1. Realize that you won't always be happy. That is okay.
2. Live for the happiness of others before your own. (To be happy, stop worrying about being happy.)
3. Learn to enjoy the things that you must do. You won't be happy if your duties all feel like intrusions.
4. Trust in the promise of heaven. Do not trust in the promises of temporary things.
5. Stop sinning. Enjoy forgiveness. Forgive.
6. Do not stuff your calendar, your body, or your home with too much stuff. Not worth it.
7. Entrust your Maker with your happiness. He knows your heart better than you do.
8. Don't sweat the small stuff. But find God in the small moments. The small moments are your life.
9. Don't try to control people. Don't try to control things that are out of your control.
10. Don't take yourself too seriously. Laugh at yourself a lot. And laugh a lot in general.
As James Taylor says, "The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time." As Solomon says, "There is a time for everything under the sun." Believing God to be good, loving, and sovereign, I believe that all the passing moments of my life are either gifts or gifts in disguise. God was plotting my happiness, hunting me down to give me himself, before I was even born. What grace!
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Why Apologetics
This is a repost from another blog I have written. It shares a similar theme with other recent entries.
Apologetics is defense. The word may be used more generally, but it also carries the specific connotation of defending the faith. There is such a thing as Christian apologetics.
Why does Christian apologetics exist? The text most often cited to defend the defense of the faith is 1 Peter 3:15. But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect...
This particular text written by Peter came into existence, not in the midst of deep and tiring academic debates, but rather in the context of an emerging Christianity that was quite bloody. Just as Jesus was crucified, so his early followers often suffered, especially under the Roman emperor Nero. Peter was eventually crucified for following Jesus; it is believed that he asked to be crucified upside down because he considered himself unworthy to be crucified the same way as his Lord. Christians were being called on to give an account, by both Jews and gentiles, for the hope that they had, and often their very lives were at stake.
It is an entirely reasonable question to ask someone, "Why do you believe what you believe?" That is also an entirely reasonable question to ask yourself. For the Christian, I believe that 1 Peter 3:15 means that our answer should not simply be, "just cause I do." Or, "cause my parents did." If someone asks you why you have hope, don't give them just a blank stare. For the occasional person who is truly seeking and wondering if there is anything to this faith beyond some nice metaphors and a social club, we owe it to them to have a better answer. When the difficulties of life would bring us doubts, we owe it to ourselves to really examine things, instead of ignoring the difficult questions by drowning them out with chatter and noise.
To have doubts without dealing with them, acknowledging them, looking them in the face is like having a relative die, ignoring it, and stuffing her in the closet. Without a proper burial (or without a resurrection), grandma is going to start smelling, and febreeze ain't gonna cut it. To ignore the stench is denial, but for many people it is just business as usual. "Don't make me think too hard or bother with whether this stuff is actually true. Just give me some good singing on Sunday and I'm happy."
There is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge. Let me take a detour to explain what I mean...
I dare you to believe in unicorns.
You can't do it. You can't just manufacture a belief for which you perceive no good reasons to adopt that belief. It is impossible.
Every new possible belief must come and find its place in the world of your prior beliefs. If the new candidate is at odds with a lot of deeply held prior beliefs, it is going to have a harder time finding a spot. Therefore, the burden of proof is going to be understandably higher. Allowing it a spot may require some struggle and the unseating of older cherished beliefs.
For many new beliefs, we have substantially no problem letting them in. For instance, if in conversation I were to tell you, "It was a beautiful sunny day in Fayetteville today," you would probably accept that. You have no good reason, I suppose, for thinking that I would want to lie about that. You probably have no prior beliefs there to challenge this.
Kids are generally more accepting than adults. (If they are inquisitive, they will believe you but ask "why" a lot.) They do not yet have an extensive set of prior beliefs. That is why they more often than not simply accept what their parents or teachers tell them. In a sense they are sort of like blank slates. (This is a humbling responsibility for parents and educators.)
If you tell a two-year-old that unicorns are real, they are far more likely to accept that than you have been. But if they accept that, have they just manufactured a belief out of thin air? Have they accepted something that they have no good reason to believe? Their reason lies in the fact that they trust you, just like you presumably would trust me about the weather. They do not yet have good reason to believe that unicorns aren't real, and unless you have just stolen their lollipop, they will probably trust you when you tell them something.
But you are not a kid, and we are bound to move this analogy into deeper waters... If you are old enough and patient enough to read and follow all this, you are old enough to have some deeply held prior beliefs, whatever they may be, and it is through those beliefs that you will filter all that I am saying.
Some beliefs come in meekly and take their place quietly in a corner. Other beliefs, by their very nature, come in like a bull in a china shop. They leave no stone unturned. These sorts of beliefs are the ones that turn our lives and our way of thinking upside down because they touch nearly everything else. We are not settled until the bull either leaves or finds its place.
Some of the following types of questions seem to invite responses that look rather bull-like:
Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here?
What is the good life? How do I go about living it? What really matters in life?
Is there such a thing is truth? How do I find it?
What is wrong with the world? Why is there suffering? Why is there evil?
How should we go about fixing the world?
How should I go about understanding my world? Who can I really trust? Is it possible for me to reliably know anything?
What happens when I die? Anything?
How should I relate to my fellow man? Do I have any obligation to my fellow man?
Has this world always existed? Did it come into existence? Why does the world exist?
Could things have been different? Do I have freedom, or is my freedom an illusion?
Is right and wrong a real thing, or did we just make it up?
Is God real? What is he like? Can he be known? Should I try to know him?
It is certain that any given person will have more or less detailed answers to these questions. Their answers to these questions may sometimes be contradictory. Different people will have given variable amounts of time to thinking through these things, and different people will have differing levels of justification for their answers. Some people will even think these questions are not even important or that the answers are unknowable... which are also ways of answering them.
I would contend that truly gaining or truly losing faith will be like one of those bull-in-a-china-shop experiences for someone who is earnest and has their eyes open, for someone who is self-aware and searching. (And the bull may cause its fuss in an instant or over the course of years.) For the child, gaining faith - or not - generally happens more easily with less fuss and struggle. These questions, for them, receive relatively uncontested answers. But the older you get, a reversal on any one of these major questions is going to have ramifications for the things you already believe and the things that you will come to believe in the future.
This is what it means to have a worldview. Everyone has one. It is simply a lens through which you see the world and filter new experiences. One way of saying this is that all new information or knowledge is interpreted; there is no such thing as raw knowledge. No one is truly neutral. (I would add that, while this humbles us and causes us to examine ourselves, it does not logically follow that no one can know truth. All knowledge is interpreted knowledge, but this does not mean that there is not true knowledge. Tongue-twister! Or at least mind-twister.)
I stated that the experience of losing faith can be like the bull-in-a-china-shop experience if the person is earnest and self-aware and generally awake to what they really believe. But losing faith is not like that for everyone. For some it is a slow fade, and instead of a bull, doubts can come in like a silent assassin and begin poisoning and quietly taking out unsuspecting prior beliefs. This is what I meant by the dead-granny-in-the-closet-slowly-decomposing analogy. You wake up one day and realize that you no longer believe. This happens to a lot of church kids who wake up one day in college and realize that they don't really believe it all anymore. It is now a nice childhood memory like Santa Claus. Why?
