Is God Real? with Lee Strobel

Hey, friend, I'm so excited to be back with you on the podcast again today. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and we are going to do some self-brain surgery around the most important

question you could ever ask.

The question, is God real?

I've got Lee Strobel. He has sold millions of books going all the way back to

the late 1990s when he wrote The Case for Christ.

He's an investigative journalist who was an atheist, and he decided to research

the question, is Jesus real?

Did he really rise from the dead? is he really God?

And in the research process as an honest journalist, he brought himself to Christ.

And that decision ultimately led him to becoming an author, to quitting the

professional journalism and

becoming a pastor and a thought leader around these ideas of apologetics.

And over the course of the last 20 years, 25 years, he's written numerous books.

And the most recent one, as I recently told you on my top 10 book episodes of the year, is God real?

This is without a doubt the best top top-to-bottom look at the big questions of the universe.

Does God show up in science? Does He show up in cosmology and in our DNA?

And why is there suffering?

And ultimately, is God real? Had a great talk, almost an hour,

with the one and only Lee Strobel.

We have a few copies of his book, "'Is God Real?" to give away.

So send me your name and your mailing address, name and your mailing address

to Lee at drleewarren.com.

We'll randomly select a few winners and send out some books.

Copies of Lee Strobel's amazing book, Is God Real?

I'm so excited to have this opportunity to talk with him. I asked Lee to say

a prayer with us before we get started, and let's just get after it.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind

works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready Ready to change your life? Well, this is the place,

Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Father, thank you for the privilege and the honor of sharing your word,

your encouragement with others.

Thank you for Dr. Warren, his life, his ministry, his influence, his impact on people.

Pray for this podcast. It would be encouraging. It'd be helpful.

It'd be inspirational. It would be practical. And we pray for freedom from technical glitches.

And we'll give you all the glory and honor in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Thank you. I'm so excited, friend, to be back with you for another episode of the podcast.

And I've got an incredible guest.

The one and only Lee Strobel is here with us today. Lee, welcome to the show. Thank you.

It's truly an honor and a privilege to be with you.

I'm so appreciative of your ministry and how you have reached out and helped

so many people in so many ways through your story and through your background.

And so it's really an honor to be with you.

Thank you. I want to tell you a little story about you and how you've impacted my life.

I was a neurosurgery resident in Pittsburgh in my third year of training in

1998 when Case for Christ came out.

And it was a difficult time. You know, this may surprise you,

but neurosurgery training is not exactly a bastion of Christendom.

I was struggling a little bit, you know, like a Christian and working around

all these scientists and agnostics and atheists. And as a young man in that

environment, it was difficult for me.

And Case for Christ kind of reinvigorated my faith and kind of gave me just

a little boost of holding on to what I believed in.

And you made a difference for me. That is awesome. That's great. That makes my day.

Good. Tell us an overview. I'm sure most of the listeners know who you are and

have been familiar with your books.

But give us kind of an overview of your story and background before we get into Is God Real? real.

Yeah, my background's in journalism and law.

I was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. I was an atheist,

and I married a woman who was agnostic.

We met when we were 14 years old and got married when I was 20.

She was 19, been married now over 51 years.

And we had a pretty good marriage until she became a Christian.

And it was through the influence of a neighbor who was a Christian nurse.

And she told me that she had decided to become a follower of Jesus,

And I thought, that's it. That's the end of our marriage. I was going to walk out.

And but I thought, you know what, maybe I could rescue her from this cult she's gotten involved in.

Because even as an atheist, I recognize that the resurrection of Jesus was the

linchpin of everything. It was the bedrock of faith.

And so I thought if I use my journalism and legal training, I could disprove

this fairy tale, this mythology in a three day weekend. in.

And so I decided to investigate. Well, I ended up spending almost two years

of my life delving into the evidence of science and history and philosophy.

And ultimately, on November the 8th of 1981, coming to the realization that

in light of the powerful and persuasive evidence I encountered for the truth

of Christianity, it would have taken more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.

Sort of like the scales went like this, you know, and that's when When I realized

this is true, and Leslie pointed out a verse to me, John 1, 12,

said, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children

of God, even to those who believed in his name.

And so I thought, okay, I believe, and now I need to receive this free gift

of God's grace, forgiveness, and eternal life.

And I did that in a prayer of repentance and faith on November the 8th of 1981. 1981.

And my life, like many others, has taken a 180-degree turn and ended up later

against all of my expectations, leaving journalism, taking a 60% pay cut to

join the staff of a church.

And it has been the greatest adventure of my life to follow Jesus.

Wow. And that led to a whole career that you weren't anticipating,

writing books and becoming a subject matter expert on apologetics, basically.

Well, you know, I was a I had printer's ink in my blood. You know,

I wanted to be a journalist since I was in kindergarten. And I love newspapers.

