Part 1: Setting the Stage
Underneath my even-keeled demeanor, over the past several years there have been storms. The conflict I recount here has been the greatest tempest of my life. It has lasted for five years and continues on now as I write.
To understand my dilemma, you must first understand the alternative worldviews I am facing: theologically orthodox Christianity on the one hand, and naturalism on the other. These worldviews differ not only in values and beliefs but in their basic intellectual architecture and mindset. Important aspects of one don’t necessarily have counterparts in the other. For example, Christianity is framed in an elaborate, well-defined metanarrative—an overarching story—known as the gospel, whereas naturalism claims comparatively little in the metanarrative department. Also, the reasons why each one appeals to those who hold it ride on different currency and can be difficult to weigh against each other. Christianity draws more on the moral sense whereas naturalism draws more on scientific reasoning. My description of naturalism and Christianity is included in Appendix 1. I encourage you to review and digest this description even if you’re familiar with both worldviews; they are the foundation of what follows.
Where I Come From
I grew up among staunchly Evangelical Christians. The class of Christians known as Evangelicals can be defined by five concerns:
1. Creedal orthodoxy, which approximately means we accept the gospel story I outline in appendix 1;
2. Belief in the Bible as the trustworthy Word of God and foundation for all doctrine;
3. Belief in conversion, both in the sense described in the ‘redemption’ part of the gospel (a turning point) and the ‘sanctification’ portion (a changed lifestyle);
4. Belief in mission, especially in the form of supporting evangelism (making the gospel available to people). This belief also applies to cooperation with other aspects of divine mission in the world, helping fix everything that evil has broken (thus leading to the support of hospitals, schools, hunger relief, etc).
5. The emphasis of these four concerns as so primary as to recognize anyone who shares them as kin and the agreement as reason for cooperation, regardless of disagreement on other things.
More specifically, I grew up among missionaries. We moved to Latin America when I was five, ending up in Quito, Ecuador. There is a large missionary community where we lived, owing at least in part to the presence of a mission-owned radio station, hospital, and international school there. My father worked as a doctor in the hospital, my mom as a computer administrator in the radio compound, and my brother and I attended the school. So I grew up with in a community where life-directing active devotion to Jesus was the norm, among intelligent, educated and cosmopolitan Christians. Of course this is not to say everyone was uniformly a shining example of the virtues they promoted, or that my peers all favored the devoted lifestyle of their parents. But it was a culture of decency and purpose and one where God’s active presence was assumed. I respected the teachers and other role models there. In general, they left a very positive impression as the people of God. I accepted all this for my own.
I cannot remember a time when I didn’t believe I belonged to Jesus. Verbally at least, I made the prayer to accept Jesus as my savior at the age of three. Subsequently I matured as a Christian while maturing in everything else. Growing up, I was thought of as nice, smart, and fairly artistic. In retrospect I was generally respected, though I often felt socially uneasy. I tended to make friends with the oddballs and outsiders—really anyone particularly interested in friendship. Underneath the inapt social fear, I thought quite highly of myself, though at the same time believing I wasn’t supposed to. This dynamic is still significant in me, although I’ve at least grown some in understanding my flaws and in dealing candidly and carefully with perceived expectations. I’ve generally succeeded at cleaning out the sorts of moral faults people focus on, though more subtle embedded problems persist. For example, the social fear itself: It shows whose opinions weigh most heavily in my practical values. If it had consistently been God’s opinion, my psychology would not look as it has.
In late high school, I started contemplating my responsibility to evangelize. It didn’t begin pleasantly. I recall one or two occasions when I was a junior, lying in my room wondering,
How can I ramble around in the comfort of my home amusing myself when there are people out there who need to be saved from utter inconceivable ruin? What sort of diabolical monster, believing he has a message for someone more important than life and death, stops so short of doing everything he can to convey that message? Will people burn in hell because right now I’m being a lazy coward?
I didn’t know how to do what I had in mind at the time—especially in Spanish, which somehow I never really mastered. I was deathly afraid of making an awkward, impotent fool of myself. It was a torturous line of reasoning. Eventually, inspired by guilt and fear, I would run out and shove gospel tracts into the hands of a beggar and a random pedestrian or two.
Disturbing as the experience was, good did come of it. My senior year I was able to enroll in a class at my school to learn Evangelism Explosion, a system of sharing the gospel. Upon considering the prospect of enrolling, I felt in a way I hadn’t ever felt before that God was inviting me into his way, his plan and his provision. Through it I came to understand the logic of God’s story in a way I frankly hadn’t before, and the foundation was laid for a life of intentional spiritual conversation.
Graduating at the top of my class, I decided to go to the University of Michigan for college. Practically everyone at my school went to college, but mostly to Christian schools. In part (the larger part), I was pursuing excellent academics. But I was also acting on the notion that Christians needed to be engaging more in American secular society. How are we to fulfill our mission of advancing God’s kingdom by sharing the gospel with people unless we learn to communicate with them and get to know each other? So I came to the University in part as a missionary to American thinkers, seeking to understand and engage with them in love and respect, that they would know Jesus.
At Michigan, I joined InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (“I.V.”), an Evangelical student organization which prides itself on its focus on leadership development and inductive Bible study. It has a reputation among some Evangelicals for being a group that strives for a deeper Christian understanding of things. My chapter was a small bunch, but had an openness to exploring new ideas and typically a genuine interest in living out real Christianity.
Within this context, I learned to dialog about important spiritual issues with non-Christian friends and strangers, seeking to share the gospel. At first, my efforts continued to be colored by that semi-neurotic guilt of my first steps in evangelism. But gradually I came to understand that God counted for more than I gave him credit in the whole undertaking. He showed me that bringing salvation is essentially his work, and that faith means operating in a joy-laced mindset of energetic yet patient reliance on him, not one of feverish guilty striving. And my mindset has changed for the better. It is still changing, for the mindset and lifestyle of faith is easier said than done. I gravitate toward complacency on the one hand, joyless duty on the other, and in the middle, relentless internal debate.
For all the dozens of people I’ve spoken with about Jesus, of the cases where I was the main person sharing the gospel, I don’t know of a single convert. But I still press on in trust, aiming to be a faithful witness of the God I know, depending on him to make something of value out of my words. This testimony is part of that.
Ironically, I felt more at home in I.V. than I had among fellow missionary kids. Instead of finding my identity in the bridging of nations, I found it as a bridger of ideas. But the two roles have this in common: though one may feel homeless in other ways, there is a home in Jesus.
Ulterior motivations
Given this background, I must recognize that I have significant personal interests wrapped up in Christianity: my lifestyle, family, friendships, aspirations, investments, values, and more are all tied up tightly in following Christ. Thus, I anticipate significant destruction and desolation in my life if I should abandon my pursuit of Jesus. Later, when I introduce part 3, I will offer my thoughts on whether this critically compromises my intellectual integrity on the issue at hand.
Despite my deep integration in the Christian life, bridging thoughts eventually ran its course. The funny thing about bridges is that they always cross in two directions. Creatures once observed from a comfortable distance –or not at all- suddenly make themselves hard to ignore.
Why I question God’s existence
Starting my freshman year in college, and with increasing force during my time at Michigan, I came to wonder if God even exists. Sometimes I have even felt fairly certain that he doesn’t. Presently, I classify my motivations for uncertainty that the Christian God exists into two categories. The first is concerned with an intuitive experience of deep emotional incredulity, whereas the second has more to do with evidence and making sense of the world.
. Many Issues of Salvation and Damnation Feel Outrageously Ridiculous
I am at times deeply troubled by certain issues relating to salvation and damnation, and the division of people between Christians and non-Christians. It often doesn’t look or feel like non-Christians have such a cosmic problem or Christians such a cosmic solution as the Bible would suggest.
More importantly, I find it absolutely heartbreaking to think that the majority of the world is doomed for terrible, eternal ultimate failure. As I think of the texture of individual people living each of their lives complete with art, friends, interesting experiences, unique personalities, discussions, acts of kindness, things that they learn, and so forth, it feels profane to say it’s all going to waste, that so many people ignorantly miss the point of life altogether, and they’re going to hell forever. For most of the world, when a mother comforts her child that everything is going to be alright, her words will prove a gaping falsehood; when years later the child dies before the mother, her desolate hopeless pain is not even desolate enough: in the end they are both in for a horror more profound than they had ever imagined, an eternity of the deepest sort of defeat. At least such is today’s standard Christian view of hell and what strikes me as probably the most straightforward interpretation of the Bible; I sure hope it’s not the right one.
It troubles me that God, the perfection of love, would make this situation even possible. I don’t feel like humans have the maturity to be trusted with decisions that could result in horror beyond our comprehension. Furthermore, I’m not impressed with the notion that God gives Christians any responsibility for addressing this situation. If we really can affect the salvation of others, the Christian’s position seems to me at times like that of a kindergartner made to drive a loaded school bus, only worse. God knows we’re untrustworthy, and none of us can even conceive of how weighty the matter actually is.
It troubles me even further when people hear the good news that could save them but then as far as I can see get no encouragement from God to believe it’s true. If God himself chooses not to save some, I have trouble thinking of him as Love, or as true ultimate perfection—not because this would be unjust but because I would expect his heart to break for them and that he would do everything in his unlimited power to rescue his beautiful creations, self-corrupted though they may be. In the face of these issues, Christianity feels woefully and outrageously ridiculous to me sometimes, and I have a hard time operating as if it were all true.
The Christian worldview looses its foundation if God is less than perfect, and becomes recklessly subjective if the Bible loses its authority over our beliefs. In the absence of authoritative divine revelation, spiritual belief degenerates to hearsay. So I’m inclined to either accept the whole package or to call the whole set of assumptions into question, rather than simply fashioning for myself more palatable beliefs about the afterlife.