And the answer brings me to close the lengthy loop that I opened up a while back. I stated that there is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge. And I think that's what happens to too many people. There are many people who profess Christianity and have made a commitment to it who do not really believe it... or who no longer believe it.
The former-Christian-now-something-else originally picked up answers to all the worldview questions quickly (and sometimes without giving it much thought), and perhaps they really believed and had reasons for believing their answers. But life sends suffering their way that is not easily explained, or it sends friends who don't fit neatly into their pre-existing categories, or it sends professors who give new intellectual challenges. And this person - the one who doesn't have the bull-in-a-china-shop experience - just sort of ignores the cognitive dissonance and the battle that needs to happen. But the foundations for those prior beliefs are now shaky and maybe gone.
Perhaps this person does eventually become openly atheistic or agnostic. I know some who have. But maybe they don't. Perhaps for purposes of social conformity or peace of mind or whatever, staying committed to the faith remains an attractive option. The problem is, this person is now operating like he is trying to believe unicorns are true when he really doesn't believe it. He is trying to manufacture something out of thin air against what he really now believes. He is pulling the wool over his own eyes. Faith has become divorced from knowledge, and when he tries to obey, it is now his will-power that is the driving force, not any sort of knowledge.
"No problem," says most of the world. "Isn't faith basically belief without evidence? If I have evidence for something, then I don't need faith." By this definition, the person who does not see any reason to believe in God but chooses to believe anyway exercises greater faith than the one who is strongly convinced on the basis of reasons. And some would praise the former, and that praise would tend to demotivate that person from finding or having a reason for the hope that is in him. So much for Peter's original exhortation.
Outside of Peter's call to be ready to give a defense, what view do the other biblical writers take of faith? Paul writes the following in 1 Corinthians 15:17 - And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Paul is saying that it really does matter whether what they believe is true. What is useless faith? Faith based on a lie. In other words, there is no good reason to practice Christianity if it isn't true. And Paul goes on to say that if Christianity only gives us hope for this life, Christians are most to be pitied. Paul doesn't say, "Just believe." Just prior in the same chapter, he gives a list of resurrection appearances of Jesus. And he says that most of these eyewitnesses are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. In other words, "I am not just making this up. Don't just take my word for it. There are still eyewitness of this walking around. Go find some of them and ask them." For the skeptic who would doubt Jesus' resurrection, Paul gives reasons. When Thomas doubted, Jesus did not banish him, but he acquiesced and invited Thomas to examine his wounds to see that it was really him. I mention these things to show that if you attempt to look at Christianity in the way that it actually presents itself, we do not see a Christianity that wants us to turn our minds off in order to swallow dogma, even if the Church sometimes acts like it.
Consider the apostles. It is sometimes suggested that Christianity is a hoax made up by the apostles, that they hid Jesus' body to perpetuate the hoax. Suppose that's the case. They could have made up some nice-sounding sayings and good moral teachings. They could have built up some stories surrounding Jesus. They could say he rose again to give some authority to what they were saying. But in the end they would have known it wasn't true. Eleven out the twelve apostles went to martyr's deaths, and all it would have taken for them to live would have been to admit the falsity of their claims. No one dies knowingly for a lie, much less eleven out of twelve. The only way you die for something is if you really believe it is true (even if you are mistaken). Did the apostles die martyr's deaths because Christianity held some nice moral teachings? No. They died because they refused to renounce the Lord that they truly believed was risen. And they believed because they had seen him. Knowledge was crucial to their faith.
Why apologetics?
1. Others may ask why you believe. They may be sincere in asking. Peter tells us we should be ready to tell them why.
2. We are supposed to tell others of Christ. It is understandable that the world would be opposed to Jesus' last command - it goes against our world's current understanding of tolerance - but Jesus gives his people the Great Commission to make disciples of the nations, to teach them all that he commanded, to baptize them. If this Commission is to sound like anything other than, "believe in unicorns," to its hearers, we should be willing to address the questions and help to provide an intellectual environment in which the Christian claims are at least intellectually plausible. Conversion to Christ is one of those bull-in-a-china-shop things, and how Christ connects to everything else, all those prior beliefs, is something we should be sensitive to, even as we realize we will never have all the answers.
3. Apologetics exists to strengthen believers. Apologetics exists so that believers don't have to close their eyes, grit their teeth, and just obey, even when Christianity doesn't appear plausible. Apologetics does not exist to explain every difficult bit, but there are certainly places where it helps.
I want to address two more things before I finish this post. First, what about those who become Christians and it isn't like the bull-in-the-china-shop? Second, are there other factors that apologists have to keep in mind?
To address the first question, I think there are some people who come to Christianity, but when the Christian idea enters, it comes in like the meek little guy, doesn't say a word or ruffle any feathers, and it settles for a quiet corner in the person's mind and heart. It doesn't bother to unseat any prior beliefs. What is going on here?
I think this person has separated faith from knowledge. I think this person is not bothering with whether Christianity is true and is instead worrying about some other concern. For example, is it fashionable? Does it match with the pants I'm wearing? Or does it clash? This is what I would call Christianity without teeth. You commit to it in some sense, but you don't really believe it, and so there is no inconsistency between holding it and plenty of other beliefs that would seem to contradict it. The world is very comfortable with Christians of this sort, but then again, this is the sort of Christian who would never bother to tell them that they are wrong about anything. I think that the churches of the world are flooded with Christians like this. Low-maintenance, inoffensive, comfortable Christianity.
I don't believe there is such a thing as dabbling in Christianity. Jesus is clear that we must repent and believe the gospel. This means believing that he died and rose and is who he says he is. We must die to ourselves. I don't think there is a casual half-hearted way to do this. We don't try on Jesus like we try on a pair of jeans. Thought experiment: suppose God is real. How belittling is it to him for us to hold him up and nonchalantly critique him like some pretty rock we picked up on the side of the road. If he is real, we will look back and think it tragically ironic how often we put him in the dock to grill and judge him when our very sense of justice was given to us by him as a gift - a stream trying to rise above its source... I digress.
This leads me into my final considerations. I believe, looking back on what I have written, that this makes Christianity seem like a very intellectual, mechanical sort of exercise. But I would be remiss if I did not say something about the relationship of the head and the heart. Ultimately, I believe that God is after our hearts. I believe the mind is meant to work with the heart, and it is a fool who thinks the two can be easily separated or who believes himself above the workings of the human heart. The heart and the mind influence each other.
The Bible teaches, history confirms, and my own experience shows that the human race is fallen, and my heart is dark. I do not even live up to the standards that I hold other people to, and my conscience condemns me. I know that I have a darkened heart that needs healing help of some sort. Honesty will compel any reader, I am sure, to admit that he is in a similar situation.
