Why Do I Believe in God?

I want to answer this question anew.  It is a very important question to me personally, and my answer may be important to others who want to know.

I am given to long-winded explanations, so I want to try to remain concise.  (Retrospective fail.)  I want to give several concise reasons.  This means that I will not have explained everything fully.  I will reject my tendency to anticipate and respond to possible objections.  I do not expect an atheist to buy every one of these reasons.  Some of them may be more helpfully seen as clues or pointers.  I hope that the cumulative evidence will show that I am at least reasonable in believing in Jesus.  I hope that this cumulative evidence may help you to consider or reconsider belief in Jesus.  Here is a sort of index that is expanded on below.

1.  My own experience of God.
2.  Others experience of God.
3.  Christianity's diagnosis of the world.
4.  Christianity's solution for the world.
5.  The self-attesting nature of Scripture.
6.  The design argument for God's existence.
7.  The fine-tuning argument for God's existence.
8.  The cosmological argument for God's existence.
9.  The moral argument for God's existence.
10.  The unique nature of Jesus.
11.  The reliability of the Bible.
12.  The unique nature of the Bible.
13.  The resurrection of Jesus.
14.  Christianity as supplier of presuppositions for science.
15.  The centrality of love and relationships.
16.  The benefit of judgment.
17.  Retaining goodness, beauty, and truth.
18.  Made for eternity.
19.  Christianity makes dialogue meaningful.
20.  Evolution makes dialogue meaningless.


The first five reasons are probably the most important to me but also the most subjective.  Oh well...

1.  I believe that Jesus has saved me and brought me into relationship with him.  I have felt the presence of God at various times in my life through prayer, through worship, and through nature.  I believe in God because I have experienced the presence of God, and he has changed my life.  I am a different person because of God.  I believe in God because of his felt presence and the prayers I have seen him answer in my life.

2.  I have seen the power of God at work in the lives of those around me, especially my family.  I have seen the joy that he brings.  I have seen and experienced the peace that he gives.  I have seen people come alive with purpose.  I have seen the power of forgiveness.  One of my friends from college gives God the praise for delivering him from alcoholism.  The testimony of others through changed lives and answered prayers is powerful to me.  I am always encouraged when I read Christian biography.  I asked one of my students today why he believes in God, and he was able to recount a list of things that he has been through that he considers to be medical miracles. 

3.  I believe that Christianity gives the most accurate diagnosis of the world.  It speaks of a world that was created good and went bad.  It speaks of human greed, hypocrisy, pride, lust, and other destructive sins.  It speaks of the dignity of humans created in the image of God.  It speaks of the lowliness of humans as created in dust.  It speaks of love being the most important thing.  And it tells me that in my heart I am not fundamentally good, but fundamentally fallen-from-good.  It speaks of objective guilt for sin against a holy God.  As I look at the world and at my own heart, these things ring true.  Depravity rings true.  The need for a savior rings true.  I agree on a deep level with the way that Christianity views our world.  Christianity, I believe, does justice to the twin heights and depths of humanity. 

4.  The solution given also rings true, and it hits me as Good News.  It is not a solution that I ever would have thought up.  Christianity is about grace in the person of Jesus.  It is about a loving God becoming a man, dying on a cross, to save sinners.  This solution keeps me from boasting because there is nothing I can do to save myself or to earn this salvation.  And I feel deeply that there is nothing I can do to save myself, even though I try and try.  I know of no other system of belief that offers grace undiluted like this.  I know of no other belief system that does not have us working to save ourselves.  We love because God first loved us.  Christianity has a fitness to the way I find reality.

5.  As I read the Bible, I feel that God is speaking to me.  The words have power and have brought change in my life.  They have an air of authenticity.  If God is real, then this is by no means unexpected.  I have seen my father, to his good, devote himself diligently to the study of Scripture, and there are layers and wonders there that will not be exhausted in a lifetime.  In the Bible I believe I have read the very words of God.  Those words have commended themselves to me as such.

The next several reasons are less subjective and more like apologetic evidences...

