Wilful ignorance

     I have often wondered how anyone can really be an atheist, as the idea of an accidental Universe seems completely implausible to me.  The great British physicist Fred Hoyle, who originated the term 'Big Bang' wrote in his book 'The Elegant Universe' that the likelyhood of an accidental Universe was equivalent to the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard would leave behind it a Boeing 747.  That does not mean that all non-Christian religions are absurb or even that virtual agnosticism is.  One does not have to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Jesus, to realize the extraordianry implausibility of a Universe which simply exnihilates itself --- comes into existence out of non-existence.  To go from there to Christianity is a long road, which is not travelled without effort.
     But the stakes are enormous.  On one side we find a putative Saviour, Jesus Christ, who promises salvation, eternal life, achieved via His own death and sacrifice, offered freely, as a gift to all who will accept it, and on other side, what?  Who knows, but there is no other religion in the world which even makes the same claims as Christianity.  Some are too strange for any reasonable person to accept, while others have at least some superficial plausibility, particulary some Eastern religions, as the great Christian writer C. S. Lewis acknowledged.
     Without now attempting to decide what is true and what isn't, how can any sensible person ignore the questions; who was Jesus?  Was He a real person?  Can He be believed?  Yet we have to recognize the reality of Wilful Ignorance.  In other words, some people do not care enough to ask questions about their eternal existence or absence thereof.  Why? Is it because Christians are unintelligent and lack the sophistication of wiser and more practical skeptics, atheists and agnostics?  No, that idea is demonstrably false.  Even in the previous century alone we had such great intellectual lights as C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers and J. R. R. Tolkien, and many, many others whose intellectual bona fides cannot be seriously questioned.  Maybe they were mistaken, but any idea that they were unsophisticated, unintelligent provincials is simply out of the question.  They were the opposite.  They were intellectual heavy weights.
     A few years ago on a social occassion a woman who knew I was a Christian asked me to explain what Christianity is.  I told her that the circumstances did not permit me to offer an adequate explanation but that I would give her a book which I believed would satisfy her curiosity and I added that I would be glad to talk to her another time.  Shortly thereafter I gave her C. S. Lewis' "Mere Christiantity", the best product on the market for the purpose at hand.  A month or so later I saw the woman, who told me that it was too technical and frankly "boring" so she stopped reading it after an hour or so.  Here was a person whose eternal destiny was at stake, or so I believe, who would not exert even minimal effort to understand and deal with the matter.  That isn't innocent ignorance which I believe God forgives and remedies either here or in the hereafter.  That is wilful ignorance, and I just don't understand it.