Coming to Christ will likely involve intellectual challenge, but it also is more deeply about a heart change, where the will and emotions are also converted. The apologist and the evangelist must be sensitive to this. Peter tells us to give our defense with gentleness and respect. There is more going on underneath the surface in any encounter with these worldview-type questions than we realize at first.
I do believe in God, and ultimately I do not think he is looking for a bunch of people to merely acknowledge his existence. He wants at least that, but he wants more. He wants people to fall in love with him and worship him.
It has been my goal with this post, not exactly to argue that Christianity is true, but to argue that such an argument is worth having. Worship provides the most compelling picture for me of why apologetics is worth doing. Let me explain: Everyone worships. Worship is simply the act of ascribing worth to something. Worship is praising something that we delight in, like, love, or enjoy. Worship happens all the time at sporting events. For me worship happens at good steakhouses. Fogo de Chao! Check it out. When I find something I love, it is entirely natural for me to say so. And I don't want merely to tell others about it - I want them to experience it themselves. My enjoyment of a thing is increased as I am able to bring others into that enjoyment. I don't merely want to say, "That was good." I want to be able to say, "That was good, wasn't it?!" My faith in Christ is like that. I believe I have found the most valuable, delightful, wholly good thing in the universe, and I want to share that with others. And when I share with them the Good News, I want it to be able to hit them with greater force than, "Believe in unicorns. Maybe we can get a t-shirt made about it!"
Is it prideful or arrogant to share your beliefs with someone? Is it prideful or arrogant to believe that you are right and others are wrong? No. Everyone does this. Certainly some people need to check their attitudes, but it seems to me that when you are presented with a potential belief your first question should be, "Is this true?" It should not be, "Is the person presenting this arrogant?" That is such a distracting consideration, although an understandable one. I think that every single person, no matter how they fall on whatever spectrum, should not allow prior beliefs to stop them from listening and talking with others. Really listening. If you do not know why you believe what you believe, find out. Worry about the truth before you worry about how believing that truth will make you look in this world. It was a wise man - and I would say the wisest - who said that the truth will set us free.
In the end, if God means to have a person, he will get them. The Holy Spirit blows where he will. I am thankful that God overcomes objections and dead hearts. I am thankful for my relationship with him. Though I have not seen him, I know him. I pray you will, too. May this post serve as a dire warning of my long-winded-ness, yet I hope that if you are questioning or thinking that you would see me as a worthy conversation partner. I promise I can listen as well as talk.
Apologetics is defense. The word may be used more generally, but it also carries the specific connotation of defending the faith. There is such a thing as Christian apologetics.
Why does Christian apologetics exist? The text most often cited to defend the defense of the faith is 1 Peter 3:15. But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect...
This particular text written by Peter came into existence, not in the midst of deep and tiring academic debates, but rather in the context of an emerging Christianity that was quite bloody. Just as Jesus was crucified, so his early followers often suffered, especially under the Roman emperor Nero. Peter was eventually crucified for following Jesus; it is believed that he asked to be crucified upside down because he considered himself unworthy to be crucified the same way as his Lord. Christians were being called on to give an account, by both Jews and gentiles, for the hope that they had, and often their very lives were at stake.
It is an entirely reasonable question to ask someone, "Why do you believe what you believe?" That is also an entirely reasonable question to ask yourself. For the Christian, I believe that 1 Peter 3:15 means that our answer should not simply be, "just cause I do." Or, "cause my parents did." If someone asks you why you have hope, don't give them just a blank stare. For the occasional person who is truly seeking and wondering if there is anything to this faith beyond some nice metaphors and a social club, we owe it to them to have a better answer. When the difficulties of life would bring us doubts, we owe it to ourselves to really examine things, instead of ignoring the difficult questions by drowning them out with chatter and noise.
To have doubts without dealing with them, acknowledging them, looking them in the face is like having a relative die, ignoring it, and stuffing her in the closet. Without a proper burial (or without a resurrection), grandma is going to start smelling, and febreeze ain't gonna cut it. To ignore the stench is denial, but for many people it is just business as usual. "Don't make me think too hard or bother with whether this stuff is actually true. Just give me some good singing on Sunday and I'm happy."
There is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge. Let me take a detour to explain what I mean...
I dare you to believe in unicorns.
You can't do it. You can't just manufacture a belief for which you perceive no good reasons to adopt that belief. It is impossible.
Every new possible belief must come and find its place in the world of your prior beliefs. If the new candidate is at odds with a lot of deeply held prior beliefs, it is going to have a harder time finding a spot. Therefore, the burden of proof is going to be understandably higher. Allowing it a spot may require some struggle and the unseating of older cherished beliefs.
For many new beliefs, we have substantially no problem letting them in. For instance, if in conversation I were to tell you, "It was a beautiful sunny day in Fayetteville today," you would probably accept that. You have no good reason, I suppose, for thinking that I would want to lie about that. You probably have no prior beliefs there to challenge this.
Kids are generally more accepting than adults. (If they are inquisitive, they will believe you but ask "why" a lot.) They do not yet have an extensive set of prior beliefs. That is why they more often than not simply accept what their parents or teachers tell them. In a sense they are sort of like blank slates. (This is a humbling responsibility for parents and educators.)
If you tell a two-year-old that unicorns are real, they are far more likely to accept that than you have been. But if they accept that, have they just manufactured a belief out of thin air? Have they accepted something that they have no good reason to believe? Their reason lies in the fact that they trust you, just like you presumably would trust me about the weather. They do not yet have good reason to believe that unicorns aren't real, and unless you have just stolen their lollipop, they will probably trust you when you tell them something.
But you are not a kid, and we are bound to move this analogy into deeper waters... If you are old enough and patient enough to read and follow all this, you are old enough to have some deeply held prior beliefs, whatever they may be, and it is through those beliefs that you will filter all that I am saying.
Some beliefs come in meekly and take their place quietly in a corner. Other beliefs, by their very nature, come in like a bull in a china shop. They leave no stone unturned. These sorts of beliefs are the ones that turn our lives and our way of thinking upside down because they touch nearly everything else. We are not settled until the bull either leaves or finds its place.
Some of the following types of questions seem to invite responses that look rather bull-like:
Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here?
What is the good life? How do I go about living it? What really matters in life?
Is there such a thing is truth? How do I find it?
What is wrong with the world? Why is there suffering? Why is there evil?
How should we go about fixing the world?
How should I go about understanding my world? Who can I really trust? Is it possible for me to reliably know anything?
What happens when I die? Anything?
How should I relate to my fellow man? Do I have any obligation to my fellow man?
Has this world always existed? Did it come into existence? Why does the world exist?
Could things have been different? Do I have freedom, or is my freedom an illusion?
Is right and wrong a real thing, or did we just make it up?
Is God real? What is he like? Can he be known? Should I try to know him?
It is certain that any given person will have more or less detailed answers to these questions. Their answers to these questions may sometimes be contradictory. Different people will have given variable amounts of time to thinking through these things, and different people will have differing levels of justification for their answers. Some people will even think these questions are not even important or that the answers are unknowable... which are also ways of answering them.