6.  The design evident in nature points me toward God.  What I mean by this, first, is just walking outside and being impressed, whether walking in a forest or staring up at the night sky.  When I learn about how intricate and detailed things work on both a large and a small scale, I feel a sense of wonder.  In Christianity that awe rolls up into a worship of God as Creator.  This feels entirely natural.  It feels like I was created to have this response.  Design in nature and the experience of being in nature lead me to believe that not all of this was due to accident or chance.  And this also leads me to believe that whatever power is out there is huge and awesome, dwarfing the universe itself as the earth and humans are dwarfed by the distances of space.

7.  The fine-tuning of the universe also leads me to believe that the universe is designed.  This is one that I must learn from science.  There are different constants in the universe, such as the force of gravity, that could have been different.  But they are what they are.  And it seems to be that life needed these universal constants to be nearly exactly what they are, or else life would not have happened.  It is like Someone was setting the dials just right for life, for us.  I believe that was God.  Again, it would appear that we are not some universal accident.

8.  The universe also appears to have had a beginning.  Cosmology points toward a moment, popularly referred to as the Big Bang, which was the beginning of both time and space.  But everything that happens has a cause.  Everything that begins to exist has a cause.  But the cause of the first thing in time and space must have been a very powerful something outside of time and space that willed this action.  Why does the universe exist at all?  I believe it exists because something like God created it.  He started it.  He is the reason why anything got moving in the first place.  In the beginning he created the heavens and the earth from nothing.

9.  I believe that an absolute morality exists.  Otherwise, we would not be able to call people wrong, including people like Hitler.  If atheism were true, then naturalism would be true.  If naturalism were true, then there would not be an absolute morality.  It would be subjective.  But there is an absolute morality.  Therefore, I am not an atheist.  I believe in God as the ground of our morality. 

10.  Jesus is a unique figure in human history that requires some deep thought.  If you made a list of the 10 most influential people in human history, he would be on that list.  For many people he would be at the top of that list.  If you also made a list of people who claimed to be god, Jesus would be the only person on the overlap between those two lists.  The claims of Jesus are unique.  Other religious leaders claimed to be speaking for God or showing people the way to God.  Jesus claimed that he was the path, the way.  He claimed, usually indirectly, to be God himself, and it was for this "blasphemy" that he was crucified.  He claimed the ability to forgive people's sins.  We find early Christians from the first century already giving him worship as God.  Jesus demands a response, and he is obviously not just a good teacher.  If he was not who he said he was, then he was either severely delusional or an incredible liar.  Almost no one has that reaction when they read of Jesus, and I certainly do not have that reaction.  I trust that Jesus is who he said he was - the Son of God come to save sinners like me.

11.  The Bible is reliable.  We have far more copies and manuscripts of the Bible than any other ancient document.  Because of the subject matter, those who recorded it were interested in having it recorded accurately.  The Christians of the first centuries were concerned to get the right scriptures, and I believe that they were in a better position than us to determine what those scriptures were.  The persecutions and heresies of the first centuries also lend a weight and credibility to the opinions of the early church.  I am more inclined to believe the testimony of the persecuted early church Fathers than today's modern skeptics.

12.  The Bible is also unique. It is unique because Jesus is unique.  Fulfilled prophecy in the New Testament of prophecies made in the Old Testament are incredible.  Jesus is the fulfillment and the consummation of the Biblical story.  I say that the Bible is unique because it does not give us merely rules to live by, but it tells us a story to believe, a Person to believe in and relate to.  Though miracles are there, it does not read like myth.  It is written in a simple style, and numerous allusions are made to eyewitnesses, so the early readers could have checked out the stories.  The falsity of these stories would have choked out the credibility of the narratives, but I believe they were true.  The gnostic gospels provide good examples of what myths read like.  I believe the Bible is unique, reliable, authentic.  And for these reasons, I trust it when it commends itself as true and as the Word of God through the words of man.

