and HarperOne.

I love Strobel's books, including Is God Real? I'd like to be able to dedicate hours to reading university press books addressing the origins of the universe, the problem of evil, and support for the historicity of the Bible. I don't have that kind of time or attention. Strobel's books have introduced me to ideas, thinkers, and arguments I'd never otherwise encounter.

You don't have to agree with Strobel to enjoy his books. I don't agree with every position he takes, and I am a stranger to Strobel's world. Almost every expert he consults is a white male Protestant, ethnically or culturally. They are economically comfortable and their life trajectories proceed from success to success. Women are mentioned in passing as wives, mothers, and refreshment servers. Again, I love his work, but towards the end of every Strobel book, I find myself wishing he would have included a woman, a Catholic, a child of immigrants, someone poor, someone who struggles.

Could a non-Christian benefit from a Lee Strobel book? Yes. In recent years, as some doomsayers put it, the West has begun committing suicide. Atheists like Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton*, and Tom Holland have pointed out that the Judeo-Christian tradition is a sine qua non of Western Civilization. Author Jonathan Van Maren observed, "One does not need to find Christianity believable to realize that it is necessary." To be a true fan of Western Civ, one does have to appreciate what the Judeo-Christian tradition has accomplished. I am not an ancient Greek Pagan but I am very respectful of, and I certainly want to see recognized and preserved, the positive contributions of ancient Greek Pagans.

Instead of respect, appreciation, and a desire for preservation, New Atheism contributes to the erosion of Western Civilization. Atheists are smart, they insist. Christians are stupid. New Atheists peddle this toxic propaganda via straw man arguments. A typical New Atheist might repeat, ad nauseam, that Christians believe in a "Sky Daddy" comparable to the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" and that any questioning of faith quickly topples its house of cards.

Strobel quotes one such Atheist in Is God Real? Ricky Gervais, a British celebrity, reports that, as a child, he had been taught to believe in Jesus. One day Gervais' brother Bob asked him why he believed in God. Gervais did not have an answer. "It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions and within an hour, I was an atheist." The idea that faith is "as simple as that" and that it can be demolished in an hour by any child asking basic questions is a falsehood so transparent that only a New Atheist would believe it. It is also an anti-Western, propagandistic lie that would meet with the approval of Marxists and jihadis.

Much has been said by others about the New Atheists' straw man arguments, their ignorance (see here and here) and even their obnoxiousness. New Atheists insist that freed of the "pox" of religion, people would become the best, most ethical versions of themselves (see for example here and here). Instead, New Atheism has become notorious for its misogyny, sexual harassment, rape, and cyber stalking (here, here and here). Directly contrary to the New Atheist narrative, Christianity and the development of science are inextricable from each other; see for example here, here, here, here, and here.

Even some New Atheists have displayed the necessary intelligence and grace to reassess. In 1996, New Atheist Richard Dawkins declared that "Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." As Christianity's decline began to make headlines, even as Dawkins' expressed wish for the end of Christianity seemed to be coming true, Dawkins began singing a different tune. On March 21, 2018, Dawkins tweeted, "Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let's not forget Hilaire Belloc's menacing rhyme: 'Always keep a-hold of nurse, For fear of finding something worse.'"

In other words, Dawkins was acknowledging that Christianity has had an impact that he likes, and he was also acknowledging that whatever may eventually replace Christianity might have an impact that he would not like. In 2019, Dawkins acknowledged the truth of a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky. "Without God, all things are permitted." Dawkins told the Times that the elimination of faith would give people "license to do really bad things."

New Atheism is not the attention-grabbing trend that it once was. In 2019, atheist blogger Scott Alexander dubbed New Atheism "The Godlessness that Failed." But it's still popular among lower-case-a atheists to associate faith with stupidity, and to hope that the entire Judeo-Christian tradition is relegated to the trash bin.

Here's where Lee Strobel's books come in handy, even for folks who don't believe in God and have no desire to be religious. Strobel makes very clear that the Judeo-Christian tradition is one of scholarship and the advancement of the human species. No serious, integral person could cling to New Atheist canards after reading a Strobel book, and delving into the ample supplemental material.