I would contend that truly gaining or truly losing faith will be like one of those bull-in-a-china-shop experiences for someone who is earnest and has their eyes open, for someone who is self-aware and searching. (And the bull may cause its fuss in an instant or over the course of years.) For the child, gaining faith - or not - generally happens more easily with less fuss and struggle. These questions, for them, receive relatively uncontested answers. But the older you get, a reversal on any one of these major questions is going to have ramifications for the things you already believe and the things that you will come to believe in the future.
This is what it means to have a worldview. Everyone has one. It is simply a lens through which you see the world and filter new experiences. One way of saying this is that all new information or knowledge is interpreted; there is no such thing as raw knowledge. No one is truly neutral. (I would add that, while this humbles us and causes us to examine ourselves, it does not logically follow that no one can know truth. All knowledge is interpreted knowledge, but this does not mean that there is not true knowledge. Tongue-twister! Or at least mind-twister.)
I stated that the experience of losing faith can be like the bull-in-a-china-shop experience if the person is earnest and self-aware and generally awake to what they really believe. But losing faith is not like that for everyone. For some it is a slow fade, and instead of a bull, doubts can come in like a silent assassin and begin poisoning and quietly taking out unsuspecting prior beliefs. This is what I meant by the dead-granny-in-the-closet-slowly-decomposing analogy. You wake up one day and realize that you no longer believe. This happens to a lot of church kids who wake up one day in college and realize that they don't really believe it all anymore. It is now a nice childhood memory like Santa Claus. Why?
And the answer brings me to close the lengthy loop that I opened up a while back. I stated that there is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge. And I think that's what happens to too many people. There are many people who profess Christianity and have made a commitment to it who do not really believe it... or who no longer believe it.
The former-Christian-now-something-else originally picked up answers to all the worldview questions quickly (and sometimes without giving it much thought), and perhaps they really believed and had reasons for believing their answers. But life sends suffering their way that is not easily explained, or it sends friends who don't fit neatly into their pre-existing categories, or it sends professors who give new intellectual challenges. And this person - the one who doesn't have the bull-in-a-china-shop experience - just sort of ignores the cognitive dissonance and the battle that needs to happen. But the foundations for those prior beliefs are now shaky and maybe gone.
Perhaps this person does eventually become openly atheistic or agnostic. I know some who have. But maybe they don't. Perhaps for purposes of social conformity or peace of mind or whatever, staying committed to the faith remains an attractive option. The problem is, this person is now operating like he is trying to believe unicorns are true when he really doesn't believe it. He is trying to manufacture something out of thin air against what he really now believes. He is pulling the wool over his own eyes. Faith has become divorced from knowledge, and when he tries to obey, it is now his will-power that is the driving force, not any sort of knowledge.
"No problem," says most of the world. "Isn't faith basically belief without evidence? If I have evidence for something, then I don't need faith." By this definition, the person who does not see any reason to believe in God but chooses to believe anyway exercises greater faith than the one who is strongly convinced on the basis of reasons. And some would praise the former, and that praise would tend to demotivate that person from finding or having a reason for the hope that is in him. So much for Peter's original exhortation.
Outside of Peter's call to be ready to give a defense, what view do the other biblical writers take of faith? Paul writes the following in 1 Corinthians 15:17 - And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Paul is saying that it really does matter whether what they believe is true. What is useless faith? Faith based on a lie. In other words, there is no good reason to practice Christianity if it isn't true. And Paul goes on to say that if Christianity only gives us hope for this life, Christians are most to be pitied. Paul doesn't say, "Just believe." Just prior in the same chapter, he gives a list of resurrection appearances of Jesus. And he says that most of these eyewitnesses are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. In other words, "I am not just making this up. Don't just take my word for it. There are still eyewitness of this walking around. Go find some of them and ask them." For the skeptic who would doubt Jesus' resurrection, Paul gives reasons. When Thomas doubted, Jesus did not banish him, but he acquiesced and invited Thomas to examine his wounds to see that it was really him. I mention these things to show that if you attempt to look at Christianity in the way that it actually presents itself, we do not see a Christianity that wants us to turn our minds off in order to swallow dogma, even if the Church sometimes acts like it.
Consider the apostles. It is sometimes suggested that Christianity is a hoax made up by the apostles, that they hid Jesus' body to perpetuate the hoax. Suppose that's the case. They could have made up some nice-sounding sayings and good moral teachings. They could have built up some stories surrounding Jesus. They could say he rose again to give some authority to what they were saying. But in the end they would have known it wasn't true. Eleven out the twelve apostles went to martyr's deaths, and all it would have taken for them to live would have been to admit the falsity of their claims. No one dies knowingly for a lie, much less eleven out of twelve. The only way you die for something is if you really believe it is true (even if you are mistaken). Did the apostles die martyr's deaths because Christianity held some nice moral teachings? No. They died because they refused to renounce the Lord that they truly believed was risen. And they believed because they had seen him. Knowledge was crucial to their faith.
Why apologetics?
1. Others may ask why you believe. They may be sincere in asking. Peter tells us we should be ready to tell them why.
2. We are supposed to tell others of Christ. It is understandable that the world would be opposed to Jesus' last command - it goes against our world's current understanding of tolerance - but Jesus gives his people the Great Commission to make disciples of the nations, to teach them all that he commanded, to baptize them. If this Commission is to sound like anything other than, "believe in unicorns," to its hearers, we should be willing to address the questions and help to provide an intellectual environment in which the Christian claims are at least intellectually plausible. Conversion to Christ is one of those bull-in-a-china-shop things, and how Christ connects to everything else, all those prior beliefs, is something we should be sensitive to, even as we realize we will never have all the answers.
3. Apologetics exists to strengthen believers. Apologetics exists so that believers don't have to close their eyes, grit their teeth, and just obey, even when Christianity doesn't appear plausible. Apologetics does not exist to explain every difficult bit, but there are certainly places where it helps.
I want to address two more things before I finish this post. First, what about those who become Christians and it isn't like the bull-in-the-china-shop? Second, are there other factors that apologists have to keep in mind?
To address the first question, I think there are some people who come to Christianity, but when the Christian idea enters, it comes in like the meek little guy, doesn't say a word or ruffle any feathers, and it settles for a quiet corner in the person's mind and heart. It doesn't bother to unseat any prior beliefs. What is going on here?
I think this person has separated faith from knowledge. I think this person is not bothering with whether Christianity is true and is instead worrying about some other concern. For example, is it fashionable? Does it match with the pants I'm wearing? Or does it clash? This is what I would call Christianity without teeth. You commit to it in some sense, but you don't really believe it, and so there is no inconsistency between holding it and plenty of other beliefs that would seem to contradict it. The world is very comfortable with Christians of this sort, but then again, this is the sort of Christian who would never bother to tell them that they are wrong about anything. I think that the churches of the world are flooded with Christians like this. Low-maintenance, inoffensive, comfortable Christianity.
