For the past century Buddhist teachers and priests have publicly shared their beliefs both within the Asian-American communities and among other American racial groups. Indeed, Zen and Nichiren Buddhism have converted tens of thousands of Americans in the past several decades. Nevertheless, the presence of Buddhism has been particularly evident during the past year.

Buddhism in America- Not Just the Rich and Famous

The branch of Buddhism that has captured the most attention in the past year is Tibetan Buddhism. Besides the countless articles that have appeared in magazines and newspapers about the Dalai Lama and the plight of Buddhists in Tibet, several major motion pictures have focused on this charismatic leader and his oppressed country. They include Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, and Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese. Moreover, Hollywood celebrities, such as Richard Gere and Steven Seagal, have vigorously campaigned for their spiritual guide, the Dalai Lama.

Other well-known Americans who have embraced the Buddhist philosophy and have publicly testified to the merits of other branches of Buddhism include pop singer Tina Turner (Nichiren Buddhism) and the coach of the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson (Zen Buddhism). In addition, several popular rock groups, such as the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins, openly promote Buddhist teachings.

Corporate advertising agencies are also not hesitant about featuring their products with serene Buddhist monks, which happen to pitch not just the desirability of their products but an alluring image of Buddhism as well. IBM and Gatorade stand out in this regard.

Exponents of Buddhism stand not only in the public spotlight but also in the conference rooms of American businesses, in the classrooms of public schools, and in the family rooms of many American homes. Buddhist speakers have enthralled many motivational consultants who conduct seminars on relaxation for corporate executives and educators. They have also inspired Buddhist enthusiasts to share their new beliefs with their family, friends, and neighbors. It is no wonder many believe that Buddhism has become a new American icon.

Buddhism in America- At the Heart of the Issue

What is wrong with a religious leader of another faith gently asking people to learn inner peace and deal with others compassionately? Isn’t that what we see Buddhists doing in films and commercials? Wouldn’t Christians be narrow minded and self-righteous to condemn such presentations? Why be alarmed by what is probably just another passing fad for Americans anyway?

It would be very easy for non-Christians to hurl these questions at Christians in order to box us in a corner and keep our mouths shut. In fact, that is what is frequently occurring, and far too often these people succeed. Yet there is at stake a far more important issue than how we perceive another religion as it appears in our pop culture. Indeed, the Dalai Lama frequently addresses this issue himself, clearly stating that the central doctrines of Buddhism and Christianity are not compatible. You cannot be a Buddhist Christian or a Christian Buddhist, he notes, as many people strive to be in our society.

At the heart of the Buddhist faith is the belief that no individual has a soul. Since people think they have a soul, they are rooted in ignorance and are in bondage to the desire to please one’s “self,” which results in suffering, sorrow, and anguish. We are truly enlightened when we finally believe we have no soul. Nevertheless, Buddhists still believe in some sort of reincarnation; only they assert it is not the soul that is reborn, but rather elements of one’s former identity.

Associated with the no-soul or no-self doctrine is the teaching of the Buddha that asserts that the search for and devotion to a particular god is a major hindrance to attaining true enlightenment. It is actually a false hungering of a soul that really does not exist. Instead, such a faith reinforces the illusion that there is a soul. A weakness in this Buddhist teaching is that most devout Buddhists in the world pay homage to some supernatural figure, whether it is a deity (one of the many Buddhas) or a renown holy man or ancestor in the distant past. Even a Buddhist longs to know his or her Creator.

Finally, what is the ultimate spiritual goal of a true Buddhist? No matter what school of Buddhism is at question, the summit of the mountain is nothingness — like the candle flame that is blown out. It is being totally extinguished. At that point there will be no more illusions, no more suffering and pain to endure, and no more deaths to experience. Yet there will also be no more truths to be learned, no more love to express, and no more life to enjoy with the Creator who made us so we might be His eternal, beloved children.

Q: Why do you spend so much time focusing on apologetics? Can’t we just preach the gospel?

A: Most Christians are aware of their responsibility to reach a dying world with God’s message. No less of an authority than Jesus exhorts us to proclaim the gospel (Matt. 10:27) and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19). However, there is another dimension often neglected in evangelism; namely, the defense of the gospel. The very Bible exhorting us to preach the gospel urges us to contend for the faith as well (Jude 3), just as the first Christians consistently offered reasoned defenses of their faith before unbelievers (for example, see Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 and Paul’s address in Acts 17:16-34). Giving reasons for our faith (apologetics) is neither an option nor a late feature of the Christian faith. Rather, it is an essential element of the biblical Christian witness.

