How to Talk to People Who Don’t Believe in Truth

Compared to any other place and time, we in the West enjoy unprecedented freedom, thanks to philosophical, legal, economic, technological, and medical developments. Yet we’re not measurably happier. We don’t actually enjoy freedom. Why not?

Abdu Murray says it’s because, “Through unfettered autonomy, we make ourselves into gods who are accountable to no one. And then we use our divinity to declare that we are less than human.”

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Murray explores this paradox in his new book, Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World. Murray earned a law degree from the University of Michigan and works as North America director of RZIM.

I especially love in this book how he describes Jesus:

Kids rushed to play with him in the sunlit day, and religious scholars secretly met with him in the moonlit night. Women found wholeness in him and thieves found forgiveness. Sinners were convicted by his words, but also redeemed by his actions. Jesus is the convergence of everything we wish were true about our worldviews and about ourselves.

Murray joins me on The Gospel Coalition Podcast to discuss our post-truth world, confirmation bias, freedom vs. autonomy, and more.

Related:

Jesus for a Post-Truth World (Sam Chan)
Ministering to Millennials in a Secular Age (Derek Rishmawy)
Is It Wrong to Try to Persuade Others to Change Their Beliefs? (Rebecca McLaughlin)

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.

But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.

To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

Download your copy today »

Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.

Abdu Murray is a recovering critic of Christianity and is senior vice president for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and is the author of several books, including Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World and Seeing Jesus from the East: A Fresh Look at History’s Most Influential Figure. For most of his life, Abdu was a proud Muslim who studied the Qur’an and Islam. But after a nine-year investigation into the historical, philosophical, and scientific underpinnings of the major world religions, he became a follower of Jesus.