Josh's Reviews > Letters From a Skeptic

** spoiler alert ** I was an atheist when I picked up this book, but by the end of it I found the arguments so compelling that I had to turn away from my sinful ways and accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior!

Just kidding. I'm still an atheist.

This book is the kind of nonsense youth pastors give to impressionable teens to squelch their questions and confirm them in the faith. I know this because a youth pastor gave this book to me when I was fifteen, and I'm just now getting around to reading it. In the first few correspondences in the book I kept wondering if Boyd would eventually just break out Pascal's wager as though it is an effective argument. I was not disappointed.

I suppose a couple recurring themes are that apologists are really only trying wear down their target to a "maybe." Once they get their victim to agree that maybe God exists, it is like the frog in the gradually-warming water. The frog remains motionless until it is cooked to death. This is probably why this tactic works so well on young people in Christian families who have questions: they already believe in God and so it is easy to lead them along a particular line of thinking to get them to conform. Answer enough of their questions and they will give themselves permission to be life-long slaves to Christ, and try to spread these bad memes to other naive marks.