I love journalism. I saw myself as being a lifer when people would say,

oh, I know a lot of former journalists.

I'd say, well, why are they former?

Why would anybody leave that incredible profession? profession.

And so it's totally unexpected for me to now be serving God.

And I'm an evangelist by nature.

I just want to drag as many people to heaven with me as I can.

Well, it kind of explains why you've written all the different books that you

have. So give us an overview of the writing.

You started with Case for Christ, and then you've examined numerous questions

around this idea of, is God real? Is heaven real?

Talk to us about that. Well, you know, I figured I don't have to be the world's

leading expert on every topic because as a journalist,

my role is to find the world's leading experts and ask them the tough questions

I had when I was a skeptic and other skeptics raise and see if they can provide

cogent and clear and compelling answers and sort of put the cookies on the bottom

shelf. That's what a journalist does.

You know, he interviews brilliant people. I don't have to be brilliant.

I can interview brilliant people and then I can present it in a way that everybody

can understand it. Because if I can get it, anybody can get it.

And so I've written The Case for Faith, which looks at the eight biggest objections to Christianity.

The Case for a Creator looks at science.

The Case for Grace, The Case for Heaven, and The Case for Miracles.

And my new book, Is God Real?

Examining or exploring the ultimate question of life.

Wow. It almost feels like, and I said to my podcast listeners the other day,

I did a two-part episode on the best books that I read in this year,

and you were in the top 10 books that I read this year.

And I said, it feels almost like you wanted to put a magnum opus of your life's

work together, and you addressed all the big questions in one place.

Is that close to what motivated you to write this book? Yeah,

well, it was weird because my publisher actually came to me and said,

our tech people have made an interesting discovery.

I said, what? So we've discovered that 200 times a second around the clock,

someone on planet Earth is typing into a computer search engine.

Basically, the question is, God, real?

Wow. And I said, oh, my goodness, if there's that much curiosity,

I'm going to do a book and address it.

And so I drew from some of my previous books. I've added new material, new interviews.

And you're right. It's kind of all, everything's in one place. You know what I mean?

In other words, you don't have to go buy five books, but it's all in this one

book to look at science, to look at history, to look at philosophy,

and to deal with the objections to faith. If God is real, why is there suffering?

If God is real, why does he seem so hidden? And so you're right.

It's kind of a one stop shop, you know, for people who are curious about where

does the evidence point?

Wow. I love how you addressed like not just science, not just religion,

philosophy, history, DNA, like you just covered kind of the whole ground.

And then you finish with the big two questions, you know, suffering and why is God hidden?

And I'll tell you a funny story about that. After reading your book,

I went and got Peter Craig's book about suffering.

And I was listening to the audio book when I ran a half marathon.

My brother-in-law had agreed to run a half marathon for a very long story,

but my trip got canceled and I couldn't go to Texas to run the half marathon with him.

But I had agreed to do it. So I ran it in Nebraska and it was 28 degrees outside.

So I'm listening to the meaning of suffering while I'm running a half marathon at 28 degrees.

And I thought, there's got to be a story in this somewhere. That's perfect.

That's perfect. I love that. You know, and a little bit about what do you think

the most surprising thing is that you learned as you talk to all these experts,

you know, Stephen Meyer and Peter Kreeft and all these other people?

What was the thing that surprised you the most?

Well, you know, as I think back of my days as an atheist, I thought,

you know, if I if all I had to go on.

You know, you look at all the range of evidence. There's about 20 lines of evidence

and arguments that point toward the truth of Christianity.

But if you were to boil it down and back when I was an atheist,

if there were just two things that that I found to be true, one of them is cosmology,

the origin of the universe and the way that points toward a divine creator.

If all I had to go on was that, I would believe that there is a God. God.

And then the resurrection of Jesus convinces me that God is the God of Christianity.

So those two things, it kind of surprised me that you can boil it all down.

You know, yes, the other evidence is persuasive and so forth.

But for me personally, if that's all I had to go on, I'd be a Christian.

It's amazing. Your chapter about cosmology really was fascinating.

I think it's not covered in the media well, the fact that since the 60s at least,

and maybe the 70s, sort of atheism and Darwinism has a physics problem, doesn't it?

Yes. We really, the more science learns, the harder it is to not believe in

an intelligent designer.

That's exactly right. You look at over the last 50 years and how evidence from

science has convinced virtually every scientist in the world that the universe

had a beginning at some point in the past.

Well, that leads to one of the most potent arguments for the existence of God.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

Number two, we now know that the universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe must have a cause behind it. And then you ask,

well, what kind of a cause can bring a universe into existence?

Well, it must be transcendent because it was separate from creation.

It must be spirit or immaterial because it existed before the physical world.

It must be eternal or timeless because it existed before physical time was created.

It must be powerful given the immensity of the creation event.

