A couple of weeks ago, I got an alert on Facebook. One of my friends had a birthday coming up. But what Facebook didn’t know is that the guy had been dead for almost a year. A dead guy’s Facebook page is a freaky thing. His status hadn’t been updated since June 26, 2009. His last post: “Just saying, best night ever.”
I recently mentioned this at a youth event, where I gave a presentation called “What If It’s True? How God Makes A Difference.” Here’s a teaching tip: When dealing with philosophical issues, it’s often helpful to use an illustration from popular culture. Especially for teens, a dead guy’s Facebook page was an eerie, but truly relevant example of our own mortality.
Here’s how I presented what William Lane Craig calls “The absurdity of life without God” to teens:
If God isn’t real, then you, me, every single one of your friends, and the world we live in is basically an accident. We’re what happens when you throw stuff, time and chance into mix. There’s no reason we’re even alive…Who cares if you were the most popular kid at school? Or got the best grades? If God isn’t real, we’re just sitting around waiting to die.
But if God is real, life has real meaning. You are not an accident. If God exists, this life is not all there is. If Christianity is true, eternal life is possible and available to us. After my message, about 15 students came up to me wanting to know more and I even got to pray for many of them. Sometimes, God uses the unexpected to touch people’s hearts—even a dead guy’s Facebook page.
What do you think about this tip? What’s another pop-culture apologetics illustration you’ve seen?