In a world steeped in mystery cults, the apostle Peter admonished believers to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have . . . with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). Only by meeting honest objections with biblical answers can “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). It was in this spirit that Paul vigorously defended the gospel (see Acts 14:8-18; cf. 17:2-3; 18:4, 19; Phil. 1:7, 16), charging others to do the same (2 Tim. 2:23-26).

The need for apologetics today is crucial. Believers must realize that we are living in a post-Christian era with a host of worldviews vying continuously for people’s commitments and, indeed, for their very lives. We must face these challenges head-on. Apologetics does not supplant faith, it supplements it. Nor does it replace the Spirit’s working. Rather, the Holy Spirit uses apologetic arguments as vehicles for clarifying the truth of God’s Word. The same verses commanding us to preach the gospel also instructs us to constantly be prepared to correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction (2 Tim. 4:2).

One of the reasons I love the game of golf is that it puts me in touch with people whose worldviews are radically different from mine. One such person is Matt (Matt is not his real name). This year, Matt and I teamed up as partners in a golf tournament. While driving to the tournament, we transitioned from talking about golf to talking about God.

Matt, a lawyer by profession, was convinced that humans are mere material beings. In his way of thinking, if we were to die during our drive, we would simply cease to exist. For Matt, the notion of a soul that exists beyond the grave was absolutely absurd.

Like so many others in our culture, he was firmly committed to the creed of the late scientist Carl Sagan — “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” In addition, he had embraced the mantra of a Madonna song — “I am a material girl living in a material world.”

From his perspective, human beings are merely material brains and bodies. As we rolled on down the road, I attempted to convince Matt that there are compelling reasons to believe human beings have an immaterial aspect to their being that transcends the material.

Argument One: Thoughts Go Beyond the Brain

I pointed out that from the perspective of logic, we can demonstrate that the mind is not identical to the brain. Indeed, the mind and brain have different properties: “The feeling of pain, the experience of sound, the awareness of color are all different from anything that is simply physical. If the world were only made of matter, these subjective aspects of consciousness would not exist. But they do exist! So there must be more to the world than matter.”² An obvious example concerns color. A moment’s reflection is enough to convince a person that the experience of color involves more than mere wavelengths of light.³

Argument Two: The Body Vanishes Every Seven Years

I went on to argue that from a legal perspective, if human beings were merely material, they could not be held accountable this year for a crime committed last year, simply because physical identity changes over time. Physically, we are not the same person today that we were yesterday. Every day, we lose multiplied millions of microscopic particles. In fact, every seven years, virtually every part of our material anatomy, apart from aspects of our neurological system, changes.⁴ Therefore, from a purely material perspective, “The self who did the crime in the past is not literally the same self who is present at the time of punishment.”⁵ Appealing to Matt’s legal background, I suggested that a criminal who attempted to use this line of reasoning as a defense would not get very far. Legally and intuitively, we recognize a sameness of soul that establishes personal identity over time.⁶

Argument Three: Free Will Exists

As we were nearing the golf course, I quickly moved on to an argument based on freedom. If we are merely material beings, then freedom of the will does not exist. Instead, we are fatalistically relegated to a world in which everything is determined by mechanistic material processes.⁷ Realizing at this point that Matt might have begun thinking about the golf tournament, I used a golf illustration to make sure I had his attention.

The distance a golf ball flies is fatalistically predetermined by such factors as clubhead speed, angle of impact, ball velocity, and spin rate. In concert with Newton’s laws of motion, the precise distance the ball will travel is fatalistically determined by the physical processes involved. Likewise, if I am merely material, my “choices” are nothing more than a function of such factors as genetic make-up and brain chemistry. Therefore, my decisions are not free; they’re fatalistically determined.

I pointed out that the implications of such a notion are profound. In a worldview that embraces fatalistic determinism, I cannot be held morally accountable for my actions, since reward and punishment make sense only if we have freedom of the will. In a solely material world, reason itself is reduced to the status of a conditioned reflex. Moreover, even the very concept of love is rendered meaningless. Rather than being an act of the will, love is relegated to a robotic procedure that is fatalistically determined by physical processes. If Madonna is merely a material girl living in a material world, then she really has no freedom of choice.

Three Compelling Reasons We Have a Soul

In short, I presented Matt with three compelling reasons to believe human beings have a soul that continues to exist apart from the body. First, logically and intuitively, we recognize nonphysical aspects of humanity, such as ego. Furthermore, even though our physical identity changes from year to year, we recognize a sameness of soul that legally establishes personal identity. Finally, freedom of the will presupposes that we are more than mere material robots.

