I think the most intriguing aspect of God in Proof, by Nathan Schneider, is his personal story. Schneider describes his early quest for proof of God as it relates to the separation of his parents. He says of this sad moment: “That night my world bifurcated” (15). Schneider kept a journal during his teen years (that is amazing enough to me) and writes of going to a local Baptist church with a friend. He wrote in his journal: “I felt like we had just entered hostile territory” (15, italics are all his). He adds that God was a question he stayed clear of at first but he was haunted by reading of The Brothers Karamazov. The Russian classic caused him to remember the monk Zosima speaking of his love for God. He was more than intrigued.

He provides one of the best descriptions of millennials that I have read when he writes:

I wrote about having the feeling of “skin hurting”– when I felt like there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make my life bearable again. […]

Anyone who has spent any time at all reading the proofs, both for and against belief in the existence of God, knows the essential arguments. They can be enumerated, in one form or another, as follows:

1. Cosmological
2. Dialectical
3. Historical
4. Ontological
5. Phenomenological
6. Sociological
7. Teleological
8. Transcendental

It proves helpful, at least for the non-academic reader, to state what these proofs are in rather simple ways. I will also give at least one reason why opponents find the argument(s) not convincing.

The cosmological argument “relates to the existence of the universe” (250). This argument starts with cause. The cause of the universe must be (a) God beyond the universe. This argument can be refuted by those who reject it in numerous ways. For example, “The universe is unexplainable without God, so it is simpler not to believe in God’s existence” (250). In the end the argument comes down to this: It is better to believe in something, or Someone, than nothing!

The dialectical argument relates to the processes by which we reflect on the place of meaning. The consequences, for example, of not believing are so drastic that one has no […]

Books by professional philosophers, and Christian apologists who argue for God and basic faith, are legion. But Nathan Schneider’s God in Proof is neither an argument for God or against him, at least in the normal way we think about this question. This is an honest account of a young man who became a Christian under most unlikely circumstances and then sought to find evidence to support his conversion. The end result has been a journey, an interesting and important one to the way I understand the questions and the millennial generation both.

Yesterday I gave you an account of Nathan Schneider’s initial experience that drove him to seek for theistic proofs. It is, to say the least, a strange and wonderful sort of story. Listen again to him as he describes what he did after he had this enlightening encounter:

I didn’t tell anyone about this strange, problematic unsatisfying thought then, not would I know what to say if I had. But the germ of a proof was in me, where, treasure-like–a blueprint for my own […]

Rarely do I read a book that is so odd, and yet so completely fascinating, as Nathan Schneider’s new God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Schneider, a very inquisitive and bright young man (b. 1984), comes from a truly millennial experience. His parents are divorced and they left him with a background that created a “multiple choice” paradigm when it came to religion. His mom was/is a spiritual seeker who had/has no interest in Jewish or Christian views of God. His dad is just disinterested.

Schneider’s account is a moving, enjoyable and an intensely interesting tour of the history of arguments for and against the existence of God. His journey, rooted in his broken childhood, led him to “step out [one November] into what sun remained in the day, [seeking] for a proof for the existence of God” (ix). Here is how he describes the beginning of a journey that, so it seems to me, has only just begun:

I was a freshman in […]