2. Naturalism has Superior Explanatory Power
Naturalism explains observed reality surprisingly well, despite having more easily testable, and thus more easily disprovable, theories than Christianity. In most things, I find it surprisingly easy to come by an intellectually satisfying explanation of objective evidence in life without recourse to supernatural agency—without needing God or spirits or ethereal forces. And often throwing the Christian God into the picture not only seems unnecessary but even makes it harder to make sense of things.
Here is an example. I am overwhelmed by the evidence favoring evolution as key to the development of life, and find most creationist attacks on the conception of the natural history of the world accepted in today’s scientific community to be embarrassingly unimpressive. Yet adequately harmonizing evolutionary theory with Biblical teaching on origins is challenging.
Another important issue where orthodox Christian teaching presents difficulties is that on several counts the Bible disappoints my moral expectations of God. For example, in the Old Testament laws, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard when dealing with slaves to add a few words stressing the inherent value and dignity of all people, even of foreign slaves. God could also talk a little more in the Old Testament against the hatred of anyone, including one’s enemies. This strikes me as more important than having quite so many purity laws pertaining to the ritualistic separation of Israel from its idolatrous neighbors: why not create laws more focused on being a distinctive people through awesome grace and mercy who stand out in stark contrast to the brutality of their neighbors? It seems a more radical prioritization of love in those laws would glorify God more. It seems most natural to simply say that mortal men conceived of these laws on their own and wrote them down, rather than being divinely inspired by the ultimate center of love and wisdom and purity.
My concern over explanation isn’t merely a matter of a few isolated issues. It is a diverse collection of issues that work together to make me suspicious that my Christianity is mistaken. It seems very suspicious to me, for example, that I believe what my parents believe concerning religion, just like most of the rest of the world (most of whom must be mostly wrong). It seems suspicious that the efficacy of prayer has proven so difficult to firmly establish. Further, it doesn’t help that much of Biblical sexual ethics strikes me as somewhat arbitrary. It seems suspicious when evidence Christians long would have expected for God’s existence proves absent (as, for example, evolution and natural history seem to show to the open-minded). Issue upon issue continues to beat doubt into me as history reveals ostensibly sincere and faithful Christians again and again being misled. Oliver Cromwell and his cronies wrecked havoc on the British Isles in their Christian zeal. Even such heroes of the faith as John Calvin and St Augustine approved and supported religious persecution. Luther was an anti-Semite. And need I even mention women’s issues? Where was the guidance of the Holy Spirit when all these things happened? My suspicion that we lack important divine guidance is encouraged even more by how Christianity is divided over so many significant issues. This paragraph isn’t even half done yet. The clubbing continues as I notice that God could easily objectively reveal himself in so many ways, yet doesn’t. Back to the issue of prayer, couldn’t God provide a contemporary occurrence of an amputee or two having their limbs restored through the prayers of Godly Christians that gets thoroughly and seamlessly documented by reputable skeptic scientists? Or couldn’t the Bible provide clear names, dates and descriptions of what would happen in the future, with God ensuring that we unearth manuscripts of these predictions obviously written long before the events occurred? The trend of suspicion continues as I fail to observe non-Christians who appear sincere in seeking God come to faith in Christ. Often God doesn’t appear to provide either objective or subjective reasons for belief in their context (such as an internal spiritual battle or an intuitive draw to Christ). Thus, my supposedly powerful message feels like an alleged nuclear bomb with the impact of a falling pillow. Then, the very fact that in spite of being an intense Christian, God’s existence still doesn’t seem plain to me has disturbed me in and of itself. The Bible seems to generally hold that God’s existence has been made obvious to everyone and that anyone who questions it is a fool. So how could his existence seem so questionable to me? It is suspicious that upon inquiring into things like these, I find Christianity takes on a form that is very difficult to even conceivably disprove. It’s rather what I might expect of a powerful ideology that doesn’t have truth in its favor. And this list is not exhaustive. I am haunted by a teeming cloud of little suspicions.
Dissuading me of this skepticism can be more challenging than one might think. There are answers to some of my concerns, even satisfying answers in some cases. Yet I often feel skeptical even of the answers that seem satisfying by themselves, because they contradict the trend I’ve seen. At first this may sound like circular reasoning-- not accepting solutions to my doubts because they contradict my doubts. I think it’s more a case of recursion, a snowball effect where skepticism amplifies and enforces itself by relying on different layers of skepticism, sustainable as long as there is a handful of truly unanswered questions.
When I reconsider my worldview in a scientific state of mind, I want a simple, disprovable theory that successfully makes predictions that someone who doesn’t hold the theory would find surprising and gives at least a comparable explanation of objective phenomena in the world. I don’t think Christianity has provided that, and I think naturalism has.
Christians are often very confident of their beliefs. It is difficult to operate well as a Christian without such confidence. Yet as a man familiar with scientific rigor and the uncertainty of even reproducible, well-substantiated assertions, it is aggravating to be expected to form much more certain beliefs than what a good scientist forms on good data, yet founded on what I feel is much less objective or firmly established evidence.
Further issues as I question
To some degree, the effect of these doubts is intensified by my emersion in University culture. I tend to put myself in the place of others and imagine having the biases natural to their situations. Additionally, I tend to take their arguments more or less at face value. In doing so, I may sometimes loose some of my grip on the functioning of my own worldview. I absorb the values around me and, once I’m playing by the rules of the culture, naturally come to these peoples’ conclusions and convictions. An example of this is in how I read the Bible. Sometimes I read it with a secular, historical mindset, where one critically analyzes the text to try to determine what sort of people wrote it with what ideas in mind, without assuming divine inspiration. But then it becomes a habit, and I fail to switch back to reading it as the Word of God, listening reverently for what God is saying to me through the inspired text. This is a very poisonous mistake for a Christian. It distracts me from key points as I get hung up on my apparent disagreements with the human author’s assumptions, or with the inadequacy of some apologetic explanation I’d heard related to the passage, or the questionable authorship of a book. And it dulls my receptivity toward God.
Part 2: Believing God
Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Psalm 34:8
Christian belief is not essentially a matter of opinion, but of good and evil. Opinions about facts, though vital, are not the underlying issue with which God is concerned. For some, the clear facts lead them to believe God exists. Then, for moral reasons, they either follow God or they don’t. The Israelites who were led across the Red Sea and the Jews who witnessed Jesus’ miracles had clear reason to believe God exists. Because of the good or evil at work in them, some followed God with that knowledge and others didn’t. Those who follow God are the believers.
To me, in my context, it seems like the facts don’t clearly indicate God’s existence. Nor do I have a prominent intuitive sense that he must exist (though many people do). Yet I am still faced with an ethical decision. I hear a call allegedly from Jesus to follow him, and so must decide how to respond.
As I struggle with indecision between two worldviews, I find that each worldview is favored by a different mindset: one I label ‘faith’ and the other ‘sight’. Under the mindset of sight, I am drawn to naturalism because I examine the sum of available objective evidence and find a naturalistic worldview to yield the fit with greatest tangible predictive power and generally the simplest explanations.
The mindset of faith on the other hand appeals mainly for different sorts of reasons. I find Christian theism has enough foundation in the domain of objective explanation to merit serious consideration and intellectual viability. But I find the strength of Christianity is in value, particularly when coupled with experience: it is a worldview with a morally appealing physiology. In other words, the mechanics of following Christ resonate intuitively as ethically right.
Faith
In order to understand the nature of my Christianity, how this worldview functions, and how it persists in me, one must understand faith. A Christian without faith is not a Christian. Faith is the backbone of the upright Christian walk. It is essential for dependably serving God in an environment filled with competing values, uncertainty, hardship, long waits, annoyances and distractions of every kind, and personal inadequacy. More to the point, it is indispensible for being right with God.
It is regrettable that faith gets used as a synonym for religion in general, and that it occasionally gets associated with a sort of generally vague therapeutic irrationality. As a Christian I find both tendencies to be a sad distortion of the Biblical concept. In what follows, I share what the mindset of faith looks like for me and elaborate on its integral link to Biblical Christian doctrine. This should help you to understand how I think and reason. I also hope that you will see that my line of reasoning is not something I unconsciously devised in fear due to contemporary pressures in order to cop out of the hard reality of naturalism.
Theory
Faith is an attitude of trust
Faith by my Christian understanding does not essentially refer to the blind acceptance of claims, but the attitude of steadfast, active trust in a person. This attitude may result in the acceptance of certain propositions (and this acceptance may be vitally important), but first and foremost faith is taking on an attitude rather than an idea or set of ideas. One who trusts God will believe him (this is faith), which is different from believing the same thing for reasons unrelated to God (this is not faith). In the Bible, when Jesus heals people through their faith, those people are going out of their way to cast themselves at his mercy. They exhibit a hope-filled trust in Jesus as powerful enough and good enough to address their needs.
Faith leads to action
Thus, faith is strongly associated with belief as an active force: a person can claim they believe all sorts of things, but the sort of believing that matters is betrayed by how they act on those beliefs. Jack may think greenhouse gasses are causing global warming that will wreck havoc on the world. He may think and talk about it a lot, and display clever environmentalist bumper stickers. But if he proceeds to buy an SUV to go on road trips whereas his friend Jill (because of global warming) drives a subcompact hybrid and uses public transportation, biking or walking whenever possible, we can be fairly certain that Jill is the environmentalist who has a living belief, the sort associated with faith.
Faith leads to honest, trusting endurance
The mindset of faith consists not in closing my eyes and ears, but in patiently trusting in and waiting for God while living in obedience to him. It is an attitude of hope founded on the goodness and credibility I have recognized and experienced in him, persisting even when my eyes and ears tell me that either he is not trustworthy or he simply is not.