Must be smart, given the precision of the creation event, must be personal because

he had to make the decision to create, must be creative because,

my goodness, just look at the cosmos, must be loving or caring because he crafted

a perfect habitat for us to flourish in.

And then the scientific principle of Occam's razor tells us there'd be just

one creator. So what do we got?

Transcendent, spirit, eternal, powerful, smart, personal, creative, loving, unique.

That's a description of the God of the Bible.

I mean, it's just uncanny. And that rules out polytheistic religions,

which claim there are many gods, and it rules out pantheistic religions,

which claim that everything is God.

And it rules out Eastern philosophy that says that the universe is cyclical.

So just this one, as you point out, just this one category of evidence,

to me, it's like, how do you get around that?

And I don't think there's a successful way to do it.

This is especially since the physicists have now, like you said,

all sort of agreed that there had to have been a beginning point for the universe.

Right. And before that, one of their arguments for how this all could have happened

was that because there's been enough time for it to have randomly happened. Right.

Exactly. Right. We know now that the universe is exactly the size and age it

would have to have been for God to have created it and have it end up like it

is with us talking on Riverside. Yes.

And, you know, that leads to that second argument, which is the fine tuning of the universe.

You know, you know, if you go out on a summer night and you look up at the sky

and you expect to see all these stars, but instead you see 50 to 100 giant dials in the sky.

And they're all they could be calibrated to one of trillions of possible settings.

But all these dials are absolutely perfectly calibrated so that life can exist.

That's the picture that modern physics gives us in the universe.

The numbers that govern the operation of the universe conspire in an unexpected

way, in a way that defies the explanation this could merely be a coincidence,

to point toward the existence of a supernatural creator.

It's just, it's mind-blowing. I mean, just, I gave you one example.

This is my favorite one, of the force of gravity, because we all know what the

force of gravity is, you know.

So if you imagine a ruler that goes across the entire known universe,

15 billion light years in width, broken down in one inch increments,

that represents the plausible range along which the force of gravity could have been set.

And yet it's set at the exact right place so that intelligent life can exist.

Well, what if we moved it one inch compared to 15 billion light years of width?

Then intelligent life would be impossible anywhere in the universe.

I mean, the precision is so mind-boggling. I asked one scientist,

I said, well, you know, what are the odds this could just happen by coincidence?

And he looked at me and he said, well, we scientists have a term for that.

I said, what? He said, ain't going to happen.

Very scientific term. Yeah, that's right.

I think it's also fascinating that just as the cosmos is so fine-tuned,

like you made this point that if a box fell out of the sky and it contained

all the information in our written languages, is we would all know and agree

that somebody wrote that and dropped it in on us from outer space.

And yet inside our cells, there's a library of information, even more depth and breadth than that.

Like talk about what we learned about the DNA.

It's a fascinating, and again, this is just recent stuff. This is within the

last few decades of scientists have come to this realization.

You know, we have a hundred trillion cells in our body. If you open up any cell

at random and you you were to take out the DNA and uncoil it from that famous

double helix, it would be six feet tall.

And embedded in that DNA is a four-letter chemical alphabet that spells out

the precise assembly instructions for every protein out of which we're made.

Just as English uses a 26-letter alphabet to spell out words,

nature, God's creation, uses a four-letter chemical alphabet.

Alphabet in fact there is more information in every

cell in your body than in 200 years of

the sunday new york times it's just and where does

information come from nature by itself cannot produce information it can produce

patterns you know i live in houston so if i go down to galveston and in the

wet sand i see ripple marks i could logically say that nature produced those

that the The action of the waves has created the ripple marks in the sand.

But if I'm walking down the beach in Galveston and in the wet sand,

I see John loves Mary with a heart around it and an arrow through it.

I wouldn't say, oh, the waves created that. Why? Because it's information.

And whenever we see information, whether it's a computer code,

whether it's a book, whether it's a painting on a cave wall,

without exception, whenever we see information, there is an intelligence behind it.

And I think, again, this is a powerful category of scientific evidence that

points toward the existence of God.

It's incredible. Incredible. I'm a biochemist by training before I went to medical

school, and I really kind of geeked out on your conversation with Stephen Meyer.

I had to get him on the podcast sometime. Oh, you should.

I should. He's such a smart guy. He was on Joe Rogan, and he stood up and defended

the faith right in front of Joe Rogan. It was amazing.

Absolutely. His PhD is from Cambridge. I mean, the guy is brilliant,

but he's really the nicest guy in the world and very unassuming,

but really a pioneer in this area. He's written several books,

including The Return of the God Hypothesis, which I highly recommend.

Yeah, incredible book. I got John Lennox coming up in a couple of weeks.

Oh, he's awesome. We're going to get on the Oxford and Cambridge Circles. Oh, that's great.

So, you know, the other thing I thought was amazing is so you step from the

vastness of space, right, and down to the microcosm of our cells.

