As Christians in our increasingly skeptical and at times even hostile culture,

it's important that we know how to explain what we believe and defend those beliefs with good reasons.

The encouraging news is that making the case for Christianity really isn't as hard as we often assume it is, and many unbelievers

are more open to the truths of Christianity than we might expect.

In our interview today, I'm talking with Neil Shenvi, a theoretical chemist and apologist,

about why we should not stop advocating for the truthfulness of what we believe, even in our post-truth

age.

We also discuss why so many atheistic arguments are surprisingly weak, and how God used

a book by C.S. Lewis to bring Neil to faith in an unexpected way.

And no, it wasn't mere Christianity. Neil is the author of Why Believe, a reasoned approach to

Christianity from Crossway. Let's get started. Well, Neil, thank you so much for joining me today

on the Crossway podcast. Thanks, Matt. Good to be here. So today we're going to talk about apologetics.

This, for some people, energizing, exciting topic, for other people, maybe intimidating

and fear-inducing kind of issue. I want to get into some of those dynamics, actually,

as we go on. But I wanted to start with something that you say early in your book.

You write, when discussion wanders into the area of religion,

otherwise calm and sensible people seem to lose their ability to think rationally

or to use lowercase letters, which I just found such a perfect summary of the way that discussions about God so

often go in our culture today. And I think anyone who's talked about God with non-believers

either around a dinner table, maybe at a holiday, or on Twitter or on Facebook, they're going to

resonate with what you just said there.

So I guess my first question then is something that I think we sometimes hear in our culture today,

...