engaging atheism on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heif Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast, we're talking about the problem of atheism, the problem of unbelief and how

to engage a culture where the unbelief of atheism is increasingly in the forefront of what we're

dealing with as Christians. Our guest

on the podcast this week, I'm happy to say, is Sean McDowell. He is a professor of apologetics

at the Talbot School of Theology and an author, and a man who has spent a lot of time engaging

atheists. And so we're really glad that you're here with us this week on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I want to ask you a few questions about this issue of engaging atheists.

And the first question is, what are some of the reasons that Christians are intimidated about

engagement with atheists? This is a great question, because I found a lot of Christians are intimidated.

That's the best word, to have conversations, to read their books.

And I think the main reason is because Christians don't really know what they believe and why.

And studies have actually shown recently that atheists know more about world religions.

They know more actually facts related to religion than Christians do. So I think since we've in the

church a lot of times love God with our hearts, love God with our souls, but don't really love God

with our minds and take seriously

questions like, why does God allow evil? How do we know the Bible is true? How do science and faith intersect? How is Jesus the only way? We're afraid that an atheist is going to press us on this. We won't have an answer and we'll kind of look bad. So as a result, we just hang back. So to me, I think one of the most helpful things

to gain the confidence to not be intimidated is just simply to know we believe in why. But second,

also a lot of Christians are intimidated because they don't know any atheists. They've seen

stereotypes. They've read their tweets. They've seen their blogs, so they feel like a certain stereotype of an atheist might hate Christians or something.

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