And then you step out from there into experience. experience.

Like, not only do we have these amazing scientific discoveries on the large

and small scales, but we also can have a God that we can encounter.

So it reminded me of John Burke.

I've recently had him on the show to talk about his new book about near-death experiences.

And you comment on the fact that people can and do encounter this living God.

Talk to me about that for a second. Absolutely.

I mean, and I tell stories in the book of people I know personally who have

had direct encounters with a supernatural encounter with God,

where God tells them something, they experience something that,

That's totally outside their experience. My friend Nabeel Qureshi,

who was a Muslim, who'd never read the Bible, had a prophetic dream.

And when he asked a Christian, what does this dream mean? They said,

that's a scene from the Gospel of Luke.

I mean, why did you have a dream? So people have, and then as you say,

these near-death experiences.

I did a book called The Case for Heaven. Of course, John Burke's an old friend of mine.

We were pastors together at

a church 30 years ago. And so I interviewed John Burke in my book as well.

And what I love about these near-death experiences is the ones where people

have experiences where they see things or hear things that would have been impossible

for them to see or hear if they had not actually had an out-of-body experience.

One scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal about 21 blind people,

half of them blind since birth, who see things, many for the first time when

they have have a near-death experience.

This one woman who'd been blind since birth was in a car accident and thought she was dead.

And yet she said, I was conscious the whole time. And I watched them trying to revive me.

And I saw birds and I saw plants and I saw people for the first time.

And then when she was finally revived and her soul returned to her body and

she came back to life, she was blind again.

How do you explain that? So I think you're right. There's these corroborated things.

You know, that's what I love about this. As a journalist, as someone trained

in law, I'm looking for corroboration.

You can come up to me and say, oh, I have experience with God. Okay, maybe not.

But when you can provide me corroboration.

Now I'm interested. For instance, there's a phenomenon in the Middle East of

Jesus appearing to people in dreams.

And it's all over the Middle East. It's phenomenal.

And people are coming to faith in Christ as a result. Well, I go,

okay, well, a dream, how do I really know that happened and so forth?

And yet these dreams are not dreams in which people go to sleep as a Muslim

and wake up as a Christian.

In their dreams, they encounter Jesus and Jesus points them towards someone

else who, when they wake up and later they encounter that person who shares the gospel with them.

That's the kind of corroboration. There was a woman in Cairo,

mother of several children, a devout Muslim.

She goes to sleep. She has a dream. Jesus appears to her in her dream.

They're walking together along a lake, and she feels the love and the grace.

It's just overwhelming to her. And she says, Jesus, tell me more about you.

And Jesus says, my friend will tell you. And she said, who's your friend?

And then she realized there's another person walking with them.

She wakes up from her dream. Next day, she goes to the crowded marketplace in

Cairo, and she sees that man from her dream.

She goes up to him and says, you're the man. And he said, well,

what are you talking about? You were in my dream.

Same glasses, same face, same clothes.

And the man said, wait a minute. Did you have a dream about Jesus?

And she said, yes. Well, it turned out he was a missionary. and he opened the

Bible and shared the gospel with her.

That's the kind of corroboration I talk about in my books because I'm a skeptic

by nature and I want to see what kind of corroboration is there,

not just of a dream, but a dream that points to something outside itself.

And we see that in near-death experiences and we see these in these personal

encounters that people have with God.

That's amazing. So let's say that you built the case adequately,

that you convinced me that there is a God and that he created the heavens and the earth and all that.

Well, my next question will be, well, why does it have to be the God of the

Bible? Why does it have to be Christianity?

Like, why not Islam or some other religion? Why not more than one God? Why not?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the cosmology argument argues against multiple gods.

So I think that That gets kind of gets rid of polytheism, gets rid of pantheism,

because pantheism says that everything is God and God needed to be separate from his creation.

So so that gets rid of a lot of options. But you're right. It leaves other options.

Judaism, Islam, other theistic beliefs.

And you go then to history and you look at history and say, did you know,

did Jesus claim to be the son of God?

Was he truly dead after being crucified? crucified? Was he truly encountered

alive by multiple eyewitnesses after his death?

And if so, that establishes that when he claimed to be the Son of God,

he proved it by returning from the dead.

And so I look at the evidence from history and I say, well, there's four things

that convince me that Jesus not only claimed to be the Son of God,

but he backed it up by returning from the dead.

First, the execution of Jesus. He was truly dead.

It's interesting that even the Journal of of the American Medical Association,

a secular, scientific, peer-reviewed medical journal, carried an investigation

into the death of Jesus. And I'll recite to you their conclusion.

Quote, clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates

that Jesus was dead even before the wound to his side was inflicted.

So we have five ancient sources outside the Bible that confirm his death.

So we've got Jesus executed. He was dead.

The second category of evidence is early reports.

You know, many people believe that, as I used to as an atheist,

that the resurrection was a legend.

