There's a question that has followed people of faith for generations: Can God really be known? And right behind it, a quieter one: What do I do when someone tells me He can't?
In recent years, voices like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — often called the "New Atheists" — have argued loudly that belief in God is not just mistaken, but irrational. Those arguments found large audiences, especially online. And for some people in the pew, they raised real questions.
But Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, who was himself an atheist before becoming a Christian, has spent decades examining those arguments carefully. His conclusion? The New Atheists overpromised. They claimed science had disproved God. It hadn't. They claimed faith was blind. It isn't. They claimed C. S. Lewis was a relic. He isn't.
What's worth noticing is that people who have walked with God for fifty years already knew something McGrath would later put into words: faith that has been tested over a lifetime doesn't collapse easily.
When Arguments Couldn't Take It Away
Think back over the decades. You've likely heard variations of this challenge before — not always from academics, but from neighbors, family members, maybe even your own doubts in a dark season. If God is real, why did this happen? Why doesn't He show Himself more clearly? Why do intelligent people disagree?
Those are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers. But here's what a long life of faith tends to teach: God doesn't require you to have a perfect argument before He shows up. He has a habit of showing up anyway.
C. S. Lewis understood that from the inside. He was an atheist who became a Christian not because someone out-argued him, but because the evidence — philosophical, experiential, and literary — accumulated until he could no longer honestly resist it. He didn't stop thinking. He thought harder. And it led him home.
The Limits of "Disproving" God
Alister McGrath makes a point that's worth sitting with: you cannot disprove God the way you disprove a math error. God is not a hypothesis to be falsified in a laboratory. He is a Person who acts in history, in community, and in the lives of people who call on His name.
Science, at its best, describes how the world works. It is remarkably good at that. But "how" and "why" are different questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe operate by ordered, knowable laws? Why does beauty move us? Why does love feel like it matters?
These aren't questions science can resolve. They're questions that point toward a Maker — and for generations of believers who have knelt in prayer, sung through grief, and watched God keep His word, the answer has been unmistakable.
What a Lifetime of Walking with God Actually Proves
You don't have to win a debate to know what you know. And what many of you know — after decades of marriage, loss, answered prayer, grandchildren born and buried, seasons of drought and seasons of abundance — is that God has been faithful.
That's not a feeling. That's a record.
The Psalms are full of this kind of testimony. Men and women who had been through enough to be cynical, choosing instead to say: I have seen the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Their faith wasn't naive. It was hard-won.
McGrath's scholarship confirms what your life experience has already taught you — that the case for God has not weakened under pressure. If anything, the more carefully it's examined, the more it holds.
For Those Who Are Still Asking
If you're reading this and you're still working through the questions — that's not a failure of faith. That's honest seeking. And Jesus has never turned away an honest question.
What He asks is not that you resolve every philosophical objection before you come to Him. He asks that you come. That you bring what you have — even if it's only a small, uncertain faith — and see what He does with it.
Some of the most confident believers in any room are the ones who started with the most doubt. They kept asking. They kept seeking. And they found.
A Word from Our Church
At Outpouring Worship Center, we believe that faith and honest thinking belong together. We are a people who have gathered in this community for over fifty years, and in that time, we have seen generation after generation encounter God — not because they stopped asking hard questions, but because they kept bringing those questions to the One who can answer them.
Whether you've walked with God for sixty years or you're still figuring out what you believe, there is room for you here.
If you'd like to connect with someone at OWC, we'd be glad to hear from you. Text FAITH to 231-545-4789.