I don't believe there is such a thing as dabbling in Christianity. Jesus is clear that we must repent and believe the gospel. This means believing that he died and rose and is who he says he is. We must die to ourselves. I don't think there is a casual half-hearted way to do this. We don't try on Jesus like we try on a pair of jeans. Thought experiment: suppose God is real. How belittling is it to him for us to hold him up and nonchalantly critique him like some pretty rock we picked up on the side of the road. If he is real, we will look back and think it tragically ironic how often we put him in the dock to grill and judge him when our very sense of justice was given to us by him as a gift - a stream trying to rise above its source... I digress.
This leads me into my final considerations. I believe, looking back on what I have written, that this makes Christianity seem like a very intellectual, mechanical sort of exercise. But I would be remiss if I did not say something about the relationship of the head and the heart. Ultimately, I believe that God is after our hearts. I believe the mind is meant to work with the heart, and it is a fool who thinks the two can be easily separated or who believes himself above the workings of the human heart. The heart and the mind influence each other.
The Bible teaches, history confirms, and my own experience shows that the human race is fallen, and my heart is dark. I do not even live up to the standards that I hold other people to, and my conscience condemns me. I know that I have a darkened heart that needs healing help of some sort. Honesty will compel any reader, I am sure, to admit that he is in a similar situation.
Coming to Christ will likely involve intellectual challenge, but it also is more deeply about a heart change, where the will and emotions are also converted. The apologist and the evangelist must be sensitive to this. Peter tells us to give our defense with gentleness and respect. There is more going on underneath the surface in any encounter with these worldview-type questions than we realize at first.
I do believe in God, and ultimately I do not think he is looking for a bunch of people to merely acknowledge his existence. He wants at least that, but he wants more. He wants people to fall in love with him and worship him.
It has been my goal with this post, not exactly to argue that Christianity is true, but to argue that such an argument is worth having. Worship provides the most compelling picture for me of why apologetics is worth doing. Let me explain: Everyone worships. Worship is simply the act of ascribing worth to something. Worship is praising something that we delight in, like, love, or enjoy. Worship happens all the time at sporting events. For me worship happens at good steakhouses. Fogo de Chao! Check it out. When I find something I love, it is entirely natural for me to say so. And I don't want merely to tell others about it - I want them to experience it themselves. My enjoyment of a thing is increased as I am able to bring others into that enjoyment. I don't merely want to say, "That was good." I want to be able to say, "That was good, wasn't it?!" My faith in Christ is like that. I believe I have found the most valuable, delightful, wholly good thing in the universe, and I want to share that with others. And when I share with them the Good News, I want it to be able to hit them with greater force than, "Believe in unicorns. Maybe we can get a t-shirt made about it!"
Is it prideful or arrogant to share your beliefs with someone? Is it prideful or arrogant to believe that you are right and others are wrong? No. Everyone does this. Certainly some people need to check their attitudes, but it seems to me that when you are presented with a potential belief your first question should be, "Is this true?" It should not be, "Is the person presenting this arrogant?" That is such a distracting consideration, although an understandable one. I think that every single person, no matter how they fall on whatever spectrum, should not allow prior beliefs to stop them from listening and talking with others. Really listening. If you do not know why you believe what you believe, find out. Worry about the truth before you worry about how believing that truth will make you look in this world. It was a wise man - and I would say the wisest - who said that the truth will set us free.
In the end, if God means to have a person, he will get them. The Holy Spirit blows where he will. I am thankful that God overcomes objections and dead hearts. I am thankful for my relationship with him. Though I have not seen him, I know him. I pray you will, too. May this post serve as a dire warning of my long-winded-ness, yet I hope that if you are questioning or thinking that you would see me as a worthy conversation partner. I promise I can listen as well as talk.
Friday, May 3, 2013
The Fatalism of Naturalism
I want to write here about one of the reasons I would never want to become a naturalist. What I mean when I say "naturalist" is someone who believes that nature is all there is. Matter is all there is. There is no "supernatural" world behind it. We have no need to resort to God as a solution. There is no such thing as angels or demons or other such invisible things. Nature is all there is, and it is accessible through the methods of science.
Within this naturalistic framework, everything that happens has a physical cause. Everything that happens is a physical effect of a physical cause. Event B happens because in the moment prior we had some state of the system and Event A triggered Event B. Or more likely Events A, B, C, and D working together bring about Event E in the next moment. There is a chain of cause and effect.
Also within this naturalistic framework, the higher levels of things are explainable by interactions of things on the lower levels. As an example, different biological processes in the cell can be explained in terms of the chemistry on the lower level. The chemistry on the lower level may be explained by physics on an even lower level. It is supposed as well that things like history may be explained by psychology and sociology, which may in turn be explained by biology, which is explained by chemistry, which is explained by physics, which is described by mathematics... In theory, everything may be boiled down to the ordered interactions of atoms doing stuff with each other.
Now, this is a theoretical explanation. I think any good naturalist would admit that there are some massive epistemological issues in coming up with that explanation. It requires us to know a lot of stuff we don't know yet. It requires us to put together a huge number of pieces. But the idea is that anything is explainable in terms of physical cause and effect. Everything may be explained by science which does its work on this physical cause and effect. All legitimate studies are now subsets of science, and they are simply working on pieces of this giant scientific puzzle, that is a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Materialists and naturalists may not know this Grand Unified Theory, but they have faith that it exists, that it will explain both why the universe exists and why everything is the way it is within it.
Why do I not put my own faith in this theory?
Naturalism, the way I see it, leads to determinism. If everything may be simply boiled down to interactions, everything is pre-determined by the interactions of those atoms. The things that happen this moment are determined on the level of atoms by things that have happened the moment before. Which were determined by things that happened the moment before. Which were destined to happen from the beginning of things ages ago. We see a trail of dominoes receding into ages past. And this moment was bound to come to us exactly as it has come to us.
This is a closed system of cause and effect, and reality and nature are this grand interlocking web of cause and effect. We may refer to this as The Whole Show.
If nature is all there is, then my own mind and consciousness would be merely a function of things that are going on in my brain. Mind would be synonymous with brain. And what I think would be determined by things going on in my brain. Each thought would be an event that was preceded by and caused by some other event. And all of this is explainable by the physics and chemistry of the atoms in my brain, an organ that I have inherited through evolution, which is the biological explanation of how I have arrived at this point in The Whole Show.
But if this is the case, I have always been destined to hold the beliefs that I hold now. And you have always been destined to hold the beliefs that you hold now. And you were always destined to have the cognitive reaction that you are now having to this blog. And I have always been destined to think these thoughts and write them this way. And we will die thinking the things we were always destined to think. All pre-determined by our chemistry and the way things have locked together to produce The Whole Show, of which we are a part.
So my brain happens to fizz and cause Christian thoughts. And your brain - perhaps - happens to fizz and cause atheistic thoughts. But there is no reason to think that our brains produce true thoughts. There is no reason to prefer the atheistic fizzing to the Christian fizzing, and there is no way to control the fizzing. You and I are merely functions of our chemistry. And so we might have a conversation, but it is all a charade. Because you will leave it believing what you were destined to believe, and I will leave it believing what I was destined to believe. Maybe we will have changed one another's minds. But it was all an illusion. An elaborate dance. We played our part. We may continue on, but it is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. So choosing what I will believe is an illusion, whether Christianity or Buddhism or atheism or evolution or whatever.
