Who Made God

Who Made God? (2003) by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler – Zondervan Publishing

There are questions people ask because they are curious.

There are questions people ask because they are confused.

And then there are questions people ask at eleven o’clock at night after somebody says, “Yes, but if God made everything…”

Who Made God?, by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler, published by Zondervan in 2003, takes on the sort of questions that tend to turn an ordinary conversation about religion into a three-hour discussion involving philosophy, cosmology, morality and somebody eventually saying, “Hang on, define ‘exist’.”

This is a book of Christian apologetics, concerned with defending and explaining Christian belief through argument, reasoning and responses to difficult questions.

Which means it does not merely ask you to believe something and move along quietly.

It expects questions.

Rather a lot of them.

Does God exist?

Why is there suffering?

Can faith and reason coexist?

What about other religions?

What exactly does Christianity claim, and why should anyone think those claims are true?

And, inevitably:

Who made God?

It is the sort of question that has ruined many otherwise pleasant cups of tea.

Zacharias and Geisler approach these issues from a Christian perspective, aiming to show that belief need not be intellectually detached from evidence, logic and philosophical argument.

Whether the reader agrees with every answer is, naturally, another matter.

That is partly the point.

Books like this are most interesting when they make you stop, disagree, reconsider, argue with the page and then realise you have somehow spent forty minutes thinking about causation when you were supposed to be doing something else.

There is something quite appealing about the confidence of apologetics books.

They stride cheerfully into questions that philosophers, theologians and scientists have been debating for centuries and say, in effect:

“Right. Let’s sort this out.”

An ambitious afternoon.

The writing is intended for ordinary readers rather than professional philosophers, so the arguments are presented accessibly and with an emphasis on questions people actually ask rather than requiring prior knowledge of several dead Greeks and a notebook full of Latin.

That makes it suitable for Christians wanting to understand the intellectual foundations of their faith, readers exploring religion more generally, or sceptics curious to see how Christian thinkers respond to familiar objections.

It also has considerable potential for anyone who enjoys arguments in the proper sense of the word: not shouting, but examining claims, evidence, assumptions and conclusions.

Ideally without anybody throwing the book.

Published in 2003, it comes from a period when debates about faith, science, secularism and religion were becoming increasingly prominent in popular culture, giving the book a distinctly early twenty-first-century apologetics flavour.

The questions, of course, are considerably older.

Human beings have been asking what exists, why anything exists and what any of it means for a very long time.

So far, consensus remains elusive.

This copy is in Good condition, making it a solid reading copy for anyone prepared to wrestle with some large questions.

Ideal for readers interested in Christianity, theology, philosophy of religion, apologetics or anyone who has ever started a sentence with “But surely…” and accidentally lost the rest of the evening.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where the ultimate origins of the universe remain unresolved, but the origin of this particular copy is at least known to be a second-hand bookshop.

ISBN: 9780310247104
Condition: Good

Keep browsing: See more Religion books Other books by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler