I had a copy of this book, Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity by Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, back in the 1980s (although my edition was colored green). I studied it closely and compiled notes of the main arguments on the typewriter, short bullet points that I memorized for debate. (In fact, I refer to the book in my 2017 book What’s So Confusing About Grace?)
I ran across this gem again today in a thrift store for a dollar: alas, that price was too much for me. But I did pause to take pictures of the book and its table of contents. And while I remember it having skewed priorities, looking at the table of contents brought home anew just how distorted are the priorities of fundamentalist Christian apologetics. Granted, they may have improved somewhat in the last thirty years, though from what I’ve seen, I doubt that.
Anyway, check it out: after a brief introductory section, we turn in section 2 to defending the historicity of Noah’s ark and in section 3 to attacking Neo-Darwinian evolution. And that’s it! That covers the “Reasons” that skeptics should consider Christianity.
Josh McDowell seems like a genuinely nice person and no doubt he has done much good over the years and touched many lives. But books like this have left a terribly legacy, a grossly distorted understanding of what it means for Christianity to be true and what are the hills to die on. To this day, I regularly meet post-Christians who are casualties of this kind of tragically errant message.
