3 Ways to Respond to Academic Critiques of Christianity

At the moment of writing, I am at Cambridge University. I have just had the privilege of hearing Dr. John Lennox lecture to a room full of eager students at Jesus College. Lennox is a world-renowned mathematician, scientist, and bestselling author of several books, including God, AI, and the End of History, Can Science Explain Everything?, and Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix? Lennox has taught at Oxford for decades. He heard C. S. Lewis deliver lectures in 1962. Many readers will know him from his public debates with some of the most influential atheists of our age, including Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. Those exchanges have been viewed millions of times online.

Students packed into the Webb Library to hear the veteran apologist reflect on a lifetime spent in the academy. The evening felt less like a formal lecture and more like an intimate fireside conversation between a wise grandfather and the next generation of Christian scholars.

The line by Lennox that stayed with me afterward was simple: “Don’t fear them.”

Lennox once spoke these words to another Christian apologist before a public debate with an outspoken opponent of Christianity. After decades of engaging critics, he remains convinced that Christians have no reason to be intimidated in the academy. They can answer secular objections with confidence, intellectual honesty, and charity.

This article seeks to echo Lennox’s encouragement. Christians have no reason to be intimidated in the academy, nor should they feel out of place walking across a university campus with a Bible under their arm and confidence in the faith they profess.

A short intellectual history of the university

Earlier this summer, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, led several colleagues and me on a tour of Cambridge University to show how deeply intertwined faith and science have been throughout the university’s history.

One stop in particular left a strong impression on me. We arrived at a pub called The Eagle. Mounted on the outside wall is a plaque bearing the words, “The Secret of Life.”

For decades, The Eagle served as the local watering hole for scientists working at the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. It was here, on February 28, 1953, that Francis Crick burst through the doors during lunch and announced that he and James Watson had “discovered the secret of life.” They had just determined the double-helix structure of DNA in the laboratory directly across the street. It remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of science.

What many tourists never notice, however, is what stands just across the road. Above the entrance to the original Cavendish Laboratory is a Latin inscription placed there in 1874 by the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell: Magna opera Domini, exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus. It is taken from Psalm 111:2: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” Maxwell believed scientific investigation was an act of studying God’s creation. Long before DNA’s structure was discovered, he intentionally placed Scripture over the entrance to one of the world’s greatest scientific laboratories.

The symbolism is difficult to miss. The Cavendish Laboratory would go on to become one of the most important scientific institutions in history. It was there that the electron was discovered in 1897. It was there that the atom was first split in 1932. It was there that the structure of DNA was uncovered in 1953. Some of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries emerged from a laboratory whose entrance reminded every scientist who walked through its doors that creation belongs to God.

That history is worth remembering because it reminds us that Christians have not always been outsiders in the academy. On the contrary, they helped build it. For centuries, Europe’s universities were explicitly Christian institutions. Theology was known as the “queen of the sciences,” not because it replaced the other disciplines but because it provided the framework within which they were understood. To study chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, or biology was, in many respects, to study the orderly world God had made.

The intellectual landscape began to change during the Enlightenment as confidence in autonomous human reason grew and skepticism toward religious authority increased. In the nineteenth century, higher criticism and Darwin’s theory of evolution accelerated the movement away from confessional universities. By the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly throughout Western Europe and North America, many universities had become overwhelmingly secular institutions.

Today, scientific materialism has become the dominant intellectual atmosphere across much of higher education. Materialism is not simply the practice of science; it is the philosophical belief that the material universe is all that exists. As Carl Sagan famously declared, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”¹ Many students now inhabit a culture in which scientific explanations are treated not merely as the best explanations of the natural world, but as the only legitimate form of knowledge. Questions of purpose, morality, meaning, and God are often dismissed before the conversation even begins.

This is the intellectual environment that Christian students increasingly inhabit. They will often find themselves swimming against the current, but they should not mistake being in the minority for being intellectually defeated. The very institutions that sometimes make Christians feel unwelcome were, in many cases, built by men and women who believed they were thinking God’s thoughts after him. This invites Christian academics to respond to secular critiques without fear.

3 ways to respond to secular critiques

Here are three practical ways to respond, having accepted that invitation.

1. With credibility of character

The strongest argument Christianity makes is often not an argument at all. It is Christian character.

Of course, we proclaim the gospel with words. But Scripture is just as concerned with how we speak as with what we say. Paul writes, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt” (Col 4:6). The manner in which we conduct ourselves is a witness in its own right.

I once sat next to a woman on an airplane. We spent much of the flight discussing philosophy, suffering, and the problem of evil.² Intellectually, I could tell she did not have polished answers. Yet throughout the flight she quietly read her Bible with joy, treated the flight attendants with dignity, and carried herself with a kind of peace that was difficult to explain away.

As a philosophy student, that affected me more deeply than many of the abstract arguments I had been reading on such topics. Authentic Christian character tends to reach beneath the intellect and speaks directly to the heart. In an age of scientific materialism, it is easy to dismiss this as sentimental. I think that would be a mistake. Godliness has always been one of Christianity’s most persuasive apologetics.

2. With the credibility of testimony

Academics often ask where they should begin when responding to secular critiques of Christianity. Should they start with the cosmological argument? The teleological argument? The moral argument?

My answer is almost always the same: Why not begin with what Jesus has done for you?

The early church grew not because every Christian had mastered philosophy but because ordinary believers simply told others what Christ had done in their lives. Scripture calls us to be prepared to give a reason for the hope within us (1 Pet 3:15), and that hope is not merely theoretical but personal.

Tell people how you came to faith, how you encountered Christ, what he has changed in your life. Explain how the Holy Spirit has begun to satisfy those deep existential longings that so many people spend their lives trying to escape.

Nobody can tell your story better than you can. And few things are more difficult to dismiss than the story behind a genuinely transformed life.

3. With the credibility of Christian fruit

What becomes of a society that quietly forgets God? What happens when transcendence disappears and humanity is left to construct meaning on its own?³

The conclusion is straightforward: The dream of scientific materialism does not produce a world free from gods. It simply replaces the true God with countless false ones—power, politics, celebrity, sex, wealth, identity, technology. None of these gods liberate us. They demand everything and give nothing in return.

The Christian God is different. He sets people free.

I was reminded of this while speaking with an organization that operates bachelor’s degree programs inside prisons. They told me something I have never forgotten. Many of the inmates who are enrolled in these programs will never leave prison. They are serving life sentences. Yet they educate them anyway—not merely to earn a degree, but to help them know God and learn to live faithfully, even behind bars. The result is remarkable. Violence inside the prisons consistently drops.

Christianity has always produced this kind of fruit. Wherever the gospel genuinely takes root, people become more loving, more forgiving, more self-controlled, more hopeful, and more willing to serve others. If that isn’t credibility, what is?

Conclusion

As an academic, I do not expect many universities across North America or Western Europe to abandon scientific materialism anytime soon. But I also do not believe Christians have any reason to be intimidated.

The history of the academy is deeply indebted to Christianity. More importantly, the credibility of Christian character, faithful testimony, and the societal outcomes of following Christ will continue to confront even the hardest skeptic until he returns.

Chris Palmer’s recommended resources

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• Being a Christian in a Non-Christian World: 7 Tips from Church History
• Christian Apologetics: Truth, Love, and Faith Conversations

1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Ballantine, 2023), 1.
2. I tell this story in A World Without God: The Search for Meaning in a Society Overwhelmed by Despair (Zondervan, 2026).
3. I develop and substantiate these themes in much more detail in A World Without God.