Note: I rank books differently than Goodreads: 3 stars is "it's okay".
A pen pal sent me this, so of course I had to read it :-).
Before opening it, my conclusion has always been that yes, man needs faith, but not necessarily in the Christian God. After completing it, I'm at the same place. Since I'm a Deist, the existence of a God wasn't an argument he had to win with me. Unfortunately for whatever his point in writing was, it was the only argument that I actually bought.
He starts out completely misrepresenting what it means to be atheist. I've decided that he gives a purely philosophical view, but that view doesn't translate to the everyday life of an atheist and therefore invalidates his arguments. Besides, he uses atheism and anti-theism synonymously and according to /r/atheism, that isn't accurate.
His entire argument for the existence of Jesus as a deity is dependent on Jesus and the Bible being TRUTH, and he fails to prove this claim. If Jesus word were TRUTH, then it would be possible to show why they aren't false. His only defense seems to be that "if they were false, his "enemies" wouldn't also say that they're true"--so what evidence is there that these "enemies" weren't lying about that status? There was a complete lack of analysis here.
For all the bold claims he made in the introduction, he unfortunately fell short. As always, I went into this book blind and tried to be unbiased, hoping that he'd convince me, but it wasn't there.
On an interesting note, while replying to the pen pal in question, she had said that people can never have enough guns. What I found intriguing by this statement is that on pg. 36, in describing how "Reasoning Failed the Test on Reasoning", Zacharias laments the fact that skeptics forget the second qualifier of Kant's claim that morality can be found purely through reason, that "an individuals moral choices were not to be determined by the happiness test, meaning that one ought not to choose a certain path for life just because it makes one happy." He goes on to bash Marxism which apparently based a lot of itself on Kant (I haven't done this research, so I take his word for it) and (perhaps laughingly) finishes by saying our "new world of democratic utopia inscribed the pursuit of individual happiness as a fundamental right for all individuals at the cost of the collective good. In both arenas, Kantian ethics were deviously mangled."
I'm not a philosopher and will quickly admit that strictly philosophical reasoning often goes over my head, but I interpret this passage as, to some extent, agreeing with Kant (though I doubt Zacharias would admit to this) in that it's important to put the collective good above the happiness of the individual. So since I enjoy complicating arguments, wouldn't we agree that it's in the interest of the collective good to put reasonable restrictions on gun ownership (such as waiting periods, more thorough background checks, etc) even if it means inconveniencing legal gun owners? Granted, my argument is dependent on my reading Zacharias correctly and since he's vague more often than not, I cannot say that I did with certainty.
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