Because of this trust orientation, the mindset of faith tolerates more ambiguities than sight does. It is exemplified by Abraham. Abraham believed God when God said Abraham’s descendents would be countless as the stars, trusting God to the point of obeying him in an order to sacrifice Isaac. Isaac was the very son through whom God specifically said those descendents would be counted: decidedly unsettling empirical evidence. Faith was exemplified for his descendents in whether they would trust God’s promise that Abraham would possess Canaan even though Abraham was long dead and they were enslaved (again not the indication of tangible evidences). So for the Christian living by faith, a dearth of evidence for a time (even a very long time) is not such a weakness as it would be for the naturalist living by sight.
Abraham’s faith in God did produce evidence that it was well founded, but much of that evidence did not come in his lifetime. The evidence would never have materialized if he had not had faith—if his belief in God’s trustworthiness had not been potent in how it effected his actions or had not produced tenacity in his obedience to God. Thus, as Hebrews 11:1 states, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (KJV).
Faith can be wise in personal relationships (especially with God)
Tolerating contrary evidence is part of the nature of trust, and trust is a vital element in positive personal relationships. It is especially important girder in relationships where there is a barrier to understanding such as a rift in culture or maturity. So what may seem poorly reasoned by an impersonal, purely cold fact-oriented way of thinking is a wise investment in a relationship-oriented paradigm. In issues basically about people and personal relationship, personally involved faith can often be a superior approach for fruitful decision making than personally detached evaluation.
Part of what justifies a faith in God that can be comfortable with a large amount of consequently unexplained problems, paradoxes and the like is the fact of what God is. God is our creator, the one responsible for the vast intricacies of physics and biology that some of our brightest minds continue to explore, and which reveals our massive ignorance about the way of things. A chimpanzee can create simple hand-tools, but nothing like an insect or a thermostat. A human can create a thermostat and (with a lot of work) a robot with processing capabilities that may be similar to an insect. But the smartest of bugs or most elaborate of supercomputers cannot operate nearly at our level of understanding (indeed, I’m not sure they possess the capacity of understanding things at all). So imagine how fantastically beyond our mastery God must be if he created us. Imagine also how beyond us his ways may be.
Though they may have a fair amount of contact with them, poodles don’t understand the deal with veterinarians, and chimpanzees have trouble mastering the concept of space programs. Yet the vets and trainers still communicate with these animals at a level appropriate to the animals’ capacities. So it is with us and God. Faith in such a context is an attitude part and parcel of sober humility. It is our best bet at achieving something worthwhile in light of our limitations and God’s un-limitations. Thus, Jesus says,
Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
(John 15:4-5)
Being a Christian, I affirm that God’s actions and his power are the key to progress and success, rather than human actions and power. Therefore, unlike many other pursuits, smart people don’t have a leg up over everyone else when it comes to spiritual success. So becoming right spiritually does not necessarily depend on human understanding and critical thinking (though these are excellent gifts and ought to be employed when available), but on responding to God.
In summary, Christian faith as I understand it is an attitude of humble, active trust. Having faith does not involve the suppression of difficult facts or possibilities, but it does involve a deliberate decision of personal allegiance that can happen in the face of such difficulties. In a worldview like Christianity where personal relationships dominate existence and God is Creator, faith is rational: the result of wise humility. Rightly placed faith, rather than intelligent thinking, effort, or other personal qualities, is the key to ultimate success.
Practice
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2
My choice to keep faith
In this life, I don’t expect that I ever will have direct and fully satisfying answers to most of my doubts. But the case for truth and deep value I’ve encountered as a Christian has been enough to make me listen soberly to the God found there. And his call is to faithfully trust and obey Jesus Christ. In my daily living I cannot suspend judgment concerning such a call: I either work to do what is commanded of me or I don’t. I’ve chosen to comply.
So I operate as a Christian accepting significant ambiguities in my understanding of reality, not knowing how to resolve the problems I face. Some people might wonder how I can thrive as a Christian with this ambiguity casting its shadow over all my decisions And it does often feel like a very big, lonely, cold shadow. Intentionally dividing what often feels to be true from what notions control my attitudes and mindset really is difficult, confusing, frustrating, and sometimes disturbing. And because of this, sometimes the uncertainty hinders my spirituality. But it has also been one of the major catalysts for growth in my faith in Christ in recent years. It may be a refining process: the dross of doubt has been surfacing, and I’m waiting for God to skim it off. Through the experience, I am growing in dependence on God and receiving deeper understanding of myself, Christian faith, and the thoughts and experience of non-Christians. God is using it to transform my mindset, so that instead of conforming to the standard thought patterns of the university and research world, which rely on making sense of things in general through ones own faculties, I work according to the paradigm of trusting God with my entire being, including my mind. Doing this, I acknowledge sense wherever I can recognize it but trustfully listen and wait expectantly for God to make ultimate sense of things, even when the mysteries remain large and making sense on my own seems seductively simple.
The wisdom of faith in my specific context
To understand why this sort of move could be sensible and even especially crucial in my specific context, consider Jesus’ words to his disciples in Matthew 18:3-4: “And he said: ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Children can have an admirable humility compared with adults in that they openly realize their need for help and trust their parents to provide: whether it is food the child needs, knowledge, protection, or anything else. As I understand him, Jesus says that this attitude is absolutely vital in order to participate in the new order he came to establish. If we refuse to entrust ourselves to our heavenly father, learn from him, and rely on him for our needs, we will keep him from helping us and give up the opportunity to work with him as he makes right our broken world.
The more a person is accustomed to having, the harder it generally is for them to fully surrender those things to God. Thus, God turns our world upside-down, as the people who seem to have things most together in life tend to be among the last to risk an all-out investment in what truly lasts. In Jesus’ day, people took riches as a sign of God’s blessing and inferred that the prosperous people must in general be who God is most pleased with. So when a very moral, rich young man came to Jesus asking what he needed to be perfect, Jesus surprised his disciples:
21Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." 22When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 23Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." 25When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?" 26Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." (Matthew 19:21-26)
Today in the university, more than the wallet it is the intellect by which people are judged and which they deeply value and respect. Today’s ‘Rich Young Men’ are the bright young intellectuals and the critical question they (we) are asked is whether we will humbly trust God with our minds. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
I have solemnly vowed to faithfully pursue God and his will, come what may. Having vowed faithfulness to God, he has brought me to the point where I must allow him to resect the cancer of my own intellectual self-reliance in order to move on with him. Though it may seem like foolishness to the world around me, I have accepted his plan as wise. If there really is a spiritual depth to reality that goes deeper than physics, I expect relative to God all of us basically have a child-sized grasp on reality or less, making a childlike attitude of trust appropriate. But more than because of this reasoning, I accept this plan because I love God—not the concept of God, but God as a person, who I personally know.
Why this faith is rational even when God’s existence is in question
Now in the face of my serious doubts, it could be objected at this point that my faith is the irrational emotionalism of the betrayed wife who continues to believe in her husband’s faithfulness and eventual return after he has abandoned her years ago for another woman. I grant that similar processes of attachment and longing and stubborn needy hope are indeed at work within me. The “Corroborating Evidence” and (even more so) the “Experience” sections later on in this essay describe my reasons for expecting Jesus to come through for me. The point I want to make here is that even if (as I very often feel) God’s existence still proves unlikely, I am no fool to wait for him.
Suppose I have reason to believe there’s roughly a one in twenty chance that a friendly acquaintance will come by my house tomorrow to visit for a few hours, and that will be my only opportunity to spend time with him. If I have chores to take care of or need to go in to work, I might very well leave the house for the day and not clean things up for when I get home. However, if it’s a 1/20 chance that the US President will be making a (several hour) visit to my house, I’d ask for the day off at work, clean the house, pay attention to my clothes, and make sure I have refreshments available. I might invite friends and neighbors to wait with me. I would let myself get excited, even if it was a mediocre president. I might spend the night dreaming of questions to ask this leader. And I would still deem myself justified in all this even in the likely case that the president never showed up.
Because God is so ultimate and perfect, he is far more worthy of waiting for that the president of the United States. The rule with other things, whether lovers or possessions or organizations or friends or power or security or pleasure is that a life built around their value will ultimately fail to satisfy. They are not by nature absolutely dependable, nor should they seriously be expected to provide the hope, faithfulness, justice, and love that our species yearns for. On the other hand, God does fill this void as the appropriate object of my longing and hope and the only available option that could even possibly deliver on these things. This doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood that he exists (clearly, no amount of faithfulness can make a non-existent person exist). What it means, rather, is that in dealing with him, even his possibility, there is warrant for a strength of indefatigably committed hope and trust (in a word, faith) that would be inappropriate for anyone or anything else.
Through the uncertainty concerning God’s existence that I have experienced, I have had the opportunity to work through issues of faith in both mind and heart in my own life. I have grown through this challenge, and growth in faith is tremendously valuable for Christians. I expect this is part of the explanation for why God has allowed me to experience this trouble. However, I do not believe God wants me or others to teeter about the life of faith indefinitely without much security of his existence. While attitude and commitment may be the deepest elements of faith that a Christian must always hold on to, straightforward cognitive belief is the natural long-term way such faith is to be sustained. Even if I’m not all the way there yet, I do have a foundation for the degree of belief I’ve obtained thus far. And so I turn to my reasons for thinking the God known by Christians really exists.
Experiencing God
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
John 17:3
The driving core of why I buy in to the Christian belief package is tied up in my personal experience of following and knowing Christ. My experiences occasion and reinforce a special variety of deep convictions. My experience also plays into my persistence in following him, whether I happen to think he probably exists or not.
