Pub apologetics
One would not naturally associate a crowded pub in Birmingham with a cerebral debate on intelligent design, but that is what happened at ‘Sceptics’ in Birmingham in January.
Andy McIntosh of ACM Creation and professor at Leeds University, said, ‘The organisers estimated 130 people were packed into the pub room, which is right in the centre of Birmingham.
‘About 60-70 stood at the back, and some were lined up outside with the door open. Not a place I would particularly choose, but that’s where the people are and that’s where they have the Sceptics meeting.
‘And they listened. I said atheism has no coherent answer to the science that distinctly points to design (Romans 1:20) and no answer to rationality’. Prof. McIntosh said those attending asked many questions, which would have gone on all night — questions on science, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and even ‘What are you going to do for eternity in heaven?’
Prof. McIntosh added, ‘There was a thoughtful one concerning suffering, where a father spoke of the loss his wife had suffered of an unborn child that had an abnormality — so where is God in this? I used that question to end the evening, talking on the sin that has ruined the world, and that the creator God has come into the world to take our sins on the cross.
‘I offered copies of Prof. Verna Wright’s booklet The relevance of Christianity in a scientific age, asking them to come to me afterwards, thinking no one would take them in an audience like that but they all went as many came up to have a discussion’.
To cap it all, a man told Andy McIntosh that he had become a believer — through reading Prof. Richard Dawkins’ book The God delusion! He had realised just how lacking in substance the author’s arguments really are, and turned to Christ.
