"Solus Veritas" means "one truth" in Latin. The reason I bring this up is that tonight at USC we are having an event called The Veritas Forum. It started at Harvard in 1992 and has since expanded to universities all across the nation and even globe! It is basically an academic look at Christianity. Officially "Veritas Forums are university events that engage students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life. We seek to inspire the shapers of tomorrow's culture to connect their hardest questions with the person and story of Jesus Christ."
"The Veritas Forum was started at Harvard in 1992 by a group of students, faculty, and ministers, led by Kelly Monroe Kullberg, as a response to an emptiness on campus. Universities, they perceived, had stopped addressing the most important questions of life: “What does it mean to be human? Why is there evil and suffering? Is there any meaning in death?” These questions cannot be avoided: in fact, an ongoing UCLA study shows that over 50% of entering freshmen hope to explore and define their beliefs during college. Yet the classroom rarely allows students to engage questions of meaning, purpose or faith.
And, in marginalizing such questions, universities fail to provide students room to develop a coherent worldview, making it difficult for many to integrate their academic knowledge with their lives. Veritas steps into this void, creating a space where people of all religious and cultural backgrounds are welcomed to explore ideas. Veritas encourages students to pursue Truth, connect their academic and vocational life to Christ, and emerge with clarity and hopeful vision for our world." (from veritas.org)
The topics range from "A thinking person's quest for meaning" and "What does it mean to be good? Two scholars, Christian and Secular, share their views" or "Does religion make a difference in academic life? Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Atheist perspectives."
The one tonight is "Same Evidence, Different Conclusions: Why? Is 'objective belief' an oxymoron?" featuring Oxford math professor John Lennox. He is in the same vein as C.S. Lewis because he offers a completely rational, logical and accessible view from Christianity. He has debated many prominent atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He also has about four degrees after his name, because one Masters and PhD isn't enough :)
Prof. Lennox was also at Stanford, Berkley and UCLA this week, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, and I heard from the National Veritas regional coordinator (who also happened to be on the planning team with me for the very first Veritas Forum at USC in 2004 - small world!) that Lennox knocked the ball outta the park all three days! Stanford had 450, Berkely had 800 and UCLA had 1,000 and still had to turn away 200!!! I don't think USC will get 1000, but oh my gosh!! These are questions that people want answers to that are not getting them answered in the classrooms!!
This is the first time Veritas has been at USC in five years, because the last Veritas Forum we had was when I was a senior in college and I was its director! We had it 3 years in a row, from 2004-2006, but after that it never got off the ground. This year we are just doing a one-day event, as opposed to the three-day venture it has been in the past. I LOVE Veritas because it shows a different side to Christianity that people don't normally think about, namely, that there is a purely logical and rational side to it. So many times I feel people take me down a few intellectual pegs when they find out I am a believer in Christ because "that's just hogwash/a crutch to make you feel better/no scientific evidence for it, etc" when really, I have checked out a lot of the major world religions and Christianity is the one that makes the most logical sense to me. There is an abundance of not only scientific, but also historical and archeological evidence for it, not to mention it makes the most sense philosophically to me for those deep questions that people have about the world. If you would like to chat further about that I am totally open, I have had many theological discussions with my friends where we talk about our specific worldviews and what led us to adopt them and they're just that, discussions.
I have heard it many times from speakers that people haven't rejected God, they have simply rejected their concept of Him. In my experience my friends that don't think anything of God have a skewed view of Him, mixed from bad experiences in the past, the media and their friends. That is why I love Veritas because it shows people that Christianity can indeed be logical because all the speakers we get have PhDs, so you know they're a smart bunch!
Our goal is NOT that everyone would convert to Christianity at all, but rather, that seekers, agnostics, atheists, other worldview holders would walk out of the event with a more favorable view of God and Jesus Christ. If someone comes to the event and they could care less about Jesus because He is an irrational fairy tale, yet they leave thinking there might be more to this Jesus guy, then that is a win in my mind! The purpose is not making everyone believe what we believe, but to introduce the topic of Christ into the deep, hard questions of life and see how He fits in. It is meant to be a discussion, not a lecture, and everyone from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Buddhists to atheists are all welcome to come and ask questions. I am so happy for this event to come back to USC!!
Below is a link to a 2 min preview of the topic "Same evidence, different conclusions, why?"
http://johnlennox.org/index.php/en/resource/same_evidence_different_conclusions_how/
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