The “Internal Instigation of the Holy Spirit”
My belief through experience is not an argument from experience. Through his Holy Spirit, God makes foundational truths of Christianity evident to Christians as true and from God. He provides this knowledge in a basic, non-argumentative way—like perception or memory. This knowledge is accepted through the attitude of faith. Tasting honey convinces me of its sweetness in a way that was not possible beforehand when I was merely told that honey is sweet—I experience the sweetness. When I remember my name is Tom, I don’t reason out an argument for self being named Tom; I just remember my name. Nor am I irresponsible for not using an argument to arrive at the secure conclusion that my name is Tom.
According to Biblical teaching, God reveals truth and instigates faith in people, as part of his method of rescuing us out of our sick (sinful) condition and restoring our relationship with him. Because (if Christian belief is true) this acceptance of divine revelation is a proper function successfully aimed at truth, Christian belief (if true) achieved this way is warranted: its truth can be properly known without reliance on additional investigation.
Whether they realize it or not, I think this is the real core reason why all born again Christians believe the Christian message (and may be intellectually responsible in doing so). God’s Holy Spirit makes the truth of the gospel evident to a person, and spurs her to realize and admit her guilt and helplessness, to turn away from the wicked orientation of her life, choosing to bind herself to Jesus Christ, accepting him as her savior from her abysmal condition and the Lord of her objectives and entire being, and opening herself to his renewal of her affections and understanding.
In my particular case, I have not been able to separate my reason for believing God exists at all from this reason for being a Christian, this faith-laden Christian experience of God. My understanding and acceptance of the way of Jesus has progressed gradually throughout my life. So my belief in God is enforced more through a sustained relationship with him than through a particular encounter with him. Through this relationship I sense life in God—a fiery stew of wonderful things. In what follows I attempt to describe what this relationship is like.
At this point, I should make an important clarification: for the most part, I believe God exists by implication. I don’t believe in his existence by faith, nor do I see how to do so. The instigation of the Holy Spirit is not directly applied to my belief in God’s existence. To continue an analogy: by tasting honey, I know it is sweet. I infer that the honey exists, but I can’t directly taste its existence.
As I describe different facets, understand that it is the whole of the relationship rather than the specific parts that is important here. Knowing someone through a personal relationship is a sort of a gestalt experience: the whole is more than and different from the sum of its parts. An essay can’t fully communicate it.
And as is also the case with skepticism, there is recursion in the works: knowing God arises through the effects of earlier layers of knowing God. Thus, the mechanics of faith and doubt confirm Jesus’ words to his disciples: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” (Matthew 13:11-12)
God’s Voice
One of the most important parts of my relationship with God is his work in me through scripture. For example, as my doubt of God’s existence weighed down on me, I came across Psalm 62 and realized that through it, God was speaking into my situation. It teaches me to take peace, trust and hope in God, and commit to doing it. I memorized a portion, and through chewing on it, my lifestyle as a whole improved: I had more peace and became better able to keep a general perspective of humility and patience.
When I pray to God with his character in mind as taught by the Bible, talking to him as a person rather than mechanically or superstitiously, and let consciousness of him permeate into my life, I regard things from a more honest perspective, one that’s more like his. The perspective I experience is less Tom-centered, and more merciful and gracious (that is, has a generous, kind, forgiving approach) toward people around me. It is less fixated on my petty decisions and concerns, and more ready to listen to God’s concerns, which are sometimes distinctly different from my own inclinations.
Sometimes while speaking with God I notice spontaneous impressions in my mind that seem wise and good and un-Tom-like. This is usually through scripture, but I also remember times when it was through a book other source. These thoughts are not necessarily in line with my desires or my mood or my preoccupations of the moment, yet they generally resonate as deeply needed. They seem qualitatively different from my own ideas. God’s explicit words to me are stable, and I feel awe when I hear them.
The reader may notice in my descriptions that God’s communication generally has a moral-emotional element, such as a conviction that what has been said is valuable and deeply good. Often this sort of impression is the primary aspect of what is communicated. For example, I have felt something like God’s attitude toward me or his character: a familiar spirit of soft yet sublime and purposeful warmth that carried with it a sense that God is very comfortable in his own reality.
Experiences of this variety of deep impressions are not common for me, and many Christians may not have experienced something like this at all. Yet I expect followers of Christ will generally feel a familiarity with the sort of spirit I describe, because they too have experienced what God is like. As Jesus says of himself in John 10:4, “his sheep follow him because they know his voice.”
Providence
Another aspect of my experience of God is seeing his orchestration of events. At this point, the reader must remember that under a Christian worldview, God has his hands in everything. Attributing something to God does not necessarily mean we don’t think there’s a naturalistic explanation for what happened. God is active in the ordinary things, and sometimes I think I see what he’s doing.
I perceive God’s provision in a general way when I appreciate trees, animals, food, beauty, my family, my own body, things I learn, and many more aspects of life. I sense that all of this really ought to be appreciated, that I really need to be thankful to God for each thing, even though frequently I’m not in fact thankful or appreciative. I often completely ignore this impulse, or buy in to a distortion of it like fixating on amplifying my own enjoyment of the gift with disregard for the source. But appreciating the Artist behind the art is how I truly satisfy and fulfill the internal command.
God’s providence comes more specifically through bringing us relevant scripture for the situation at hand and through his orchestration of events between people. Christians encounter each other (or non-Christians) at the right time with the right thoughts or actions that answer us in our prayers. Sometimes those prayers are uncannily prompted by what seems like thoughts impressed on our minds by God. I have frequently felt like I’ve seen pieces of this when I’ve shared God’s good news with people.
Contemporary stories of miraculous events are worth mentioning here because of their qualities (rather than because of the fact of the miracle). A key property of most of the stories I’ve heard from people I trust is the personality behind the miracles. They aren’t random instances of fortunate breaches in the laws of nature. Rather, they seem to happen when God would have good reason to do such things, in ways that bear the stamp of his personality. Normally they are relational events; there is prayer, God speaks with those involved. The miracles occur to clearly bring the Christian message to one or more people, to turn around a desolate life (someone about to commit suicide, etc), to reveal God’s trustworthiness in providing for his servants, and similar situations. The actions in these accounts from various people strike me as very God-like. This is another way I get to know God, or rather that we, his people, get to know him.
When I see Christians actually trusting God and proactively entrusting him with themselves, and committing to learn from and apply what the Bible says, the results I see resonate as deeply good. There’s a sort of ‘on-target-ness’ that I’ve noticed I often sense in sincere Christians (though I must admit many of us also are often out of line with it). I see that these people are up to something significant, something beautiful. It has to do with priorities and lifestyle, feeding into a basic mindset that seems appropriate, something I and many others want and need and are drawn to. And I think people are right to pursue this when they see it, whether or not they understand what’s going on. I’m not talking about a transitory mindset like being ‘in the zone’ that is induced in special situations, but rather something that becomes part of a person’s personality. This mindset is a sign of God transforming his people, and it’s one of the things his Holy Spirit highlights when instigating both Christians and non-Christians to believe in God.
My guess at the consistency of this mindset is that it includes a basic disposition to seek the good of others, combined with a sort of directedness coming from a patient confidence in an objective, external mission-giver, in whose mission there is a commitment to engage. This fits with the directive in Romans 12:1-2:
1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. 2Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Priorities
One last thing I will mention that feels right and Godly about Christianity is the priorities prescribed. Essentially, living by the Christian worldview means admitting our corruption and impotence for ultimately fixing the consequences of that corruption, submitting to God’s righting of it (achieved through Jesus’ self-sacrifice to pay what we justly owe), and genuinely agreeing to cooperate with God, the perfectly good, with our entire selves in holistic obedience. Thus, given the intimate union of God and goodness, the fundamental value of the Christian life is the absolute commitment to righteousness. This contrasts with the norm I see outside of Christianity of pursuing personal happiness as the ultimate standard. I think it is self-evident (even tautological: true by definition) that the absolute pursuit of righteousness is what is ultimately right and any deviation is ultimately wrong. Such deviation is the essence of idolatry, orienting worth according to created things rather than the Creator. The pursuit of one’s own happiness (or that of one’s group) at the expense of righteousness is the source of all sorts of evil, including most cases of war, rape, extortion, feuds, oppression and genocide, but also things like divorce, untruthfulness and gossip. The solution to the world’s problems must have the power to overcome all this. Thus, Christianity appeals to me on the moral level of getting our priorities straight, as is necessary for a truly good worldview, and the kind I could be (and am) proud to subject myself to. The whole orientation of Christianity seems like the right path, the sort of solution God would bring.
The beliefs I’ve received
Through experiences like what I’ve described above, and especially through the combination of all of them working together, I feel I know God, and have received assurances from him of true and important beliefs. While I can make an argument from these experiences to the effect of certain Christian doctrines, such arguments are not the foundation of my belief. The foundation is found in the convictions whose virtue I claim God has shown me directly—not as an argument, but as a basic thing like perception or memory.
What are some of these things that I suspect God has impressed on me, in which I have, in a sense, perceived divine virtue? He has given me to know that he loves me deeply, more than I understand, that he understands me completely, is all-good, is perfectly trustworthy, and I should depend on him. He has made clear that I am morally guilty and unable to set myself right, but that he is able and willing to do it if I trust him. He has also made clear that doing what is right is his way, and for me it is essentially pursuing him, trusting him and obeying him—in other words, loving him with my whole being, as well as loving other people. He has made clear that this is the correct priority in life, necessarily more important than pursuing my own happiness. And he has made clear that the Jesus followers, Christians who I know, are his people, on the right path, the path that God calls me to as well. He calls us to join together in unity as Christians, supporting each other as we work together to do right, following Jesus’ lead.
It is on the basis of these things that my Christian belief is founded. My acceptance of the Bible as authoritative isn’t really because of its historical credentials, which really play a non-essential, confirmatory role. I accept this authority because I see God himself using the Bible as if he considers it authoritative. Similar reasoning goes for most further theological beliefs that I accept, which generally rest at least partially on the authority of the Bible.
