GOD IS

A response to atheist critiques of the Christian faith.

Debut author Grimes suggests that millions of people are slowly becoming “atheists by degree” as “they assimilate the prevailing opinions of our culture, the ideals that are steeped in its humanistic undercurrents.” Combatting atheism explicitly and “postmodern religious pessimism” and “toxic secularism” broadly, his book argues that humanity was divinely created to serve a “glorious purpose.” The author, a devout Christian, also asserts that he was drawn to the religion “not based upon a blind leap of faith” but via “rational justification.” Written in a prose that’s well versed in Western literature and philosophy, the book’s arguments use traditional defenses of the faith that have long been part of Christian apologetics for centuries. Leaning into Thomas Aquinas’ fifth proof, for example, the author looks at the order of DNA nucleotides and can’t help but see “the unmistakable mark of intelligence.” In a similar manner, Grimes provides an array of reasons why he believes the Bible has supremacy over other religious texts. What’s unusual here is not so much the novelty of the author’s point of view but its absolutist convictions. Rather than dwelling on the “mystery of the faith,” to borrow a phrase from Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, the book instead asserts starkly definitive answers on topics that theologians have grappled with for millennia, such as why a just God would allow evil. The book’s endnotes demonstrate a firm command of Christian thought through the ages, and they’re admirably ecumenical in their inclusion of Catholic and Protestant scholars. However, the work fails to fairly engage with Christianity’s critics. Rather than dealing with the subtleties of specific theological, philosophical, or scientific criticisms, the book reduces its opponents to straw men, lumping them together in an “academic and cultural elite” who allegedly “gravitate to what they want to be true and not necessarily to what the evidence demands.”

An earnest but unsophisticated religious defense that offers nothing new to the field of apologetics.