For those who care about the faith of the next generation, the book Sticky Faith is a must read. Youth experts Kara Powell and Chap Clark record the findings of the "College Transition Project,” which is a six-year research study of over 500 graduating seniors. Here is their stated goal: “To better understand the dynamics of youth group graduates’ transition to college, and to pinpoint the steps that leaders, churches, parents, and seniors themselves can take to help students stay on the Sticky Faith path” (18).

According to their research, between 40 and 50 percent of kids who graduate from a church or youth group will fail to stick with their faith in college. Only 20 percent of those who left the faith planned to. That means 80 percent of those who abandoned the faith were planning to stick with it. On the positive side, they estimate that between 30 and 60 percent return in their late twenties. But this still means between 40 and 70 percent of students who leave their faith never return.

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Recently I spoke at an apologetics conference alongside William Lane Craig, arguably the leading Christian philosopher and apologist today. He discussed the evidence for God in the final talk of the “On Guard” conference. Craig offered four arguments for the existence of God, which I will briefly state below.

Objections are raised to these, and Craig has responded to these objections on his web site www.reasonablefaith.org I also expand on these arguments (except the first) in my recent book, Is God Just A Human Invention? But here they are laid out briefly along with simple comments for understanding.

ARGUMENT 1: THE CONTINGENCY ARGUMENT

This argument stems from the question of why there is anything at all. Why does the universe exist?

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The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those historic events theologians and Christian apologists have worked very hard to "prove."  And rightly so.  No less a biblical authority than the apostle Paul says the faith of all who follow Christ is "futile" if Christ has not been raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15:17).  So it's not enough to believe Jesus is some kind of life force that fills all people, and it's certainly not acceptable to conjecture that God is going to rescue humanity apart from the risen Christ.  Either Jesus is alive today  and the Christian faith is true, or Jesus is still dead and the Christianity is a joke.

The good news is that there is enough historic evidence to reasonably believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place as the Bible describes.  There's the proof of the empty tomb, the proof of hundreds of eyewitnesses, and the proof of transformed believers who sacrificed everything for what they knew to be true.

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