13.  Jesus was resurrected.  Why do I think this?  The earliest Christian proclamation as seen through the New Testament documents and other sources show that they were proclaiming a risen Jesus.  Paul's list in 1st Corinthians includes a number of eyewitnesses to the resurrection, including a group of several hundred at once.  Paul was inviting belief in the resurrection based on evidence.  The Jews were a very religious people, and we see all at once that a large number of Jewish people change their day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.  The best explanation here was the resurrection of Jesus on Sunday.  James was the brother of Jesus, and he did not believe in Jesus while he was alive.  Yet, soon after Jesus' death he converts, is the pastor of the church in Jerusalem, and dies as a martyr.  The best explanation for the conversion of this skeptic is Jesus' resurrection.  Consider Paul.  He was an enemy of Christianity, persecuting and killing Christians.  The best explanation for his reversal was an actual experience of Jesus.  Jesus did not simply swoon.  He was crucified and would not have been able to revive from that and convince people he was God.  The disciples did not make it up.  Or else why would they all, with the exception of one, have died as martyrs proclaiming a risen Jesus?  The disciples did not hallucinate it because there are no such things as mass hallucinations.  Such a thing as that would rank as a miracle on the same level as resurrection.  If Jesus had not really risen, the Jewish authorities who wanted to squelch young Christianity would have produced the body.  But they did not.  Jesus rose from the dead.

I also believe in Christianity because it has intellectually helped a lot of things click into place.   You might place these things under the category of why I am intellectually glad that I think Christianity is true.  

14.  Christianity provides the best presuppositions to do science.  Christianity leads us to believe that a rational God created a rational world.  So we expect the world to be orderly, to work according to natural laws.  We believe humans are created in the image of God, rational and intelligent.  Therefore, there is a natural fit.  We are uniquely suited to explore and learn about our world.

15.  Christianity allows me to believe that love is at the center of all things.  It allows me to recognize the importance of relationships.  The reason for this is that the Trinitarian God of the Bible is ultimate.  The Trinity has always been in loving relationship with Itself from eternity past and will continue in this state forever.  Therefore, the story of this world is a footnote in the bigger story of God himself.  Love is not incidental to God.  It is at the center of who he is.

16.  Christianity allows me to believe in a judgment day.  Knowing that a just God will one day set the balances straight is a strong part of what allows me to freely forgive and move on when I have been wronged.  True belief in a coming judgment will help us live at peace with one another today.

17.  Goodness, beauty, and truth are no longer subjective whims.  They are real.  If you lose God, I believe that you lose these as meaningful categories.  Because they are real, I believe that God exists.

18.  I experience an insatiable desire for more.  If atheism is true, there is no ultimate meaning to things beyond the meanings that we assign.  But since we will die and be no more, those meanings will soon evaporate.  But Christianity tells us that we were made for more.  We were made with eternity written on our hearts.  And all those aches and longings find their satisfaction in an infinite God.

19.  Christianity allows me to believe that the pursuit of truth is meaningful. It allows me to believe that dialogue and debate is meaningful.  Naturalism reduces everything down to the bouncing of chemicals and atoms.  Everything is already pre-determined.  If that is the case, what I will believe and what you will believe has been pre-determined.  And there is therefore no reason to have dialogue or prefer one thought to another thought.  Your brain fizzes one way, and mine fizzes the other way, and it could not have turned out differently.  But Christianity does not do this.  We have been given free will.  We have been given minds that are rational. And we can reason with one another.  I cannot be an evolutionist or atheist because I think those options shut down the meaning of thought and dialogue.

20.  Similar to #19, I think that the evolutionary explanation of things backfires.  The very idea of evolution undermines the idea that our minds are reliable.  They may help us survive, but they do not necessarily help us believe true thoughts.  If they are unreliable, then why should I believe your theory of evolution?  But if we grant they are reliable and produce true beliefs, then why have so many people over the centuries come to belief in God?  Christianity gives a more satisfying explanation than naturalism as to how we got here.  And it gives more hope for where we are going.

While you may not believe in Christianity, I hope you will admit that its claims are plausible.  It is possible that God exists and has decided to make himself known in Christ.  I invite you, for the reasons listed above, to place your faith in Christ.  He is worth it.  And getting to know him is far better than remaining in the mire of intellectual arguments like these.

Soli Deo gloria!