To me, this shuts down inquiry and thought. It is fatalistic. If I were to be a naturalist, I would want to follow the logic all the way down. And I think it would take me to this dark place. I do think that thought and conversation are real and meaningful, and therefore, I reject naturalism.
Within this naturalistic framework, everything that happens has a physical cause. Everything that happens is a physical effect of a physical cause. Event B happens because in the moment prior we had some state of the system and Event A triggered Event B. Or more likely Events A, B, C, and D working together bring about Event E in the next moment. There is a chain of cause and effect.
Also within this naturalistic framework, the higher levels of things are explainable by interactions of things on the lower levels. As an example, different biological processes in the cell can be explained in terms of the chemistry on the lower level. The chemistry on the lower level may be explained by physics on an even lower level. It is supposed as well that things like history may be explained by psychology and sociology, which may in turn be explained by biology, which is explained by chemistry, which is explained by physics, which is described by mathematics... In theory, everything may be boiled down to the ordered interactions of atoms doing stuff with each other.
Now, this is a theoretical explanation. I think any good naturalist would admit that there are some massive epistemological issues in coming up with that explanation. It requires us to know a lot of stuff we don't know yet. It requires us to put together a huge number of pieces. But the idea is that anything is explainable in terms of physical cause and effect. Everything may be explained by science which does its work on this physical cause and effect. All legitimate studies are now subsets of science, and they are simply working on pieces of this giant scientific puzzle, that is a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Materialists and naturalists may not know this Grand Unified Theory, but they have faith that it exists, that it will explain both why the universe exists and why everything is the way it is within it.
Why do I not put my own faith in this theory?
Naturalism, the way I see it, leads to determinism. If everything may be simply boiled down to interactions, everything is pre-determined by the interactions of those atoms. The things that happen this moment are determined on the level of atoms by things that have happened the moment before. Which were determined by things that happened the moment before. Which were destined to happen from the beginning of things ages ago. We see a trail of dominoes receding into ages past. And this moment was bound to come to us exactly as it has come to us.
This is a closed system of cause and effect, and reality and nature are this grand interlocking web of cause and effect. We may refer to this as The Whole Show.
If nature is all there is, then my own mind and consciousness would be merely a function of things that are going on in my brain. Mind would be synonymous with brain. And what I think would be determined by things going on in my brain. Each thought would be an event that was preceded by and caused by some other event. And all of this is explainable by the physics and chemistry of the atoms in my brain, an organ that I have inherited through evolution, which is the biological explanation of how I have arrived at this point in The Whole Show.
But if this is the case, I have always been destined to hold the beliefs that I hold now. And you have always been destined to hold the beliefs that you hold now. And you were always destined to have the cognitive reaction that you are now having to this blog. And I have always been destined to think these thoughts and write them this way. And we will die thinking the things we were always destined to think. All pre-determined by our chemistry and the way things have locked together to produce The Whole Show, of which we are a part.
So my brain happens to fizz and cause Christian thoughts. And your brain - perhaps - happens to fizz and cause atheistic thoughts. But there is no reason to think that our brains produce true thoughts. There is no reason to prefer the atheistic fizzing to the Christian fizzing, and there is no way to control the fizzing. You and I are merely functions of our chemistry. And so we might have a conversation, but it is all a charade. Because you will leave it believing what you were destined to believe, and I will leave it believing what I was destined to believe. Maybe we will have changed one another's minds. But it was all an illusion. An elaborate dance. We played our part. We may continue on, but it is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. So choosing what I will believe is an illusion, whether Christianity or Buddhism or atheism or evolution or whatever.
To me, this shuts down inquiry and thought. It is fatalistic. If I were to be a naturalist, I would want to follow the logic all the way down. And I think it would take me to this dark place. I do think that thought and conversation are real and meaningful, and therefore, I reject naturalism.
Christianity and Circular Reasoning
I have found that sometimes there is a circular reasoning present when I try to explain Christianity. For example, if I am asked why I believe in God, I would say something like, "I trust the Bible." If asked why I trust the Bible, I would say something like, "I believe in God."
Now my answers normally don't carry that degree of clarity and are not so concise. I would tend to flower things up and explain it with a lot of words. But sometimes my overflow of words may come from some subconscious discomfort with the circularity of this reasoning that is at the heart of things.
Is this a problem? What kind of discomfort should I feel? Should my faith be weakened by this?
I think there is a crucial difference between knowing the truth of Christ and showing the truth of Christ. Sometimes I may be speechless to explain, but that should not mean that I cease to believe. If a skeptic finds my reasoning lacking, that does not mean that it really is lacking or that I should conclude that it is not compelling. Why should I put my own faith in the hands of skeptics?
Suppose I am coming to Christianity for the first time and I want to evaluate it as a system of beliefs. The first thing I might ask is, "Is this coherent? Do the beliefs cohere with each other and form a system that is not shot through with inconsistency?" The second thing I might ask is, "Why should I believe this? Are there any good reasons to believe this? Are there good reasons to disbelieve this?" The third thing I might ask is, "How does this system and worldview mesh with what I already believe? What things and beliefs might I have to jettison if I am to take this on board?"
In real life, I doubt that anyone's story of coming to Christianity - or anything else for that matter - will look so tidy as a linear journey through these three question types. But something like this must happen.
Here is the part that may not seem fair. Faith is needed at each of these crucial steps. Faith is like the mysterious lubricant that makes the engine run smoothly. It is the animating thing that gets us from point A to point B. I say this, even as I realize how infuriating this might sound. And I say this as someone who does not think that faith is divorced from reason.
For the first question - the question of coherence - Christianity plunges us into mystery. The system of belief does seem coherent and consistent to me. I am amazed at the unity of the Bible, though it is written through multiple genres, times, cultures, authors, and purposes. For the difficult passages, I generally find the attempts to harmonize them compelling. And I know that Christianity plunges us into the deepest of mysteries, how humans are both body and soul, how there is an unseen world of spiritual forces, how God became incarnate in Jesus, how God himself is described as three-in-one, and how Jesus atones for sin on the cross. I really do believe in these things. I think it is reasonable to believe in these things. But I think that faith does something to help me towards being compelled by those reasons. Doubt will find much to stumble over here.
For the second question - that of seeing the reasons for Christianity - faith gives my heart an openness. I do not believe neutrality exists in the pursuit of God and ultimate reality. A Christian and an atheist can both look at the exact same evidence and with clear conscience reach completely opposite conclusions. Answered prayers - in my life and others - constitute one of the reasons I believe in Jesus. But I have never experienced any clear miracles - that is suspension of the laws of nature - that were undeniably God in a more restricted sense. I believe that God's providence through the events of my life show his love and care. But the atheist may look at these same things and see coincidence and gullibility on my part.