And we knew it took time for legend to develop in the ancient world.

In fact, the great historian A.N. Sherwin-White said the passage of two generations

of time is not even enough for legend to grow up and wipe out a solid core of historical truth.

So it takes time for legend to develop. But we have a report of the resurrection

of Jesus Christ, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses that

has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death.

That is a newsflash from history that I think so quickly after his death that

you can't say it was a legend developed over time.

Third, we have an empty tomb. And you could give all these reasons why the tomb

was empty, but to me, the clearest evidence is is even the opponents of Jesus

admitted the tomb was empty. That's right.

Because we know from sources inside and outside the New Testament,

when the disciples began proclaiming that Jesus had risen, what the opponents

said was, oh, well, the disciples stole the body.

Well, they're admitting the tomb is empty. They're trying to explain how it got empty.

So everybody believed the tomb was empty.

And then finally, the eyewitnesses. You know, most of the facts of the ancient

world that we accept as being true, it's based on one good source or maybe two sources.

Maybe, if we're really lucky, three sources of information.

And yet, for the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected

Jesus, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources.

Inside and outside the New Testament, confirming and corroborating the conviction

of the disciples that they encountered the risen Christ.

That is an avalanche of historical data.

As a journalist, I mean, that nine sources would be more than enough for you to... More than enough.

In fact, when I was an atheist at Yale Law School, my hero at the time was another

skeptic who was the greatest lawyer in the world.

He was literally in the Guinness Book of World world records as the most successful lawyer on the planet.

His name was Sir Lionel Luck, who he won, get this 245 murder trials in a row,

either before the jury or on appeal, um, um, as a defense attorney.

So he was knighted twice by queen Elizabeth. He was appointed the Supreme court of his nation.

So brilliant lawyer, but he was a skeptic about the re the resurrection until

Until somebody once said to him, well, Sir Lionel, you're the greatest lawyer who's ever lived.

Have you ever thought of using your legal acumen and really examining the historical record?

And he said, no, I haven't, but I will. And so he ended up doing what I ended up doing.

He spent years investigating the evidence. Now, recite to you one sentence he

wrote that summarizes his conclusion.

He said, I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus

Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof.

Which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.

This is from the greatest lawyer ever. By the way, I shared that story at a

church in California where I just moved years ago.

And a woman came up to me afterwards and she said, hey, I'm your new neighbor.

You just moved into our neighborhood. I said, oh, it's great to meet you.

She said, yeah, I'm Sir Lionel's sister.

And she shared with me some of his unpublished writings that he had compiled

during his investigation. She confirmed to me the entire story.

I thought that was a funny incident. Wow.

All right. So you've got us on the mat now, like a confirmed skeptic.

You've convinced us that there's a good argument for God being real and maybe

even that the Christian God of the Bible is the right one.

Now you've got a big question to answer. And I think that's really where it

comes home, Lee, for this podcast.

This podcast came birthed out of the pain after we lost our son,

Mitch, who was stabbed to death in 2013.

And most of the people listening here today are people people who are going

through some kind of suffering, some kind of massive trauma or tragedy.

And they're going to have a question about why, if God is so good and so great, why do we suffer?

Why do children die? Why do we get brain tumors?

Why does all this happen? Why are we supposed to believe that this God you've

described and convinced us he's real?

Why does he love us and why should we care about him? Yeah, and that is the

biggest question. I did a national survey once, and I said, if you could ask

God one question and you knew he'd give you an answer right now, what would you ask him?

And 80% had some permutation of if God is real, why is there suffering?

Now, it's important to keep in mind, we have about 20 lines of evidence and

arguments that point toward the existence of God. This doesn't negate those.

We have that on one side, and skeptics have this and a couple other things on

the other side. And every worldview has to account for the existence of pain

and suffering, not just Christianity.

But I think Christianity has a reasonable explanation.

And basically, in my book, I interview a great philosopher, Dr.

Peter Kreeft, who has written a great book on this. And I think when you read

that chapter, and again, it's hard to give a 25 cent answer to a million dollar question.

You know, how do we answer this question in 25 words or less? It's hard.

So we spend quite a few pages really developing this answer.

But to me, the short answer is this.

God has existed from eternity past as the Godhead, God the Father,

God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, in a perfect love relationship.

So love is the greatest value in the universe.

And when God decided to create humankind, he wanted us to be able to love,

to love him and to love others.

And the only way he could do that would be to give us free will.

Why? Because love always involves a choice.

You know, when my daughter was little, she had a toy called Chatty Cathy and

it was a doll and it had a string on the back.

And if you pull the string and let go, the doll would talk to you.

This is a very primitive technology back then. So she would pull the string

and let go and the doll would say, I love you.

Now, did that doll love her? No, of course not. It was programmed to say that.

It was a mechanical device. It had no choice. choice.