Strobel opens Is God Real? with a fascinating statistic that says much about human nature and the failure of New Atheism, and that testifies to the truth of Ecclesiastes 3:11. "More than two hundred times a second, around the clock, someone is asking an online search engine about God – often with the simple inquiry, 'Is God real?' If you type that question into Google, you'll get 3.7 billion results in two thirds of a second."

Strobel quotes an atheist on what it means if the answer is "No." Without God, there's no morality, there's no meaning, and there's no free will. Even New Atheists have trouble accepting these consequences of their dogma. And even New Atheists wish that the world were not as they believe it to be; see a 2014 piece by New Atheist Michael Shermer that expresses longing for a supernatural experience.

Even though Americans are leaving church, they still crave contact with that eternal something that, according to Ecclesiastes 3:11, God placed in their hearts. Psalm 42:1 says that as deer pant for water, our souls yearn for God. As Strobel points out, one bit of evidence of humanity's yearning is that frequent Google search. A 2022 survey said that three out of four US adults want to grow spiritually. Three quarters of Millennials report that they are searching for a sense of purpose in life. The rise of "nones," that is people identifying as not a member of any religious belief system or congregation, is accompanied by a dramatic decay in mental health and an increase in suicidal thoughts, plans, and completed attempts. Atheism has not eliminated, and never will eliminate humanity's yearning for God, described by seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal. There is a God-shaped hole in the human heart that God alone can fill. 

Strobel's first answer to Is God Real? is "The Cosmos Requires a Creator." His first interlocutor is William Lane Craig. Craig has an MA and two doctorates. Trained in philosophy and theology, he has frequently argued, in formal debates, for the reasonableness of Christian faith. Craig has stood toe to toe with Bart Ehrman, Antony Flew, Lewis Wolpert, as well as various Muslims. Craig has been an invited speaker at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge. For a menu of Craig's debates, see here.

One can watch Craig debate here. I've spent much of my life on campuses. I've attended lectures by legendary scholars, creators, and authors, including Alan Dundes, Bernard Lewis, Salman Rushdie, Lech Walesa, Edward Said, and David Horowitz. I've never heard anyone do a better job of presenting a point of view than William Lane Craig does in this Biola University debate with the late Christopher Hitchens. Many of the comments under the video are from atheists who acknowledge that the debate was carried out at an exceptionally high intellectual level. Strobel's Is God Real? offers just a fifteen-page discussion of Craig's defense of his faith, but those fifteen pages are rich enough that this reader spent much time on YouTube and in other resources seeking out other material by Craig, just to be exposed to his clarity and authority.

Craig traces the roots of his "Kalam" argument back to Aristotle. Centuries after Aristotle, John Philoponus, a sixth-century Christian, argued against Aristotle, and for a beginning for the universe. In the eleventh century, Al-Ghazali, a Muslim, took up the thread of Aristotelian criticism and the universe's origins. The word "Kalam" comes from the Arabic for "science of discourse." Strobel and Craig summarize the Kalam argument as "Whatever begins to exist has a cause," "The universe had a beginning," and "Therefore the universe has a cause." In elucidating each step in this argument, Strobel and Craig get into nitty gritty details of science and math. That the universe had a beginning is disturbing to many atheists. It was so disturbing that atheist scientists attempted to suppress discoveries that suggested a creation (see here)."Perhaps the best argument … that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists," according to astrophysicist C. J. Isham.

"The Universe Needs a Fine-Tuner," argues Strobel in chapter two. A fish doesn't know it is in water. We humans, like a fish in water, tend to take physical reality for granted. We drop something; it falls. We take gravity for granted. We breathe air. We freeze water to make ice. Time passes. Air, water, temperature, time: we take all these phenomena for granted. We may recognize the miracle of a baby's smile or a field of daisies, and not recognize the astounding physics that makes all that possible. Many physicists, though, are not as blind to the miracles of physical reality as the average civilian. We live in a "Goldilocks" universe, they say, where every aspect of physical reality appears to have been engineered to make life possible. If any aspect of physical reality were altered – if gravity or time or forces of attraction and repulsion were altered by the tiniest degree – life would have been impossible.

"Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design," wrote British cosmologist Edward Harrison. "The God hypothesis … is the simplest and most obvious solution to the [fine-tuning] puzzle," wrote former atheist and author Patrick Glynn. Physicist Paul Davies said, "Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astounding that I can't accept it merely as a brute fact. I cannot believe that our existence in the universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama."

Astrophysicist and apparent agnostic Geraint F. Lewis doesn't take physical reality for granted. He recognizes that had the universe been slightly different, none of the realities that we take for granted, including us, would have been possible. "Playing with the laws of physics, it turns out, can be catastrophic for life … the periodic table disappears and all the astonishing beauty and utility of chemistry desert us. The galaxies, stars, and planets that host and energize life are replaced by lethal black holes or just a thin hydrogen soup … not the kind of place that you'd expect to encounter complex, thinking beings like us."

In chapter two, Strobel interviews physicist Michael G. Strauss, author of nine hundred scholarly articles on elementary particle physics. Strauss also has performed experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. "Picture a control board with a hundred different dials and knobs, each representing a different parameter of physics. If you turn any of them just slightly to the left or right – poof! Intelligent life becomes impossible anywhere in the universe," Strauss says. If one were to make the strong nuclear force "just two percent stronger while all the other constants stayed the same, you'd add a lot more elements to the periodic table, but they would be radioactive and life-destroying. Plus, you'd have very little hydrogen in the universe, and no hydrogen, no water, no life." Strauss crosses over from cosmology to theology and argues that the universe indicates not just that it was created by a god, but by the God of the Bible.

Strobel moves from the universe to the human person in chapter three, "Our DNA Demands a Designer." Strobel chats with Stephen C. Meyer. Meyer holds a PhD from Cambridge. He is a bestselling author and he is affiliated with the Discovery Institute. His book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design was named a Times of London Book of the Year. Meyer's 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe was endorsed by several scientists, including occupants of endowed chairs and one Nobel Laureate. You can see those endorsements here.

Self-appointed defenders of Darwin can be fanatical. They rage against not just Stephen Meyer but also Richard Weikart, who has meticulously documented Social Darwinism's influence on Nazism. I strongly recommend chapter three of Is God Real? so that the reader can become acquainted first-hand with Meyer, unfiltered by venomous and misleading attacks. I hope that the reader will move on to Meyer's YouTube channel and of course read his books.

Chapter four, "Easter Showed that Jesus Is God," makes the big leap from an argument for the existence of God to an argument for the validity of the Christian God. Michael Licona wrote his PhD dissertation on the resurrection of Jesus. His 718-page book, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, applies "the methodology of historians who lie outside the community of biblical scholars" to the question of whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. Reviewer Justin Mooney writes that Licona "models his methodological approach on that of historians outside the biblical studies community." The book provides "an excellent example of how a scholar may strive for objectivity in his research."

Licona has something in common with the previously mentioned Ricky Gervais. Licona went through a period of doubt. According to Strobel, after grad school, Licona came close to losing faith. Licona was different from Gervais, though. Licona didn't stop at asking. Licona went in search of answers. This search solidified his conviction that Christianity "rests on a firm historical foundation."

Licona walks Strobel through the methods he used to investigate the resurrection. Historians must seek out sources that are relevant, and must focus on sources that are "early, eye-witness, enemy, embarrassing, and corroborated." Licona lists five minimal facts. Licona's five minimal facts aren't just agreed upon only by Christians, but by non-Christian scholars. For example, Paula Fredriksen is the former William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University. She is currently distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Fredriksen is a former Catholic who converted to Judaism. She rejects Jesus' divinity. Even so, Fredriksen wrote, "The disciples' conviction that they had seen the risen Christ … is historical bedrock, facts known past doubting."

