In chapter one, Introduction: Hope, Despair, and Knowing Reality, Groothuis states that “the very concept of objective truth is under fire today.” Yet without a belief in objective truth men die in despair. The late psychiatrist Victor Frankl who was a prisoner in Hitler’s death camps wrote “The gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinda, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared….at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosopher.” Frankl noted that those captives with a sense of meaning that reached beyond their immediate experiences maintained hope and dignity, even in the Nazi hell. Those without the benefit of this conviction tended to atrophy and die in the pressure cooker of evil, even if they were spared the gas chambers.
It was the hope that belief in objective truth that enabled the tortured to survive. Sometimes it takes tragedies like 911, to clear away the disbelief in objective truth. David Brooks, who at one point called himself a “recovering secularist” who believed he had been too easy on religion, in response to 911 wrote “In a world in which religion plays an even larger role, this approach is no longer acceptable. One has to try to separate right from wrong.”
Groothuis believes that a compelling case can be made that what matters most for everyone in this life and beyond is one’s orientation to Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnation of God. It is the work of apologetics, the discipline of defending and advocating Christian theism to prove this proposition. In Christian Apologetics, Douglas Groothuis will seek to defend and advocate Christian theism.