Hi Scott, thanks so much for commenting and I’m sorry I didn’t get back to this more quickly (understatement, huh?).

I suppose you could ask if he believes in things like gravity, quarks, or the Higgs boson. Has he ever seen them? That would be a rather odd reduction, as there are lots of things we believe in that we can’t see.

Or, for example, I’ve never seen you Scott, yet I’m fairly sure there is a person associated with this question out there somewhere on the Internet.

But, before that, I’d challenge the notion that you’re on the witness stand being questioned by this attorney. You’re a peer having a conversation and he’s going to have to answer some tough questions too, like “Who lit the fuse on the Big Bang?”, “Where did life come from?”, or “Explain consciousness.”

And instead of trying to dissect one’s personal prayer life, how about asking him to go after the Resurrection? Or, how about something like the prophecy in Daniel predicting the date of the Messiah (i.e.: Jesus), or Isaiah 53 (both written hundreds of years before the events). In other words, if he’s in the mood to investigate and question something, have him make it something he can actually investigate in a meaningful way. (Not something where no real headway can be made and he can just pretend to be smart and have a superior position.)

Hope that helps a bit.

I have often thought about this question as I imagine being on a witness stand and a skeptical, brilliant attorney cross examining me. He focuses on something like prayer. How quickly would he be able to take prayer and reduce it to an absurdity by substituting “God” for “a being you cannot see”? (“So you pray to this being you cannot see. You make requests of this being you cannot see. And walk me through exactly through what this being you cannot see does in response to your request.”) How can Christians defend their faith against reductio ad absurdum and use it against hardened critics of our faith?