Together, these three reasons give us warrant to conclude that human beings have an immaterial nature that transcends the material body. In the Christian worldview, this immaterial aspect of humanity is called the soul.⁸ Because the human soul is not dependent on material processes for its existence, it can survive the death of the physical body.⁹

However, Matt was not yet convinced of life beyond the grave. And so during the course of the next few hours, I presented additional arguments supporting the overwhelming evidence for a Creator¹⁰ and for the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.¹¹

By the time I had finished telling Matt about the resurrection, we were pulling into his driveway. While we continued to talk, I told him how some 20 years ago someone had explained to me what I was now explaining to him. I described how after I had examined the evidence, the Creator of the cosmos had become the Lord and Savior of my soul, and today, He is more real to me than the very flesh on my bones.

While I would like to tell you that Matt yielded his life to Christ in the driveway that evening, I can’t. Although Matt has asked to hear more, he remains a skeptic. As I write, Matt has not yet yielded his life to the Creator of his soul — but then again, the whole story has not yet been told.

^NOTES

1 Adapted from chapter 10 of Hank Hanegraaff’s Resurrection (Nashville: Word, 2000). Available through CRI.

2 Gary R. Habermas and J.P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998), 52.

3 Habermas and Moreland explain: “Mental events are feelings of pain, episodes of thoughts, or sensory experiences. Physical events are happenings in the brain and central nervous system that can be described exhaustively using terms from chemistry and physics. However, physical events and their properties do not have the same features as do mental events and their properties… An experiment will help you see the difference. Picture a pink elephant in your mind. Now, close your eyes and look at the image. In your mind, you will see a pink property (a sense datum or sensory way of experiencing). There will be no pink elephant outside you, but there will be a pink image of one in your mind. However, there will be no pink entity in your brain; no neurophysiologist could open your brain and see a pink entity while you are having the sense image. The sensory event has a property — pink — that no brain event has. Therefore, they cannot be identical. The sense image is a mental entity, not a physical one” (Beyond Death, 49).

4 Ibid., 58.

5 Ibid., 59.

6 Habermas and Moreland write, “Physicalists [who hold that the mind is identical to the brain] and property dualists [who hold that the mind, while distinct from the brain, is a property or attribute of the brain and the mind depends on the brain for its existence] have no alternative but to hold that personal identity through change is not absolute” (Beyond Death, 58). In essence, they are relegated to the unenviable task of trying to rationalize what are called “person-stages”; the “self” is really a contiguous series through time of closely resembling but not identical “selves.” Continuity of self can be accounted for only by positing an immaterial self, i.e., a soul. (See ibid., 57-60).

7 See ibid., 60-62.

8 For a discussion of the nature of the soul, see ibid., chapter 3.

9 While biblically we continue to exist in a conscious state after the death of our physical bodies, we are not complete until we are reunited with our resurrected bodies at the second coming of Christ (see John 5:28-29; 2 Cor. 5:1-10; Phil. 1:22-24; 1 Thes. 4:16; Rev. 6:9). The sum substance of the self is a psyche/soma — a soul/body.

10 See Hank Hanegraaff, The FACE that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution (Nashville: Word, 1998).

11 See Resurrection, Part 1.

Q: Why do you spend so much time focusing on apologetics? Can’t we just preach the gospel?

A: Most Christians are aware of their responsibility to reach a dying world with God’s message. No less of an authority than Jesus exhorts us to proclaim the gospel (Matt. 10:27) and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19). However, there is another dimension often neglected in evangelism; namely, the defense of the gospel. The very Bible exhorting us to preach the gospel urges us to contend for the faith as well (Jude 3), just as the first Christians consistently offered reasoned defenses of their faith before unbelievers (for example, see Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 and Paul’s address in Acts 17:16-34). Giving reasons for our faith (apologetics) is neither an option nor a late feature of the Christian faith. Rather, it is an essential element of the biblical Christian witness.

In a world steeped in mystery cults, the apostle Peter admonished believers to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have . . . with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15). Only by meeting honest objections with biblical answers can “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). It was in this spirit that Paul vigorously defended the gospel (see Acts 14:8-18; cf. 17:2-3; 18:4, 19; Phil. 1:7, 16), charging others to do the same (2 Tim. 2:23-26).

The need for apologetics today is crucial. Believers must realize that we are living in a post-Christian era with a host of worldviews vying continuously for people’s commitments and, indeed, for their very lives. We must face these challenges head-on. Apologetics does not supplant faith, it supplements it. Nor does it replace the Spirit’s working. Rather, the Holy Spirit uses apologetic arguments as vehicles for clarifying the truth of God’s Word. The same verses commanding us to preach the gospel also instructs us to constantly be prepared to correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction (2 Tim. 4:2).