In the soon to be blockbuster best-seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I tell the story of “the clicker.” Yes, that clicker, more commonly known as the remote control. As you’ll read in the book, the clicker is a great tool for engaging popular culture with our children, and teaching them the incredible explanatory power of the Christian worldview. An example comes from a movie we recently watched called Conspiracy. This gut wrenching film dramatizes a day long conference that took place on January 20, 1942, where Nazi officials discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish question.” This solution was of course the attempt to murder all Jews in Germany, and it was hoped beyond. The cold, calculating demeanor of most of the participants as portrayed in the film is chilling. To figure out who would be included, they discussed blood percentages, parentage, and whether they were German citizens or not. The goal was complete extermination, and it was difficult at times to realize they were talking about human beings, not animals or something less. The clicker got a good workout.
Many people look at the Holocaust and have a difficult time reconciling such enormous evil with the existence of God. There could certainly not, they think, be a good and loving God who would allow such a thing. There is no doubt this is a complicated and difficult issue, as “the problem of evil” always is. Getting rid of God, however, doesn’t solve the problem, but in fact only makes it worse. Remember, if we eliminate God from the picture, we are left with a solely material universe in which there can be no ultimate purpose or meaning in things, that is outside of our own perceptions or preferences. We are all, then, just random molecules that fell together by chance for no reason at all. The only explanation for why a Holocaust would happen in such a universe, or anything else for that matter is . . . just because. Things can’t point beyond themselves to anything bigger, to anything that can transcend the things because there isn’t anything bigger or transcendent. All you have, as philosophers call it, are brute facts. Cold comfort in the face of evil that is.
For my family, the points I kept pounding home via the clicker (stop, comment, reflect, play), is that these horrific events, and the thoughts and ideas expressed by the participants in the conference, all point beyond themselves to something much bigger, something that really exists in the universe and in us. In other words, none of us responds to incidences of such evil with a nonchalant, it’s only a brute fact—Nothing here to see, move on. In fact, we are repelled by them. As I referred to the film above, our guts are wrenched within us. We yearn inside for justice to be done, wrongs to be righted.
Where do these feelings come from? What best explains them? The atheist’s view of reality, and the materialism that inspires it, explains absolutely nothing, at all. In fact, the atheist refuses to even consider the question, and will in fact poo poo it as a meaningless question. Of course it’s meaningless; everything in their universe is meaningless. All is preference, end of story. Thankfully, we are not left in the dark. God has revealed to us why we feel this longing for justice, how we know right and wrong, good and evil really do exist, that they are real things that indeed point beyond themselves. It is all found in the first three short chapters in our Bible. We were created good in God’s image, fell through our pride of wanting to be like our creator, and the battle of good and evil ever since has been played out in the history of redemption. This is not a difficult persuasion job for parents, not even close.
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