"5 Reasons: Why I Still Believe in God" - FOREWORD

FOREWORD

by C. Richard Wells

In his well-known autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis relates that before he experienced conversion to Christian faith, he experienced conversion of another sort, a more radical sort actually—he became convinced of the existence of God. He became, in short, a theist, rather than an atheist (which he pretended for a while to be) or an agnostic (a position he found more defensible intellectually, but no more satisfying).

Lewis resisted this conversion to theism, not least because he realized that, alas, if it were really true, that if anything like the God of the Christians really existed, then his life would change forever. “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God,’” Lewis recalled, but “to me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”¹

Lewis’ experience perhaps explains why philosophers and theologians over the centuries have spilt so much ink on arguments for and against the existence of God. God certainly has more to do than merely to exist, as George MacDonald somewhere said, but if such a Being does exist, the implications are immeasurably immense. Anyone might glibly answer a pollster’s question about belief in God—ninety percent plus of Americans say “yes” every year—but no one can truly confront the reality that (as Francis Schaeffer phrased it) “He is there,” and take it lightly.

For that very reason, Dr. Randy Stewart’s 5 Reasons is, in a manner of speaking, dangerous. Like the scholars, Dr. Stewart has examined, thoroughly examined, the evidences for belief in God. But more importantly, like Lewis, he has come to grips with the disturbing consequences of believing—or not believing. And now, most disturbingly, he invites you to come to grips with God yourself. He is your guide through the “whether” of God’s existence, and he is your companion through the “so what?”

As to the “whether,” Dr. Stewart is a skillful guide indeed. He presents complex ideas in easily digestible form. His writing proves the point of Professor Stephen Evans, whom he quotes (Day 12), that “Belief in God is genuinely coherent with all we know about ourselves and our universe.”

As to the “so what?,” Dr. Stewart has passed this “dangerous” road himself and found that it leads at last to a heavenly court. It may feel in the beginning like “the mouse’s search for the cat,” but it ends in a room full of Brie.

A thousand years before Jesus Christ, and three thousand before C. S. Lewis or Randy Stewart, King David declared, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14.1).  If God is there, and we deny Him, we are fools. But what should we call ourselves if we never bother to ask the question?

C. Richard Wells – past president and professor of Pastoral Theology at The Criswell College in Dallas, Texas.

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¹C.S. Lewis, Inspired by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 227.