My Present State of Uncertainty
As I have described, my belief in God as a Christian is founded on a basic perception-like phenomenon that has a strong moral-emotional content that accompanies certain propositions. Yet for whatever reason, I rather easily fall into thinking and operating as if the phenomenon has little bearing on reality. I suspect that many other Christians experience God’s assurance in a more vivid, less shakable way than me.
Some people seem to have a strong innate belief in the divine, but I’m not one of those people. If I recognized a way I could make a virtuous choice resulting in a secure confidence of God’s existence, I would. But as things stand, I don’t. Perhaps God will provide that in time.
Thinking outside of myself and making an object of the process I’ve described, I find the subjective nature of my experience suspicious; all sorts of other religions also appeal to some variety of subjective experience as inspiring their beliefs. This is merely suspicious and not glaring contrary evidence in and of itself. It’s not surprising that God should choose to reveal himself by subjective means. I see no reason to expect he would necessarily be a philosophical rationalist or empiricist. As to the experience of others, perhaps a given non-Christian “spiritual experience” is really a different (less legitimate) sort of phenomenon, or a misinterpretation of God’s communication, or caused by demons, or who knows what else. Of course, in some cases those of contrary spiritual traditions might reflect the same sorts of arguments back on my experience. Still, this lack of objective resolution doesn’t excuse me to disregard my experience of God, to ignore the person I’ve known. Yet in an attempt to judge as fairly as I’m able, I bring my experience into question.
Even literal clear perception and definite memory can be mistaken. A person can experience convincing optical illusions, for example, or hallucinate and be emotionally moved by his hallucinations. An individual comes to recognize such mistakes when powerful evidence is brought against his beliefs: if I thought I talked with an albino sociologist standing in front of me, but later heard others who were present saw no such person and was informed that my drink had been laced with a hallucinogen, I could be convinced that in fact the albino sociologist didn’t exist.
As a Christian, I also am confronted with strong evidence that puts my belief into question. So I wonder if maybe my experience of God and the whole way I’ve interpreted so many events in my life might be due to a natural religious psychological mechanism that, while perhaps being adaptive, is not aimed at truth. I have great difficulty weighing the evidence between the two sides: they appeal as true on different grounds, each having the upper hand by the standards of the mindset appropriate to the worldview it supports: the way of faith for Christianity or the way of sight for naturalism.
So at any given moment I may or may not feel like this gestalt experience of God is actually legitimate. But regardless of whether naturalism or Christian belief strikes me as the true proposition at any given time, I continue in commitment to the way of faith. This has to do in part with the nature of the conviction God has implanted in me (faith), that there’s a sort of durable momentum in my commitments regardless of my thoughts. My love of God works this way. Also, in the summer of 2006, I made a solemn oath to God to pursue him no matter what, and I intend to make good on that promise whether or not I arrive at the conclusion that he exists. Finally, in a state of uncertainty about God’s existence, I have concluded that continuing in practical faith is the responsible course of action. I will now explain why God’s existence remains at least a living open question when I wonder if my experience of him is a sort of an illusion, and why living according to faith is the morally right choice for me.
Part 3: Persevering
I have claimed (drawing on the argument of Alvin Plantinga) that my Christian belief is warranted insofar as Christian belief is true. But I have often felt like I actually am wrong, and have been overwhelmed with the evidence that seems to point toward this wrongness. What has kept me from flipping the switch? I think ultimately the Holy Spirit is the underlying agent responsible for this fact.
But the Holy Spirit can act through reason, and the God of Truth is no friend of poor reasoning. My internal adversary frequently accuses me of being irrational to stick with Jesus in the face of severe doubt, given that my experience of God could be an illusion. This section lays out how I answer the accuser, and persevere in faith with a clean conscience.
Essentially, I can identify three sorts of rational motivations working to keep me from settling down into a naturalistic worldview while in the grey zone, when I at least partially neglect or downplay my experience of God. I number them 0, 1 and 2.
The 0th is the self-preserving motivation that my hopes, dreams, plans, habits, culture, close friends, immediate family, and probably more… basically the great majority of what I hold dear and gives me meaning and identity happens to be bound up in Christianity. I don’t want to ruin my life, and this naturally motivates me to avoid such an outcome. However, this motivation isn’t exactly inspiring. It’s not consistent with the type of person I aim to be, and my conscience would probably not tolerate it as a primary reason for persistence. So, motivation 0 may root for the other reasons from the grandstand, but it generally stays off center stage. When I examine my thoughts when my belief is in crisis, the primary energy by which I stand my ground as a Christian does not seem to come from this motivation. More often it seems to be the fear and love of God that drive me. I describe this by its rational elements in motivation 2 and its passionate elements in the conclusion.
The classes of rational motivations beyond self-preservation are 1, objective realities that corroborate the Christian worldview, and 2, what is ethically at stake in my decision, which I will lay out as an ethical wager.
Corroborating Evidence
While looking for faith, God gives signs to Abraham and the Hebrew slaves so that they would believe him. Such objective evidence that gives reason to believe God is present and potent in the first place is recounted throughout the Bible. It is a very significant element God has typically used in eliciting faith. As religions go, Christianity is very strong even today in objective evidence. Through my life as a Christian, this evidence is especially available to me. What follows are what I judge to be the most convincing pieces of evidence for the truth of Christianity.
Christianity’s Success
To begin, Christianity distinguishes itself from the plethora of religious notions humankind has dreamed up as an old and vibrantly thriving world religion. Such longevity and functionality, particularly when its relevance carries over to today through radically different cultural contexts, suggest that a religion has hit on something powerful and has proved itself to be a philosophy to be reckoned with. It is duly noted that this may apply to several conflicting religions; if any spiritual tradition has the fiber to stand against naturalism it is likely one of these.
Jesus’ Miracles and Resurrection
There is an impressive case that Jesus Christ’s miraculous life and resurrection are not only historically viable claims, but clearly the best explanation available for the evidence. This evidence is found both in the writings preserved in the New Testament and in circumstances external to those writings. Many have tried to find ways of explaining away the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and they seem largely to have failed to produce especially promising alternatives. Other Christians have already presented this argument, and argue it better than I can. I provide a reference for one of them.
Jesus’ death and resurrection are the focal point of our faith. They are the keystone event of the Christian message, without which our scriptures explicitly admit utter defeat (1 Cor 15:14-19, commenting on his resurrection in particular).
The naturalist would expect a comparable number of surprisingly substantiated assertions between the various religions that occur by chance in a mess of less fortunate notions, but I would be very impressed if something as surprising and pivotal as this was found among Christianity’s supernaturally oriented competitors.
A possible objection can be made on the grounds of how very inaccurate eyewitness testimony has been shown to be. However, there are certain sorts of eyewitness testimony, especially under certain sorts of circumstances, that ought to be taken as very reliable, and the evidence for the resurrection fits this category.
Prophecies about Jesus
Additionally, there is the testimony of the prophets. Some of the Old Testament prophecies applied to Jesus are highly remarkable, such as Psalm 22 (which gives an accurate description of crucifixion before its invention) and Isaiah 52:13-53:12 (which uncannily tells the story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and mission). Beyond these passages, Jesus elegantly fulfills a system of important expectations weaved throughout the Old Testament Metanarrative. Many Christians champion an argument from probability based on the fulfillment of a pile of individual (alleged) prophecies; noting original context, this doesn’t strike me as objectively impressive. But I am impressed at how the tapestry of preceding scripture resolves in the person of Jesus.
Continuing Testimony of the Supernatural
These are supplemented with a tradition of Christian interaction with God and numerous contemporary stories of miraculous and supernatural events that come from apparently trustworthy sources. These include stories from people I know and trust, people I don’t know but judge reliable, and a few from my own experience.
The notoriety of these events is not only that they seem to be supernatural. They also cohere with the Christian understanding of God. As a Christian, I detect a familiar personality behind many of them. I provide a book recommendation (God’s Smuggler) that illustrates the sort of thing I’m talking about.
A standard way of dismissing people’s supernatural accounts is to point out the existence of such stories in multiple conflicting religions, augmented with a recollection of the numerous psychological and social reasons why people sometimes mistakenly believe in supernatural happenings. But this move seems to ignore the possibility that there really are supernatural occurrences in multiple religions (which is consistent with Biblical metaphysics) and/or that there is a mixture of untrustworthy and trustworthy accounts which could be distributed unevenly between the religions (which the Christian would find unsurprising). I’m impressed enough by what I’ve encountered within Christianity that given these two possibilities, supernatural stories and experiences pull substantial weight with me. While I find it wise to employ some skepticism in determining the veracity of miracle stories, I find it very difficult to explain away a number of the accounts I’ve come upon, especially given the norm of intelligent, healthy, cognitively grounded people and culture in which I encounter many of them.
What this Evidence Does
These things taken together make me think Christianity has rational viability. It didn’t materialize arbitrarily out of wishful thinking but emerged from a context of objective historical events. It doesn’t seem to be the product of a mere cultural fad. And it isn’t just in people’s heads (or ‘hearts’), but has explanatory value for and interaction with the concrete world.
I recall hearing someone compare believing Christian theology to believing the earth is encircled by a ring of undetectable pink elephants. In other words, it is untestable, doesn’t really sensibly explain anything, is extravagantly superfluous in its claims and hence should not be believed. Based on what I’ve presented here, I think I have established that such a position is baloney.
But let us take a step back. Although I think I’ve made a strong case that naturalists have some significant explaining to do, remember from my section on doubt that, by my judgment, Christians have our own mound of suspicious and unsatisfying explanations. Very often, the arguments against Christian belief are decisively more impressive to me than the evidences I have just described.