Real love always involves a choice. And so God gave us that choice to love or

not to love. And what has humankind done?

We've turned our back on God. We've hurt each other.

You know, I can take my hand and I can feed a hungry person,

or I can take that same hand and pick up a gun and kill an innocent person.

But if I pick up a gun and kill an innocent person, it's a little disingenuous

at that point for me to say, why does God allow pain and suffering in the world? The problem is us.

Ultimately, the problem is us. And so, of course, it goes much deeper than that.

But I think that's the nub of the answer that I find reasonable and makes sense.

The other thing is, and I know this gets thrown up to people who have crises in their lives.

I almost died about a decade ago, 2011.

My wife found me unconscious. I woke up in the emergency room.

The doctor looked down at me and said, you're one step away from a coma,

two steps away from dying.

And I hover between life and death for a while there.

And so, you know, when you deal with the reality of life and death,

when you deal with real tragedy,

sometimes what Christians will do, and they're well-meaning,

is they'll say, yeah, but Romans 8.28 says that God can cause all things to

work together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

And, you know, we tend to, it's kind of a throwaway line almost.

But, you know, I take Romans 8.28 seriously because it is in scripture.

And here's what Peter Kreef pointed out in my interview with him,

and this was so powerful to me.

He said, Lee, think about this.

God took the worst thing that could ever happen in the history of the universe,

which is the death of the Son of God on a cross.

He took the worst thing that could ever happen, and from that,

he brought out the best thing that could ever happen, which is the opening of

heaven to all who follow him.

And if God can truly take the worst thing in the universe and turn it into the

best thing in the universe, he can take our sufferings and actually draw good

from them in this life or the next.

And I think there's truth to that. I think there's truth to that.

I've seen it in my life where when things are going great and everything's fun,

I tend to forget about God Not a little bit, but when life is hard,

when you're looking up in the eyes of that emergency room physician and he's

telling you one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying,

you know, you take that, you grab a hold of Romans 828 and hold on to it tightly.

That's right. I think that chapter, by the way, that you wrote on suffering,

I think is the best single source on that topic I've ever read.

I've been telling my podcast listeners, if you get one chapter in the book,

that's the one. Go read it.

But I can tell you, you should write a book about the case for why not to quote

Romans 8, 28, the day somebody's kid dies.

I know. It is terrible. What happens, as you point out in the book,

like suffering is one moment in a very long story.

And God's got this big, long narrative arc from the Big Bang and eternity beyond

that, before that, to the redemption and the hope that we have in resurrection.

And what happens over time after suffering is that you begin to gain perspective

on the other things that God is doing around that moment of suffering.

And little things like this, like my entire interaction with you and with the

world after our son died happened because I was trying to find my feet again,

trying to find a way to harness that pain and make it mean something.

Right yeah and and so after ten years I

can say unequivocally that it's equally quantum quantum ly true that my son

dying is the worst thing that's ever happened in my life and had the biggest

impact on the way that I live my life now yeah and the way that I'm a better

doctor I'm a better husband I'm a better father and grandfather because of it

and so suffering over time you begin to able.

To see the reality and the truth on this promises right like it there are good

good things that God can grow out of you from the soil of that suffering.

And so I think that that's a beautiful way that you put it.

And I've changed the approach I take as an apologist.

An apologist, you know, of course, comes from the Greek word to give a defense,

to give a reason for the faith.

And I'm an evangelist, tries to reach people through giving them evidence and

reasons to believe what we believe. But here's what I used to do.

I'd meet someone and they would ask me this question.

You know, I'll ask you a question. Why does, if God's so good and God's real,

why does he allow suffering?

And what I used to do is say, oh, that's a great question.

Let me give you five reasons why. And I've given a little five-point sermon

on why God allows suffering. I don't do that anymore.

You know what I do now? I say to someone, let me ask you a question.

If you could ask God any question and you knew he'd give you an answer, what would you ask him?

And they say, I'll tell you what I'd ask him. Why does he allow suffering?

And then I stop and I say, wait a second, of all the possible questions in the

universe, why did you ask that one?

Well, now we get down to the personal side. Now they say, because we lost a

child in childbirth five years ago, and I want to know where was God when that happened.

Or my wife has just been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and I want to know

where's God in the middle of that.

Now we're getting to the personal side, because most people don't really want

or even need a five-point sermon on why God allows suffering.

They need what I do at that moment is to put my arm around their shoulder and

to pull them close and to commiserate with them and to relate to them and to

try to be Jesus to them in that moment. That's what we need the most.

And I've learned as an apologist and as an evangelist, it's not all about just

giving facts and reasons and evidence and logic. You know what?

People long for Jesus.

People long long for the comfort and the presence of Jesus in their life.

And if we can be that presence in their life, as Peter Kreef said,

if you're a follower of Jesus, it's not like Jesus sits next to you on a park

bench and commiserates with you.