The first of Licona's five minimal facts: Jesus was killed by crucifixion. Second, Jesus' disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them, as recorded in material that can be dated to within five years of the crucifixion, and that probably came from eye-witnesses. These disciples would have known if Jesus did not rise from the dead. With the knowledge they had, they were willing to endure torture and death for their belief in his resurrection. People, like jihadis, may be willing to suffer and die for something that they believe to be true but that they can't prove one way or the other, like the promise of paradise and 72 virgins. The disciples, again, would have known for certain that Jesus did not rise from the dead if he had not. If they had Jesus' corpse, they would have been much less likely to suffer and die for the claim of resurrection. Third, again, historians agree that Paul was an historic personage who persecuted the early church, had a profound conversion experience, and was willing to endure jail and martyrdom as a result of what he believed to be an encounter with the risen Christ. Licona's fourth point is that Jesus' brother James, who had been a skeptic, came to believe in Jesus' resurrection after seeing him. James was martyred for this faith. His martyrdom is recorded in extra-Biblical sources. Fifth, Jesus' tomb was empty. Clearly Christianity's early opponents would have loved to have been able to produce Jesus' body in order to nip the annoying new belief system in the bud. That women were the first to testify to Jesus' resurrection also is supportive of the veracity of the claim. Women were not respected witnesses in the judicial systems of Judaism and Pagan Rome. If one were inventing a story of resurrection, one would chose male witnesses.

Chapter five, "Experiencing God," addresses testimony from persons who believe that they have had encounters with the Christian God. These people range from motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel to Muslims living in countries where knowledge of Christianity is brutally suppressed by the state and by the wider society. Douglas Groothuis received his PhD in philosophy. He has written bestselling books that "explain the world to the church and explain the church to the world." It's interesting that Groothuis' website describes him that way because the phrase has traditionally been used to refer to Jesuits, and Groothuis is a Protestant. Groothuis uses his interpretation of the Bible to assess claims of personal encounters with the divine. For example, in 2002, he published Deceived by the Light, a criticism of accounts of near death experiences. He also assesses claims as to whether or not the experiencer has changed. Such an encounter, he says, will lead to "a new moral awareness and progress, a sense of guidance or calling, a deep sense of belonging to God … increased love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This kind of transformational experience is to be expected if the Christian message is true."

Chapter six asks, "Which God Is Real?" Strobel opens with a quote from Thomas Nagel. Nagel is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. In his book The Last Word, Nagel wrote, "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Chad Meister is a former electromechanical engineer. During a spiritual crisis and while having suicidal thoughts, Meister received a vision that steered him toward Christianity. But he didn't know much about Christianity and he soon found himself waffling between various belief systems, including Hinduism and Mormonism. Meister visited a Christian group called the L'Abri fellowship in Minnesota. There Christians encouraged Meister to devote study to comparing and contrasting all the worldviews he was considering. The L'Abri fellows' questions included, Which belief system "is reasonable? Which is logical? Which is livable? Which one had the best evidence?"

These questions set Meister off on an intense path of study. "I started at square one by asking the question, 'What is truth?'" After a year and a half of study, Meister decided that "Christianity is the most reasonable, the most livable, the best supported evidentially, and it matched my own personal experiences of God." Meister left engineering and became a professor of philosophy and theology, and author of books like  The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity, The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, and The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience.

In order to share with others his method and his conclusions, Meister developed an apologetics pyramid. This systematic approach to Christian belief is very much what one might expect from a former electromechanical engineer. It's not about faith as the result of a blinding flash on the road to Damascus, as occurred to Saint Paul. Rather, it's a systematic, brick by brick construction of a path from doubt to faith. Meister begins, "What is truth?" He moves on to worldviews, contrasting atheism, theism, and pantheism. Meister tests all three against the following criteria: their logic, livability, and internal coherence. Given his interrogation of these worldviews, Meister selects theism as the best choice. He supports theism with previously mentioned phenomena, the fine-tuning of the universe and the Big Bang. He then cites morality. "If there are objective moral values, then God exists." The fourth level of his pyramid is revelation. Meister subjects religious scriptures to the bibliographic test, the eye-witness test, and the test of external evidence. By these objective standards, the Bible comes out ahead of other scriptures. His next level is the resurrection. The pinnacle of Meister's pyramid is the Gospel and all that it offers the believer.