The points I’ve provided above remain important from several different angles. First, this evidence defends Christianity from the accusation that it is merely a complex ideological web that has evolved over time to fit human psychological needs while in reality being only an illusion. It has significant objective evidence to its credit. Second, as far as I’m aware, it distinguishes Christianity from other religions as having a relatively impressive case when it comes to objective evidence. All in all, it keeps Christianity on the table as a distinct possibility for the person who seeks evidence external to the human mind. Through it I see that Christianity is definitively raised above the noise, set apart from the sea of religions, philosophies and arbitrary notions that the human race continues to devise. Even if the evidence I’ve mentioned can’t make the truth of Christian belief clearly probable, it can help clarify that the Christian message is a significant theory to be reckoned with. It is an important factor in why Christianity and naturalism are the real contenders for truth, as I see things. Thus, it prepares the table for the ethical wagers that get played in my soul.
Ethical Wagers
Even at the times when it seems to me that Christian belief is probably not true, I persist in living a life of faith, seeking to trust and obey God. I do not always find this easy or natural. But I hold that living this way is the responsible course of action for the person in doubt who sees that there is a serious chance the Christian gospel is true. Moreover, it is right for people who like me can claim to know God. There is a well-known argument along similar lines known as Pascal’s Wager which argues that a decision in favor of Christian belief is the prudent choice: even the smallest chance of missing heaven and being condemned to hell must be avoided at all costs. A different wager, or set of wagers, based on ethical grounds plays an important role in my continuing decision to persevere in living by faith. The first has to do with the nature of ultimate goodness. The second concerns ethical dealing with the person of God. Naturally, these wagers assume my particular context, but I encourage you to think through how well they do or do not translate into your own context.
Ultimate Goodness
The first wager is a wager on whether or not there is ultimate goodness. The currency I am betting is the entire way in which I think and live. The prize is overall ethical success in life: to live rightly, to be truly righteous.
Christianity supports ultimate goodness, naturalism does not
There are a number of deep human intuitions that most people tend to take for granted which have a firm basis in a Christian worldview, but are more difficult to support in a naturalistic worldview. Among these is the objective authority of goodness. Naturalistically, goodness is likely nothing more than a category that was useful for the survival of our ancestors. I can see no reason to think that if there was real value (something that transcended the preservation of our genes), naturalistic evolution would endow us with the ability to ascertain it. Thus, as far as I understand, with naturalism it is vastly probable that nothing we value is actually worthwhile. It is completely unfounded to prefer anything at all (altruistic sacrifice, magnificent creation, justice, love, peace, hope) to anything else (recreationally torturing children, cat-burning, wiping out all life in the universe, bombing the Louvre, eating those dearest to you, suffering, hatred, indifference, horror, despair). As all parties would admit, by their wiring, naturalists don’t generally follow through on this particular line of reasoning: normally the great majority of people –naturalists or otherwise- act like it matters and should matter to everyone whether innocent people are brutally tortured. And to some degree, I would too, were I a naturalist. But this aside, naturalism strikes me as essentially making reality an utterly empty, worthless existence in concept. And even if the naturalistic proposition were true, what good is truth divorced from goodness itself? A person may value truth, but there’s no reason they ought to value it. My personal preference would be indefatigably pursuing goodness even into insane denial as opposed to congratulating myself on embracing ultimately worthless and pointless truth.
The naturalist may still support a sort of belief in goodness in the form of relativistic ethics. She can claim that no foundation for believing in goodness or valuing things is necessary beyond the fact that an individual happens to have these processes hardwired. But this strikes me as similar to substituting light bulbs for the existence of the sun. It is an inestimable loss. A basic part of what constitutes right and wrong dies when there ceases to be an objective and binding foundation for why they are important, why anything is important. The shriveled up shell that remains may be functional, but how much authority can it muster? It is weightless when the dictates of such a system of thought are weighed against dictates underwritten by ultimate goodness, or even by what has a chance of being ultimate goodness. In the end, the dictates of one have worth- or at least might have worth- while those of the other do not.
In contrast, Christianity offers a coherent foundation for belief in ultimate goodness. God, who is ultimate and eternally contains this perfection within himself, was in control of our origins, and ensured that we would have a good handle on ultimate things. He has the authority to determine true value. God created people in his image, such that like him, we would have a grasp on what is ultimately right and valuable. Christianity also has the perk of motivating a devotion to ultimate goodness to an extent that is much more difficult with a naturalistic worldview.
Placing my wager
I consider the deliverances of relativistic ethics to be infinitely unconcerning when put alongside ultimate ethics. If naturalism is true, then nothing really matters. But even if I’ve somehow missed something and said deliverances really should concern me, they don’t seem to clearly favor one side of this argument over the other. My system of relativistic ethics would probably take as its core principle the pursuit of happiness and minimization of pain for all, weighted in proportion to sentience. It is difficult to judge whether or not I would achieve this better living by naturalism than by faith in Christ. On the other hand, as a naturalist I would clearly be impeded in doing right according to Christian ethics. For instance, I would probably not evangelize, act on crucial guidance from God found in the Bible or worship God.
If ultimate value is the correct basis for making decisions (and I think this is self-evident), choosing to put my faith in Jesus Christ has a net probability of being tremendously right. Choosing the other option has a net probability of being tremendously wrong. If I want to do what is right and make my life count, I must resolve to invest it in God, abandoning myself entirely at his mercy, whether I feel inclined to think he exists or not. Faith is the ethical choice for a doubter like me.
Ethical dealing with the person of God
Sin against God is heavier than sin against humans
Doing wrong to God is probably a far bigger deal than doing wrong to other humans. Scripture illustrates this in a story. The much celebrated king David murdered a man named Uriah in order to take the man’s wife, Bathsheba, for himself. In doing so, he clearly deeply wronged other humans. When the prophet Nathan called him to account, David said "I have sinned against the LORD" (2 Samuel 12:13). Later, in a psalm he wrote in response he said to God “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge” (Palm 51:4, emphasis added.) Why would David say a thing like that when he obviously did sin against people other than God? Because he realized that all wrongdoing is ultimately against God and is an overwhelmingly greater offense against God than it is against other people.
God is the very foundation and center of goodness itself. It would blow every neuron in my body to do justice to even imagining how much love and respect such a sublimely wonderful and valuable person deserves. Every fiber of my being every moment of my existence ought to be devoted to him.
As the ultimate being, I also wonder if God is infinitely sentient. How big is his experience in response to what we choose? Could it even be that what we experience in finite proportions he experiences in infinite proportions? If this is the case, then to cause him to suffer is an even worse thing than causing all people on earth to suffer, and causing him to rejoice is an even better thing than causing even all people on earth to rejoice. Possibilities like this warrant fearful care in our dealings with God.
Rejecting faith in Christ wrongs God
Hebrews 11:6 says, “without faith, it is impossible to please God”. As his creature, I owe him my obedience. It is a great barrier to obedience if I stop trusting God or looking to him for guidance, as well as a great insult to the most important being that exists. Furthermore, abandoning faith in Christ could mean rejecting his salvation. God made a tremendous sacrifice in order to save me. He also loves me more than I can imagine. Moreover, as his creature, I have a responsibility of taking care of what he has given me (in this case my very self). On all three counts, I wrong God if I reject his offer to save me from my evil. I may be within my rights to make such a choice, but it is a very, very wrong choice.
Rejecting the life of faith in Christ would also be ethically crippling in a more general sense, in that it would cut me off from receiving God’s guidance and empowerment. Thus, Jesus says, “If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5). This fruit is fruit to please God.
Placing my wager
Naturalism implies that God doesn’t exist. If naturalism is right, acting as if there were a God might be seem rather odd, but presumably would not be of much ethical consequence. Of course, I don’t think anything is of any real ethical consequence within a relativistic ethical framework, but even if I did, it seems to me there is no clear indication that I could pursue universal happiness either more effectively or less effectively with such a mindset in a naturalistic world. On the other hand, if the Christian God exists, it is ethically of the most critical importance to have a right relationship with him. He has made it abundantly clear that this means living by faith in Christ. Thus, if I want to do what is right, choosing to live by faith in Christ has a net probability of being exceedingly right, pleasing God. On the other hand, the contrary choice would have the inverse result.
Further Issues
How best to seek resolution of doubt
Another issue that concerns me is choosing the best route to the resolution of doubt. Based on the above wagers, I would argue that coming to know that God exists in the case that he does is far more important than coming to know that he doesn’t exist if indeed he doesn’t. I expect that the most likely way to receive God’s assurances of his existence is to live as a faithful servant. For example, if, given my hesitance to place full stock in testimonial evidence, I want to see miracles myself, I am more likely to be there when they happen while working as a faithful Christian involved in the advancement of the kingdom of God than wile living as a skeptic who has left the scene. I also expect God is more likely to choose to reward me with such assurance if I am a faithful worker than if I am a sight-seer. Anyhow, I would rather be the in the position of the faithful servant than the mere observer when it happens. A lifestyle of active faith is more consistent with the sort of person I aspire to be.
Keeping my oath
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve made a solemn oath to pursue God all my days, whether I think he exists or not. Presently, having faith in Christ seems like the best way to pursue God. While as a naturalist I might not see such an oath as necessarily permanently binding, as a Christian I do. And on these grounds, an ethical wager similar to those above seems to suggest that fully keeping that oath is the wisest choice.
Conclusion: What Drives Me
Even after I’ve explained all this, you may still do well to reexamine me from a psychological standpoint, and ask, what continues to drive my persistence? Deep down, underneath the rising and falling waves in my arguments and moods, as this tempest batters my soul and my outlook often seems bleak, what gives me the energy to sail on? Key motivations for me are my love, respect and value for God, Christians, and the Christian life. I have a deep appreciation for the depth and moral fruit that this Christian life has made available to me and that I’ve seen in a number of individuals who cherish the worship of Christ. But the most important of all things that drive me is the love of God: love being a passion to seek the full good of a person combined with a deep appreciation of that person’s value. And my motivation comes not just because I love God, but because I know he loves me, profoundly and dearly. I am determined to accept this love, and by no means insult it—to by no means insult or reject God. Essentially in this sentiment, being God-fearing and God-loving are one and the same. Love is of paramount value to me.