If you're a follower of Jesus, he lives in you.

The Holy Spirit resides in you. He is close to you and you can reach out to

him and he can minister to you.

And I want to be part of that process of ministering to people in their moment of need.

That's amen. That's exactly right. How do we move then from that place where

we want to feel that from Him to a place where we do feel that? How do we get...

From the place where we understand it intellectually to actually being able

to see where he seems to be hidden. Yeah.

You know, I think honesty is part of this. I think too often I see Christians

who go through a tragedy in their life and try to kind of rationalize it away

and paper it over and throw out Romans 8,

28 and kind of pretend like everything's going to be fine.

No, it's hard. It's real. It's painful.

And we have to be honest about that. And that's why I'm so I've written a book,

a much earlier book where I have a chapter about Christian friendships and relationships

and how we need each other in these moments to be Jesus to each other and to

comfort us and bring wisdom and to bring insights and to just sit with each

other in the midst of our pain.

And, you know, it's a process, as you said earlier, it takes time to get to

the place where we're really able to even recognize that maybe something,

maybe something good is coming out of this. You know, I think of Johnny Erickson Tata.

I don't know if you've ever interviewed her, but she is awesome.

I did a TV show years ago and interviewed her and she is, you know,

she was in a diving accident as I think 19 year old teenager and paralyzed from

the neck down, basically paraplegic.

And it's been in a wheelchair for now over 50 years. And she said,

you know, I would rather be in this wheelchair knowing Jesus than walking without him.

And that's a powerful statement. Are you telling me that you would rather spend

51 years without the free use of your limbs and confined to a wheelchair?

If it means knowing Jesus as deeply and profoundly as you have come to know

him, you'd rather do that than to be able to walk.

And yeah, no, that's a perspective she didn't get overnight.

You know, she was suicidal in her early days. So, golly, as Christians,

we need to realize that as our fellow believers and as our non-believing friends

and neighbors go through tragedies in their life, it's going to take time.

Let's be honest about it. Let's let them grieve. Let's let them process it over

time and knowing that God will meet them if they open their heart and mind to them along the way.

That's exactly right. One more thought from you. If you would just pastor us

for a minute, we've constructed a rational basis for using our minds to understand

and believe in God and a personal God and understand how it deals with this

and our suffering and all that.

But there's another category of people right now, a large group of people that

are what they call deconstructing, like people going from a position of faith

to abandoning it. And oftentimes I've seen it.

It seems to revolve around some sort of pain or abuse in the church or something

negative that's happened in their life. And maybe address that for a minute.

What about the listener who's in a mode of deconstructing their faith?

What does Lee Strobel have to say to them?

You know, I sort of did the opposite. I deconstructed my atheism and found faith.

But, you know, there is this trend and it's become kind of popular.

And, you know, one pastor I know had an interesting response when a young man

would come to him and say, yeah, I'm questioning all this.

I'm kind of deconstructing things. And so and his question to them is, oh, what's her name?

Because so often our motivation for deconstructing, quote unquote,

our faith is not purely wrestling with intellectual doubt.

There's a motivation there. And often it's a, you know what,

I want to live my life and my terms. I want to be God.

I want to live a morality that reflects the way I want to live.

And I understand that. I was a hedonist when I was an atheist.

You know, my greatest value was to bring maximum joy into my life,

maximum pleasure into my life. I get that.

But I think we have to look at what are our real motivations in deconstructing?

Why are we deconstructing?

You know, Romans says that there's plenty of evidence out there that God exists.

And yet it's interesting in the Greek there, it talks about how we suppress that.

And the Greek imagery there is suppressing it is the imagery of a pedal.

And so it's like the The awareness of God creeps up in our life, but we press it down.

We suppress it like a pedal in a car and like a brake that we suppress.

And then it creeps up again and we suppress it again.

So sometimes there are other motivations than purely intellectual endeavors.

I'll give you another one. If you look at the famous atheists of history,

Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Freud, Voltaire, Wells, Feuerbach,

O'Hare, every single one of them had a father who died when they were were young,

divorced their mother when they were young, or with whom they had a very difficult relationship.

And as Freud said, the implication is if your earthly father has hurt you or

abused you or disappointed you, you don't want to know a heavenly father.

You're finding reasons not to believe because you don't want to be hurt again.

He's only going to hurt you worse. My goodness, he's the ultimate father.

My father looked at me on the eve of my high school graduation and said,

I don't have enough love for you to fill my little finger.

So I had a very difficult relationship with my dad. Do I think that contributed

to me going down the road to atheism?

Yeah, I think it did. Was I aware of it? No, I wasn't.

And I think some people deconstructing their faith need to ask some questions

about what is my motivation here, really?

Might there be some deeper psychological issues here that might be driving this?

By the way, I'll just add this for somebody who's saying, golly,

I know somebody like that, or golly, that happened to me in my relationship with my dad.

