Disappeared belief is a common complaint. A middle-aged man said he had grown up in the security of the authority of the Bible and the church's teaching. Now, in his fifties, belief had gone. Not demolished by scientific argument, or post-modernism, or wiped out by calamity. . .it had simply gone. The moment this happened couldn't be pinpointed, much less the reason. And he couldn't get it back again, for faith had fled.
His honesty was touching because people give many reasons for loss of faith. Greater familiarity with world religions, the study of psychology, even that they broke religious taboos and were not struck down dead! For most, there is no reason. Immersed in the daily grind - the routine of office, factory or home, riding the Celtic Tiger - what is above them and before them is shut out. Then, years later, comes the realisation that they and the Unseen haven't given each other a thought. There is actually nothing so unthinking as average unbelief.
In Ireland, where people are freely admitting to suffering absence of belief, Christian apologetics is having something of a quiet renaissance. It begins by never trying to prove the existence of God, but rather presupposing it. "In the beginning, God. . ." What needs explanation then is not that there is a God but that there is a world, which Genesis 1 proceeds to account for.
Genesis predicates that the seed of religion is in every heart. Everyone indeed seems to have a sense of deity, for we all have an impulse - to which the world's millions of temples bear noisy witness - to bow down and worship. Along with that, we share a belief that things make sense, which is a tease in post-modern Ireland where academics and even theologians join in the mantra that there is no Big Picture, no such thing as universal truth. Yet these movers and shakers of ours believe with all their hearts in their own Little Pictures! Why else would they fight like people possessed to save trees in the Glen of the Downs, or campaign passionately for slither-ways under trunk roads for lizards, or battle to have Christianity banned from schools? The Christian apologist teases them: if history as a whole makes no sense, how can you say any part of it makes any sense?
Then there is the passion for explanation. For every detail there is an explanation, from the fall of apples or the necks of giraffes to the mutation of genes. But apologetics gently asks: what explains the whole? If before the world there was nothing, where did anything come from? Pure accident, they say - the Big Bang. What a tease! An accident is something happening without something, so how can it be an accident?
It's the stuff of hours of knockabout debate, but in apologetics the pace is best kept leisurely and the ambience soothing. Down the road, we will come to the resurrection of Jesus and the reality is, once we reach the point of believing that Jesus rose from the dead, we have the empirical proof of the existence of God. Christians believe in God because he raised Jesus. Facts come before philosophies. We really do live in a world where the dead rise.
Meanwhile, T.S.Eliot's haunting words of epitaph for unbelievers provide both me and the faith-drained friend, always out on the fairways on Sundays, with equal measures of anxiety on my part and hilarity on his:
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."