An atheist and I might both sit down to look at scientific evidence. I will reject extrapolations that they may find completely reasonable about how life began and continued. They will likely reject evidence that I find compelling that the universe had a definite beginning. We are both looking at the same facts, but neither of us is neutral, and it is exactly that part of us that extrapolates and interprets the facts. It is that part of us that lends meaning to the facts. I see God all over the place in science! But I definitely have friends who disagree. I think that faith and lack of faith colors everything we see when we come to it. A neutral weighing of the evidence and the reasons is not possible, though each party will try to position himself as the most reasonable, the most neutral in the debate. Faith will gladly see reasons that doubt will likely reject.
For the third question - that of Christianity's relationship to the things I already hold to - faith is still needed. Everyone approaches Christianity - or any other belief system - with a heart that has been previously shaped and a mind that has been previously shaped. Paul speaks in Philippians about counting everything as loss for the sake of Christ. Coming to Christ is - or should be - a huge existential step in which we give him the permission to throw anything else overboard in order to make room for him. But in getting him, we get everything. So the throwing overboard of lesser treasures is a joy. Some people try to tack Jesus on to the lives they were already living, and they have not really gotten Jesus, but a small plastic Jesus figurine stowed in the cupboard, useless, powerless. This is not true Christianity. Because this is not what you do if you really believe. Plunging forth with this step requires faith. No one gives up everything for Christ without believing in him.
Faith is needed, therefore, to see Christ at all, to find the reasons for belief in him compelling, and to take the steps that faith requires in allowing Jesus to take full residence in our lives.
So in order to have faith we need to have faith?
Yes.
A frustrating answer for you, I am sure, but also initially frustrating to me, too. I want to give you an answer that you will like, but I can only give you the answer of which I am convinced.
Yes.
Romans 1:16-17 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith."
In our salvation, God's righteousness is revealed to us. From faith... for faith.
The problem, I think, is that we want to be in control and to feel in control of our own lives and destinies and minds. We want reality to flatter us and our critical ability to understand and evaluate reality. It is not flattering to us to know that faith requires faith. Because this pushes us to realize that - if God is real - faith in God is a gift. If we cannot generate our own faith, if we cannot muster it up by our own willpower, we must - especially in the first instance - receive it as a gift.
We find Jews and Greeks, rich and poor, stupid and smart, good and bad people among the ranks of Christianity. The gift of faith is spread liberally. To show that God does not play favorites. To remind us that it is not about how smart we are. We want to be flattered as the critical and neutral judge of the evidence, but God knows that this is not what we need need. We need to be humbled. In our humility we will have greater capacity to enjoy him. We need to realize that we have not earned or deserved this faith, but that it comes to us as a free gift. This is grace.
If we need faith to have and sustain faith, we must first get it from somewhere. If we cannot generate it, it must come to us from outside of ourselves. I think Jesus would say that we need to be born again...(You were not the cause of your own birth. You will not be the author of your own faith. I am fighting all of our most cherished modern creeds in saying this.)
If God is real, then I need faith. (If he is real, I do not want to disbelieve in him.) If God is real, then I need for him to break into my circle, into my life, into my thoughts, and plant a seed of faith. I need him to open my eyes to truth.
Let's think about my other circle from the beginning of this entry. Why do I believe in God? I believe in the Bible. Why do I believe in the Bible? I believe in God.
I have read enough apologetics to have been trained that this is a bad way to answer these questions. But when all is said and done, I feel the gut reality of this line of reasoning, and I know that for probably the majority of honest Christians, this is not far off the mark. It would feel like I and Christendom are in a helpless circle. Except for the presence of God!
I have never met God face to face. I have never spoken with him audibly. I sometimes have doubts. For these reasons, I am hesitant to declare so boldly, "I know God," in answer to the question, "Why do I believe in God?" or "Why do I believe in the Bible?" Some people share that hesitation. Others are strong enough in their relationship to God that they do not need to share that hesitation.
I may be in a circle, but from where I sit, it is more like a circle supported by the hand of God. I do not simply believe in the Bible because I believe in God or vice versa, but I believe in the Bible because I believe I have experienced the true God speaking to me through the Bible. I have felt his presence, though my words fail at description. A true experience of God is a very good reason to believe. My faith is by no means foundation-less, even if communication about it is difficult. And it is not that talking about such experience is impossible or useless. We can give testimony to this relationship and experience. This is simply evidence of a sort that does not necessarily compel belief in the listener. But because neutrality is impossible, that is not unique to testimony of personal experience. There does not exist such evidence that will compel any listener no matter how skeptical. Thanks be to God that I am simply called to witness to Christ, but the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the testimony compelling and causes people to believe and come alive and see Jesus. He moves where he will.
From this perspective, my circular reasoning need not bother me. If God exists, it is reasonable to believe that he created me with this capacity for faith and relationship with him, that he wrote Scripture as a vehicle for that, and that when he chooses to, he may awaken faith. He may present himself to me through the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit to believe in the truths of Christianity. Now, this does not guarantee the truth of Christianity, but it means that I can feel justified in believing in Christ without having to mount a full apologetics case. Though my skeptical friend may present me with a question that I don't yet - or may not find - an answer for, I may still sleep at night with a clear conscience concerning my faith. The ultimate ground for my faith is the presence of Christ in my life, not the strength of my own arguments.
I used to look down on the masses within my congregation and around the world who did not know all the awesome apologetic arguments that I know. I do think that apologetics are important and edifying, but my reasoning as spelled out above helps me to not feel so sorry for the older Christians I know who will soon go to be with God. They have walked with God and they have prayed and they know his voice. And to know and hear the still, small voice of God even a little is more to be treasured than ten-thousand rock solid apologetic arguments. If God is real, we might expect him to awaken faith by presenting himself to people, not merely as the end of some syllogism. God is far more than the end of a logical argument. Thank goodness! Who would want to worship a God who was merely a logical necessity and not a living Lord, a loving Savior?!
If you know God, be able to share why. And do not be afraid or ashamed. Consider the following analogy. If you have been falsely accused of a crime, it does not matter how convincing a case the other side can make against you. You still know your own innocence deep down with a stubborn sort of conviction. They may ask you to explain the evidence away, and you may not be able to effectively do so, but that should do nothing to shake your own confidence that you are innocent.
Similarly, it would be absurd for someone to try to convince you that your best friend didn't exist.
What may look like a circle to my skeptical friends may not, in reality, be a circle. Christ alone should be the ultimate ground of my faith in Christ. I need not dilute my own foundation, even as I try to give reasons that will appeal to my skeptical friends.
The truth of Christianity does not depend on your own personal preferences. The truth of Christianity does not depend on how eloquent you are. The truth of Christianity does not depend on your recognition of the truth of Christianity. The truth of Christianity does not depend on whether or not your reasoning looks circular.
"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." (Flannery O'Connor)
As my Dad would say, "It is what it is."
What happens to reasoning then? Is it null and void and useless? By no means! First, we are commanded to give a reason for the hope that is within us. Those reasons exist.
Coming to God, and accepting the Bible as true, does not mean that we must shut our brains off. It may mean - and I believe it means - that we are for the first time submitting it to the ultimate standard that will free it to really explore truth.