C.S. Lewis had an answer for this. He said, just imagine what the perfect father would be like.

What would he be like? Oh, well, we can all imagine that.

He'd be loving. He'd be kind. He'd be gentle. He'd be your biggest cheerleader.

He'd break you up in his lap and give you a hug.

That is a picture of your heavenly father.

He is the perfect father. He's not a magnification of your earthly father. He is otherworldly.

He is the perfect father. And that helped me get beyond that impediment in my

life. So I think the first thing I ask someone who is, quote unquote,

deconstructing their faith is why?

What's behind it? Let's let's kind of talk about that. Now, that's not saying

they're nefarious reasons all the time, but often there are hidden reasons why people do this.

Secondly, I'd say, you know what? I would say if you're becoming skeptical,

pray the skeptics prayer.

And the skeptics prayer just says, God, I don't believe you're there.

In fact, I'm pretty sure you're not there.

But if you are, I want to meet you. I want to know you.

And, you know, God loves to answer that prayer. You lose nothing by praying that prayer.

15 seconds of your life, but God loves to answer that prayer.

So I say to anybody who's going through periods of doubt, you know, that would be helpful.

And I will say this, that a faith that has gone through the crucible of doubt

is often a stronger faith. has been refined.

And many people I meet who have a really strong faith are those who went through

a period of doubt. I'm thinking of Dr.

Michael Lacona, one of the greatest scholars on the resurrection of Jesus.

He went through a period of grave doubt in his life, and many people have.

But you know what? I tell people kind of going through this process this as

well. Several years ago, I wrote a novel.

My daughter's a novelist, very talented writer. She writes books of fiction,

And she said, Dan, you've written all these nonfiction books.

You need to write like a John Grisham legal thriller.

And I said, OK, I'll give it a try. So I wrote a novel.

Nobody read this book. It was a bomb. Nobody read this book.

But my point is, if you read half of my book, this book of fiction,

and slammed it shut and said, oh, that's Strobel, he's a terrible novelist.

Oh, my goodness. He didn't tie the plot together. He didn't resolve all these

tensions between the characters. and I'd say to him, wait a minute,

you didn't get to the end of the book.

You didn't read the whole book. You got to get to the end of the book.

And to people who are going through a process of questioning their faith,

I'll say, you're not at the end of the book.

Go through that process. Ask the questions. God is not surprised by your questions.

I doubt if you're going to raise an issue that hasn't been raised a million

times before by other people.

And guess what? Today, Today, unlike when I was an atheist, today,

there's a proliferation of resources out there that can help you on a popular

level, really get resolution of a lot of these doubts that come into people's minds.

And so I'd say, keep an open mind, make it a front burner issue in your life

and resolve at the outset that when you get resolution of your questions,

that you'll reach a verdict in your case for Christ.

And, you know, call a ball and a strike. right. Be like an umpire in a baseball game.

Be honest about the evidence and see where it points you. And I mentioned one other thing.

I often say to people, you know, write down on a piece of paper,

if you're quote unquote deconstructing your faith, write down on paper, what are your doubts?

Crystallize them. Say one, two, three, what are they? Because it's easy to have

kind of this general ambiguous sense of uncertainty.

I can't deal with that. But what I can deal with is if If you put them down, here's my doubt.

Number one, if God is loving, why is there suffering? Okay, that's a legitimate question.

Let's explore that. And if you crystallize these questions, then it helps you come to a resolution.

Beautiful. That's amazing. Lee, I feel like I could talk to you for another

hour. I promised you 45 minutes. We're up against it.

And I think without hyperbole, I think Is God Real?

One of the most important books I've ever read. Certainly, I think your best

work. And what are you working on now? What's next?

Well, it's a great question. I don't know. I'm going to be 72 years old.

I'm toward the tail end of my life. And you know what I'm doing a lot these

days? I'm playing with with my grandkids.

And one by one, they're coming to faith in Christ. Oh, that's beautiful.

That's amazing. You've done a beautiful thing. You've given the church and everybody

who's honest with their questions, you've given us a great gift, Lee.

And I can't thank you enough for your time today.

Well, I appreciate you and all you're doing. I'm amazed by how God is using

you and your podcast and your books.

And so Godspeed to you and your ministry. Thank you, my friend. God bless you.

We will send out a few randomly selected winners. You must send me your mailing

address and zip code if you want to be considered for the win.

Please send us an email, Lee at Dr. Lee Warren, with your name,

mailing address, and zip code, and we'll select a few winners for the amazing book, Is God Real?

Thanks again to Lee Strobel. Don't forget to subscribe to this YouTube channel,

and please click on the links to check out our sponsors who make all this possible.

God bless you, friend. Don't forget, you can't change your life until you change

your mind. The good news is you can start today.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren. We're praying for you. God bless you.

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