Chapter seven asks "If God is Real, Then Why Is There Suffering?" Peter John Kreeft is a philosophy professor at Boston College. He has published over one hundred books. Kreeft was raised as a Protestant and converted to Catholicism as an adult. Strobel goes out of his way to mention that the Catholic Kreeft is "widely read by Protestants." Strobel quotes Kreeft referring to Saint Teresa of Avila's thoughts about the problem of suffering. I was delighted. Finally, I encountered an ethnic, Catholic woman in a Strobel book!

Kreeft responds to the problem of suffering as Christians have been doing for millennia. He mentions our limited knowledge, and how we might not be aware that suffering is, in some way, contributing to our formation. He cites Augustine's reversal of the question to, "If there is no God, then why is there good?" Kreeft refers to Jesus' suffering on the cross. Jesus, Kreeft reminds Strobel, took on the suffering of every human and experienced it all.

Kreeft remarks that those who insist that suffering disproves the possibility of the existence of God are often themselves comfortable people exploiting others' suffering as props to support their own worldview. Kreeft mentions Corrie ten Boom, an anti-Nazi resistance worker in the Netherlands during World War II. Ten Boom helped eight hundred Jews survive, as well as handicapped people. Ten Boom, her father, and her sister were arrested. Her father and sister died in Nazi captivity. In the Ravensbruck concentration camp, ten Boom's sister said to her, "There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still." Ten Boom narrowly escaped the gas chambers. She wrote about her work after the war. Corrie ten Boom is one example of someone who has known suffering far worse than celebrity New Atheists have experienced, and yet remained a believer.

Chapter eight asks, "If God Is Real, Why Is He So Hidden?" Strobel's interlocutor for this chapter is Kenneth Richard Samples. Samples' brother Frank was a drug addict, convicted criminal, and ultimately, a suicide. Samples asked himself what in his own life was really meaningful. He had a vision in a dream, of a scarred and bruised Jesus. This dream inspired Samples to pursue a better understanding of Christianity. He is now an author and university professor.

Strobel began by asking if Samples had ever felt exasperated by God's apparent absence. Samples responded, "When I was forty-five years old, married with three children, I came home one day feeling sick. It turned out I had contracted a rare bacteria that resulted in a large lesion on my right lung and six brain abscess lesions." Samples' doctor told him that he had a twenty percent survival chance. "Lord, where are you? I'm in a tough spot," Samples asked. Samples points out that a more obvious God might also be rejected. After all, Peter watched Jesus perform miracles but after Jesus' arrest, Peter denied him three times – just as Jesus predicted Peter would. God's alleged hiddeness is part of free will. God is like a rich man entering the dating scene. That man might hide his immense wealth because he wants to be loved for himself, not for his financial assets. God doesn't want to coerce his creations into loving him; he wants to be chosen.

Strobel opens his concluding chapter with two quotes. Atheist Stephen Hawking said, "Heaven is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark." Oxford mathematician John Lennox responded, "Atheism is a fairy story for those who are afraid of the light." Strobel closes his book with an invitation to his reader not just to believe the arguments he presents, but to act on that belief, and to become a Christian.

Is God Real? never states that any of its arguments prove that God exists. Humans are limited and such proof is beyond our reach. Rather, Is God Real? gives the reader a taste of the knowledge and reasoning behind Christian faith. Given the centrality of the Judeo-Christian tradition to our embattled, but very worth cherishing Western Civilization, the book is doing important work that serves the needs of believers and non-believers alike.

* Roger Scruton's status as an atheist is debated. See for example here, with a claim that he was not, but also here, "His secular friends insist that Scruton continued to be an atheist; that his Christianity was merely cultural Anglicanism."

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery