A Shot of Faith {To the Head}: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists
by Mitch Stokes, Ph.D., published by Thomas Nelson, 2012.
Dr. Stokes has had a double career that prepared him beautifully to write about the ideas in this book. In his earlier life he earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering and worked for an international firm where he earned five patents in gas turbine technology. Pretty impressive. But then he must have gotten bored or something, because he went off and earned an M.A. in religion at Yale and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame. He is now a college senior fellow in philosophy. So, whatever you may think about his views, you can’t say that he doesn’t have the background to write about them.
Stokes takes on the big issues that bedevil us today: the origin of life, the problem of evil, the need for faith. You may think as you start reading that he’s being flippant and shallow in his treatment, but keep going. He does a great job of treating these heavy subjects with wit and perception. He would never say that his ideas are original, but I do think that he treats his subjects in an original way. I don’t believe that you could read this book as a Christian and not have your faith strengthened or as an unbeliever and not be brought up short by Stokes’ observations. He’s great at taking on the difficult questions and showing that there’s more to the answers than you might think. His handling of the “problem of evil” question is particularly masterly. “How can you believe in a God who allows such suffering in the world?” tends to make Christians tongue-tied, but this question itself is meaningless if there isn’t a God. If we live in a random, meaningless universe then we shouldn’t be concerned with the problem of evil at all. If there is no God, there is no evil. This is not to say that there isn’t a question to be answered here, but it isn’t what an atheist might think.
One test of a book of this type, I think, is in whether or not you as the reader are inspired to read further. And I do indeed want to go on in these subjects now, particularly with the philosopher Stokes studied under at Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga. Who knows–there might be a future post on one of his books.