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 […]