A very deep and dear part of who I am is a seeker of understanding. Those who know me well know that I am an asker of questions, always pursuing deeper insights. So this passion for mastering deep truth is a powerful force within me. The sense and explanatory potential of naturalism combined with the myriad of questions in Christianity to which no clear answer is forthcoming make adopting naturalism an enticing option for me. Yet love is even more important and valuable than understanding. And love has called me to persist.
Afterword: A Challenge
My vision and prayer is that God’s good news would be at work in you, and that through honesty, boldness, and respect my words would contribute to that work. I want to see people embrace God’s full desire for them through a method that clearly communicates humility and love, free of manipulation or harassment. It is my intense hope that together we would call God on his promise, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).
Therefore, I want to encourage you to join me on this journey. The journey as I perceive it is an ethical state of being, open to everyone whether or not they feel very certain that God exists or agree with most other Christian beliefs. I encourage you to make the same commitments that I have: determine to maintain a potent attitude of trust, obedience and dependence toward God. Sorrowfully admit and renounce everything in yourself that is out of line with a devotion to what is right, submitting all of it to God in humility. Make it your deepest ambition to know God, and to love him with the entirety of your being. And when God show you the importance of it, bind yourself to Jesus, looking to him for your deepest needs, and never renounce that allegiance.
Appendix 1: Christianity and Naturalism
Christianity
The Christian worldview paints reality as essentially a story of personal relationships. God is the central focus of everything, and life is about the relationships between God and the people he has created. Also important though is relationships among created people, and relationship within God, who is three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and thus perfectly relational within himself. The Christian story of these relationships can be staged in a drama of five acts: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Sanctification and Ultimate Salvation & Judgment. It is known as the gospel, meaning the good news. This story shapes the entire Christian life and intellect. What I present here is my own paraphrase of the drama, flavored by an Evangelical perspective; there is a variety of interpretations among Christians, but generally Christians who trust and attend to the Bible roughly agree on something similar to what follows.
1. Creation
God is personal, the essence of perfection and creator of everything that does, has or ever will exist. All goodness, truth, and beauty are grounded in and emanate from him, who is absolutely good, all-knowing, and absolutely beautiful. The purpose of all that exists, including people, is to glorify God. To glorify God means to serve him, to know and proclaim who he is, to please him and to enjoy him. We were designed for a life with him truly at the center, presiding over all our decisions, which is our moral duty and will give us the deepest joy and fulfillment. He made humans in his image ( like him in important ways), desiring a loving personal relationship with us. He wanted this to be a genuine, freely accepted relationship and so gave us free choice. This choice included the option to rebel against him instead of loving him through trust and obedience.
2. Fall
We took that option to rebel, and the consequence was disastrous. We became a corrupt people, each one of us blemished by this corruption (our sinfulness), doing what is wrong (and often knowing that it is wrong), and perpetrating terrible things against God, each other, and ourselves. Since God is perfectly just, he will not allow this evil rebellion to continue forever, but will bring us to justice. This justice is hell, where people are permanently shut out from what they rebelled against. Hell means people are cut off from God, the center of all goodness and fulfillment, and permanently left to a burning consumption. An inference made by some (including myself) is that it is their own corruption that will eat them. Since God’s standard is perfection, none of us can cancel out our rottenness by doing enough good things. God passionately detests wickedness and cannot unite with himself that which is impure. He rewards all impurity with punishment. We all deserve hell and, barring outside intervention, are all headed there on our own two feet. All this is called the Fall, for we have fallen from the good state in which we were created.
3. Redemption
Since God by his nature profoundly loves us, he does not want us to have to be cut off from him or eaten by our corruption. So he brought about a solution that would completely satisfy both justice and love: he paid the penalty for our crime himself. In Jesus, God the Father’s dearly loved son, God became fully human, lived a perfect life, and took our punishment on himself when he died on the cross, experiencing unimaginable suffering. But he didn’t stay dead; he rose again signifying that he had mastered death itself (including the spiritual death that is hell and the principles that make us go there). All of our evil—past, present and future-- was thereby legally cancelled out and replaced with Jesus’ goodness. Thus, our relationship with God, for which we were designed, can be restored. The punishment of hell can be replaced by ultimate union with God, utterly fulfilling our purpose and deepest needs forever. This is heaven. And the option is free, provided completely by what Jesus has done, not by us. But we have to respond to this profuse benevolence of God’s by cooperating with him: we must accept Jesus as our savior and our Lord. Having him as our savior is a move of humility, acknowledging ourselves as profoundly guilty and warped, unable to set ourselves right. It means in response to this understanding that we let him pay for us rather than trying to achieve ultimate success through our own merit or pull ourselves out of our predicament (and, of course, acknowledging that we are in a predicament in the first place). Having him as Lord is a move of submission, resolving to let him be the center of our lives and authority over our decisions, as it was always meant to be. God offers to adopt us as his children, an unfathomable offer of familial affection, fellowship and honor. A person starts to follow Jesus Christ when God confronts them with this fantastic offer and they respond with this simple, radical decision. God, through Jesus, has redeemed us from our sin and its consequences. This redemption is a pivotal shift from the way of death to the way of life, as monumental as birth. Hence, being redeemed is also called being born again.
4. Sanctification
Making such a decision of trusting God and living for him is what it means to become a Christian, and the meaning of faith. It is how we’re saved from our corruption: a thorough dependence on God as the means rather than ourselves. When understood this way, however, the genuine decision of faith will lead to continued decisions to do right, living according to God’s perfect priorities. When we are redeemed, he sends his Holy Spirit (who is God) to live in us. By making his home in us, God provides us with guidance, the means to grow, and a direct personal intimacy between us. Thus, in character we generally become more and more like Jesus our example and God our Father throughout our lives. Living as a Christian means letting Jesus save us and preside over us daily. We humbly give over our faults regularly, asking him to overcome them as we cooperate in obedience, and we look to him for guidance, meaning and purpose. Thus, though we’ve been redeemed in one fell swoop, Christians live in a relationship building process where we become more like God means for us to be.
5. Ultimate Salvation & Judgment
Ultimately, Christians have a secure hope that we will receive the prize toward which we strain. In heaven, we will be united with God. He will perfect us and fulfill our entire beings. Together, we his adopted children will live with him in perfect joy forever.
On earth, this age of history will draw to a close when Jesus returns to earth, this time as a conqueror and judge. He will destroy all who oppose him (who oppose God and goodness) and will bring absolute impartial justice to everyone, based on what they have done. Everyone will be raised from the dead and answer to God for every single choice they ever made. People who through faith are covered by Jesus’ own sacrifice will be rewarded based on their obedience to their master. Everyone else will receive a just sentence based on all that they have done and will each go on to experience their respective sentences permanently. So there will be accountability whether we see it now or not, and perfect justice will be served. God will make everything right for good.
Other Aspects of the Christian Worldview
Christianity is necessarily social; the Christian church, God’s temple, is not a building but rather the collective of every follower of Christ. God builds his church like an organism made up of Christ followers, interconnected. Jesus is the directing and sustaining head of this organism. This is the place God lives on earth now. Christians are to cooperate with each other: supporting each other, keeping each other accountable, working together to do God’s work in the world, and glorifying him (serving, pleasing, enjoying, knowing and proclaiming who he is) through all they do.
Jesus sums up God’s law (the rules of Judeo-Christian ethics) as loving God with all one’s being and loving other humans as one’s self. In love of God, Christians are to do everything for his glory—including regular, mundane things. There is to be no sacred-secular divide in the Christian life; everything is to be sacred, devoted to God.
Part of loving God is enjoying him. And part of how we do this is to gratefully enjoy life (including nature, music, food, etc), which is his creation. In the more direct sense, we enjoy God through things like resting in his promises of provision and justice, anticipating the glorious good he is bringing (and turning) us into, and directly finding him good and enjoyable through his personal interactions with us. All this joy is part of what God develops in us as we follow Jesus. Following Jesus in truth is hard, and joy does not always mean pleasure or comfort. But joy becomes a big enough thing in the mature Christian to rejoice in suffering because of a certainty of the good that God is doing through that suffering. Though suffering itself is not good, that suffering can be an important tool in shaping a person for the better. And God is weaving all things—good and bad—together for the good of those who love him.
God speaks and acts through his people, Christians, who know his voice. He also communicates through creation, his revelation found in the Bible, direct revelation to people, his organization of events, and perhaps other ways as well.
The world is understood to be a battle field of good and evil driven by unseen entities. The war is happening within every person. Ultimate reality is the spiritual, which humans cannot master, but rather masters humans. In opposition to God, who loves everything he has created, and his angels that serve him are the spiritual powers that (like us) rebelled against God: Satan and his dark angels, deceivers seeking to spoil and destroy everything God loves. Both sets of entities are real and active, though often under cover and employing plans and strategies we may not comprehend.
Christian doctrine affirms the value and worshipfulness of exploring God’s creation and making judgments and inferences from what we find (in a word, science). However, God’s testimony about the way of things supersedes that of our own eyes, ears, and inclinations, which in contrast to God are fallible. This is part of the basis for faith, a hope and trust in God that permeates everything truly Christian. I discuss it more extensively in the body of this testimony.
Naturalism
The naturalistic worldview is simpler than Christianity. Basically, it is assumed that nothing supernatural is real: there is no God, no ethereal Cosmic Force, and no afterlife. There are no souls, no miracles. Physical things, on the other hand, do exist. We as people are merely extremely complex systems of chemical reactions (just like the other animals). Some people like to call it “the scientific worldview”, as mainstream science generally operates on naturalistic assumptions, and naturalists generally aim to establish their beliefs through sound scientific principles.
