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Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code wasn’t the first historical fiction where the history was just as fictional as the story. Émile Zola beat Brown by over a hundred years.Zola was a famous French writer and avowed atheist whose novels and other works had won popular acclaim. In 1892, he decided to write a novel about the amazing cures said to be taking place in the waters of a spring in Lourdes, France, where the Virgin Mary had reportedly appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous eighte …

Engaging with Atheists Through Respectful Dialogue From 2009 to 2011, I traveled the country as a pro-life missionary, engaging students at public universities in dialogue about abortion. I remember one student I met, named Violet, who said that she resented pro-lifers’ “pushing their religion” on her. I said that my case against abortion didn’t rely on religion, but that even if it did, why should that matter? Violet retorted, “Because I’m an atheist! I bet you can’t even give me one good reas …

One constructive approach would be to enter more fully into the celebrations ourselves and, by our example, invite secularists to consider the sacred meaning of the Christian seasons they celebrate without reference to Christ, reminding them that he is the reason for the seasons. Let’s look at Christmas as an example. Christmas is the most publicly celebrated Christian holiday in the United States. Christians, non-Christians, and secularists alike observe the day in some way—if only as a federal …

No matter how well you present the evidence for God, or how swiftly you can answer the skeptic’s objections, you’ll still find that many people resist the evidence. Human beings are complex, and it’s important to recognize that a failure to persuade someone does not mean that the arguments and evidence presented were poor. A good argument should not be judged by the number of people it persuades, but rather by how it accords with objective standards of reason and evidence.Do not lose heart when …

Often this slogan is wielded after a theist uses a cosmological argument. The skeptic points out that God is made an arbitrary exception to the causal principle. Surprisingly, both philosophically engaged atheists and popularizers have offered this slogan in one form or another. In his book Breaking the Spell, the atheist Daniel Dennett writes, “The Cosmological Argument . . . in its simplest form states that since everything must have a cause the universe must have a cause—namely, God.” From …