Naturalism approaches truth from a different angle than does Christianity. The Christian seeks his most valued truth though a relationship with God, the source of all truth. The naturalist (as I conceive of him) seeks his most valued truth scientifically: through testable hypotheses. In general, of course, informed Christians deeply value empirically powerful scientific conclusions and naturalists deeply value what they can learn through personal relationships. But the two groups of people differ as to which principle acts as the primary guide for thinking about the world.
For the naturalist, our various attributes are explained evolutionarily: we think like we do as a result of random mutations, retained because it helped our ancestors survive to reproduce more organisms like themselves. The same reason goes for why we like eating sweet things, tend to be religious, speak to each other with complex language, and so forth. Perhaps some of our attributes are actually useless, but didn’t fatally disadvantage us thus far, so are retained.
There probably isn’t any such thing as ultimate value (e.g. right and wrong) external to our selves, although believing there is may have been favored evolutionarily. If there is value at all, things are valuable simply because we value them. This doesn’t mean whatever we want is necessarily right, but it does mean that the standard and foundation of what is right and important for us comes from ourselves. Perhaps not all naturalists are actually moral relativists this way, but if any sense of value is to be affirmed at all, this strikes me as the most sensible way naturalism can do it.
Appendix 2: A Summary
To help the reader digest this testimony as a whole, I summarize it as follows:
I have been torn between two world views: naturalism and Christianity. The mindset of naturalism encourages beliefs and choices to essentially be founded on objective evidence, mastering our problems through human understanding. Christianity encourages beliefs and choices to be founded on ethical-relational grounds. Christians insist it is profoundly vital to let God master our problems. This includes looking to him for understanding.
I question the Christian God’s existence
1) because Christian doctrines related to hell feel outrageous and unbelievable to me, and
2) because for an overwhelming host of issues naturalism seems to make good sense of what I see, whereas orthodox Christianity makes reality especially difficult for me to understand.
My response to these problems involves employing faith. Biblical faith is essentially an attitude of trust that naturally leads to action and honest, trusting endurance—even when the evidence looks dire. It can be a wise choice in a personal relationship—particularly when dealing with persons like God, who we can’t comprehend and who greatly surpasses us in understanding. If we admit that our own understanding of the world (and of our own shortcomings) is vastly incomplete and fallible, this sort of a faith in God becomes very sensible.
I have decided to persevere in this faith in God in the face of my doubts concerning his existence, living faithfully while acknowledging the ambiguity I see. This requires me to trust God with my most valued possession: my understanding. Submitting what I value to Jesus is a fundamental element in following Christ. But is faith in God a rational response to doubting his existence, given that God’s existence is a prerequisite for faith to make sense; can I deny that this is circular reasoning? Yes, because given who God is, even a small chance of a genuine friendship with him is worth the greatest investment.
The primary reason I have for believing God exists is that he instigates belief in basic Christian truths through my experiences. These truths imply his existence. Knowing the virtue of these truths works rather like how through tasting honey one is caused to believe it is sweet. If in fact God is there causing this to happen, belief in his existence through this means is warranted, sufficient to count as knowledge. The most important experience of this sort is my experience of him talking to me, interacting with my life. Reading and meditation on scripture is the main means of this, but spontaneous impressions are another means. As is the case with knowing people, I can recognize God’s voice by its familiar quality and characteristic content: it sounds like him and it is the sort of thing he would say. I also experience, know and recognize God through his orchestration of events and miracles, seeing him do the sort of things he would do. I know him in a general sense as the proper focus of thankfulness for what is good in life. I also know God through sensing him in the overall effects of his work in the lives of his people. All these things fit into place when I find also that the priorities of the way of Christ are in order. Through all this, God has led me to believe the essence of Christianity.
And yet I wonder if perhaps my experience of God is merely an elaborate illusion. Trusting him anyway is rational because there is substantial objective evidence making a case for his existence and because this trust is the best way to negotiate my uncertainty in an ethically responsible manner.
The corroborating objective evidence for the truth of Christianity includes:
- the global success and persistence of Christianity,
- the excellent evidence for Jesus’ resurrection and miracles,
- Jesus’ fulfillment of scripture, and
- continuing testimony of the supernatural (i.e. miracle stories that seem trustworthy).
This evidence makes Christianity a theory to be reckoned with, keeping it on the table as distinctly possible in the face of the ‘illusion’ theory.
Even when I feel naturalism is probably true, I still aim to persevere in mindset, practice, and commitment as a faithful Christian, and believe this is ethically the right choice. This is based on two parallel arguments (my particular context is assumed, with Christianity and naturalism being definitively the prime contenders):
1. If ultimate value exists (i.e. if anything is fundamentally good, right or worthwhile)…
-Christianity provides a foundation for ultimate value whereas naturalism does not.
-Given the option, it is always right to prefer the pursuit of ultimate value.
-Naturalism yields substantially different values and ethics than Christianity, with Christian values and ethics (and not those naturalistic values which differ) being underwritten by ultimate value.
→Regarding what ultimately matters, choosing to live by faith in Christ is ethically superior to the adoption of a naturalistic worldview. Staying Christian is clearly the rational wager if I want to do what is ultimately right.
2. In the event that Christianity is true…
-Doing wrong to God is a terrible thing (probably even much more terrible than doing wrong to other people with God aside).
-Rejecting faith in Christ does tremendous wrong to God. Faith in Christ is also the prerequisite to doing right to him in other regards.
→ Given the viable possibility that the perfect, personal God of the Bible exists, living by faith in Christ is clearly the rational wager if I want to do what is right.
Christian faith is also the best route to knowing God exists if he does, and the best follow-up on an oath I have made to always pursue God.
Ultimately, my persistence as a Christian is primarily driven by my love, respect and value of God. Part of this motivation comes from how dearly he loves me. This love of God trumps my value of understanding, so that I persist in pursuing God even when it means operating in a worldview that makes less sense to me than its alternative.
Appendix 3: Book Recommendations
The Case for Christ
Lee Strobel
The Case for Christ is an enjoyable collection of interviews highlighting the main evidence for Jesus being and doing who and what we Christians claim he is and did. The author, a former law journalist (and former atheist), interviews various Christian experts in relevant fields in order to compellingly lay out the historical evidence for the Christian position. The story is set as a retracing of the author’s journey from atheism to Christianity.
The book is a very accessible overview of some of the strongest objective evidence for Christianity. Those interested in a more thorough treatment of the arguments given can consult works by the experts who are interviewed. Perhaps some of the points are better supported than others. Take the arguments with a grain of salt, remembering that it is a journalist and not a scientist writing; I encourage you to dig further into whatever points seem most critical to you. And let me know how satisfied you are with what you find. To give a taste of the content, here are some of the chapter titles:
Can the biographies of Jesus be trusted?
Were Jesus’ biographies reliably preserved for us?
Is there credible evidence for Jesus outside his biographies?
Is the Jesus of history the same as the Jesus of faith?
Was Jesus crazy when he claimed to be the Son of God?
Did Jesus fulfill the attributes of God?
Did Jesus – and Jesus alone – match the identity of the messiah?
Was Jesus’ death a sham and his resurrection a hoax?
Was Jesus’ body really absent from his tomb?
Was Jesus seen alive after his death on the cross?
Are there any supporting facts that point toward the resurrection?
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
God’s Smuggler
Brother Andrew
This is an autobiography of sorts by a Dutch man who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain and encouraged the persecuted church. His work has turned into a mission called Open Doors that continues to do such things. His account is full of God’s practical miracles; God guides uncannily and provides correspondingly. In his particular context, the abundance of miracles seems justified and I don’t see any good explanation for his report other than God. Something else that struck me while reading the book is how familiar God’s actions there are. God’s work in his life qualitatively matches my own experience of God, though there are quantitative differences in just how much God is seen in the author’s case. Also, it’s a very enjoyable read. It’s like a spy novel, only real and oriented around more important objectives. The author’s full name is Andy van der Bijl, and I understand he is still active in similar engagements in the Middle East.
Andrew, Brother. God’s Smuggler. Old Tappan, NJ: Spire Books, 1967.
Warranted Christian Belief
Alvin Plantinga
This is a professional philosophical work written by Alvin Plantinga, a leading epistemologist (philosopher of knowledge), who is moreover a Christian epistemologist. He examines whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief. In the models discussed by Plantinga, theistic belief arises from a hard-wired ability to sense the divine, with Christian belief further originating from a non-natural source, the Holy Spirit. He argues that no argument which holds that – regardless of whether God in fact exists – theism is irrational, unreasonable, unjustified, unwarranted, etc. can be supported. This does not rule out objections to theism on the basis of arguments that God does not in fact exist.
Reading this book has been helpful for me in clarifying (and adding to) certain notions I dimly held in common with Plantinga before reading it. It has been a major inspiration in how I’ve chosen to set up this version of the essay. While I don’t assert that Plantinga and I necessarily agree on quite everything (I haven’t even read the whole book), I would still endorse his book as an excellent place to look for a superior and thorough explanation of the central reason for Christian belief.
While the book is witty and accessible for non-philosophers, it is also thick material and about 500 pages long. Therefore, I will note that the core of the book’s subject is found in chapters 6-9, which can be profitably read apart from the rest of the book. Of course, the other chapters are useful as well and, depending on the reader’s main questions, could also be important to read. For a summary of the book see the review “Faith Without Reasons? A Review of Warranted Christian Beliefs by Alvin Plantinga” (written by James N. Anderson, 2002, www.proginosko.com/docs/wcbreview.html, accessed 9/1/07).
Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