If faith is a gift, what is the point of presenting evidence? I think that we can only look at this sort of thing retrospectively. There are plenty of examples of atheists who set out trying to proving that God didn't exist, and a good look at the evidence convinced them otherwise. Now in retrospect, I think they would attribute their examination and understanding of the evidence as the drawing of the Holy Spirit. Seeing reasons to believe can certainly be part of a person's testimony in how they became a Christian.
For this reason, I consider the use of evidences the same way I do the presentation of the Gospel. I am called to share. I spread the seeds, and God gives the growth. I do not know which seeds will stick. But I am not called to know that.
I think a lot of this comes down to the same mystery between God's sovereignty and the dignity of free will. There is a mystery here that I do not understand and cannot fully harmonize or explain with my finite mind. But God's sovereignty over everything is really real. And our ability to freely choose things is really real. God addresses us with things to do, and we are given the freedom to do them or not. And he is in control.
So it is with someone examining Christianity. They really need help to see the evidence, to believe the evidence. But the believing and trusting is given to them as a choice. I do not know how all this will reconcile in the end.
Though I must affirm - and gladly affirm - faith as a gift, I think the nature of God's love is such that he will not control and manipulate his creatures. I offer this only as a possibility, but I think this freedom-giving love is also part of what keeps God from compelling our belief outright. He gives us evidence that may be interpreted either way. I am a very intellectually fulfilled Christian. By now I have seen enough evidence of God's reality that I could not be an intellectually fulfilled atheist even if I tried. For me, it would be like trying to pass through the eye of a needle. But there are also plenty of intellectually fulfilled atheists. God woos us but does not drag us away to heaven. Nor does he drag us to hell. I think, therefore, that if you are really seeking him with an open heart, you will find him. And your seeking with an open heart will be seen to have been a gift in the end.
Romans indicates that everyone knows God, but that we have suppressed our knowledge of God by our own unrighteousness. Coming to faith in God will probably not come calmly at the end of a syllogism - it might - but it will likely strike in an unsuspecting moment with a bubbling up of, "Of course." This may involve a lot of intellectual wrestling. Or it may involve none at all.
Dear friends, consider this post a prologue to further and more specific apologetic entries. This is more like a lengthy airing out of epistemological preliminaries. I have already catalogued a quick and basic list of reasons why I believe in God. I certainly will also be coming up with a list of reasons why I believe the Bible is reliable. For the sake of others, I will move my argument beyond the circle above.
Perhaps this has all just been a long personal reminder for myself that I ought not to forget God among all the thorns and rabbit trails of finding reasons for him. And that I ought to talk to him more than I talk about him.
As always, Soli Deo gloria!
Now my answers normally don't carry that degree of clarity and are not so concise. I would tend to flower things up and explain it with a lot of words. But sometimes my overflow of words may come from some subconscious discomfort with the circularity of this reasoning that is at the heart of things.
Is this a problem? What kind of discomfort should I feel? Should my faith be weakened by this?
I think there is a crucial difference between knowing the truth of Christ and showing the truth of Christ. Sometimes I may be speechless to explain, but that should not mean that I cease to believe. If a skeptic finds my reasoning lacking, that does not mean that it really is lacking or that I should conclude that it is not compelling. Why should I put my own faith in the hands of skeptics?
Suppose I am coming to Christianity for the first time and I want to evaluate it as a system of beliefs. The first thing I might ask is, "Is this coherent? Do the beliefs cohere with each other and form a system that is not shot through with inconsistency?" The second thing I might ask is, "Why should I believe this? Are there any good reasons to believe this? Are there good reasons to disbelieve this?" The third thing I might ask is, "How does this system and worldview mesh with what I already believe? What things and beliefs might I have to jettison if I am to take this on board?"
In real life, I doubt that anyone's story of coming to Christianity - or anything else for that matter - will look so tidy as a linear journey through these three question types. But something like this must happen.
Here is the part that may not seem fair. Faith is needed at each of these crucial steps. Faith is like the mysterious lubricant that makes the engine run smoothly. It is the animating thing that gets us from point A to point B. I say this, even as I realize how infuriating this might sound. And I say this as someone who does not think that faith is divorced from reason.
For the first question - the question of coherence - Christianity plunges us into mystery. The system of belief does seem coherent and consistent to me. I am amazed at the unity of the Bible, though it is written through multiple genres, times, cultures, authors, and purposes. For the difficult passages, I generally find the attempts to harmonize them compelling. And I know that Christianity plunges us into the deepest of mysteries, how humans are both body and soul, how there is an unseen world of spiritual forces, how God became incarnate in Jesus, how God himself is described as three-in-one, and how Jesus atones for sin on the cross. I really do believe in these things. I think it is reasonable to believe in these things. But I think that faith does something to help me towards being compelled by those reasons. Doubt will find much to stumble over here.
For the second question - that of seeing the reasons for Christianity - faith gives my heart an openness. I do not believe neutrality exists in the pursuit of God and ultimate reality. A Christian and an atheist can both look at the exact same evidence and with clear conscience reach completely opposite conclusions. Answered prayers - in my life and others - constitute one of the reasons I believe in Jesus. But I have never experienced any clear miracles - that is suspension of the laws of nature - that were undeniably God in a more restricted sense. I believe that God's providence through the events of my life show his love and care. But the atheist may look at these same things and see coincidence and gullibility on my part.
An atheist and I might both sit down to look at scientific evidence. I will reject extrapolations that they may find completely reasonable about how life began and continued. They will likely reject evidence that I find compelling that the universe had a definite beginning. We are both looking at the same facts, but neither of us is neutral, and it is exactly that part of us that extrapolates and interprets the facts. It is that part of us that lends meaning to the facts. I see God all over the place in science! But I definitely have friends who disagree. I think that faith and lack of faith colors everything we see when we come to it. A neutral weighing of the evidence and the reasons is not possible, though each party will try to position himself as the most reasonable, the most neutral in the debate. Faith will gladly see reasons that doubt will likely reject.
For the third question - that of Christianity's relationship to the things I already hold to - faith is still needed. Everyone approaches Christianity - or any other belief system - with a heart that has been previously shaped and a mind that has been previously shaped. Paul speaks in Philippians about counting everything as loss for the sake of Christ. Coming to Christ is - or should be - a huge existential step in which we give him the permission to throw anything else overboard in order to make room for him. But in getting him, we get everything. So the throwing overboard of lesser treasures is a joy. Some people try to tack Jesus on to the lives they were already living, and they have not really gotten Jesus, but a small plastic Jesus figurine stowed in the cupboard, useless, powerless. This is not true Christianity. Because this is not what you do if you really believe. Plunging forth with this step requires faith. No one gives up everything for Christ without believing in him.
Faith is needed, therefore, to see Christ at all, to find the reasons for belief in him compelling, and to take the steps that faith requires in allowing Jesus to take full residence in our lives.
So in order to have faith we need to have faith?
Yes.
A frustrating answer for you, I am sure, but also initially frustrating to me, too. I want to give you an answer that you will like, but I can only give you the answer of which I am convinced.
Yes.
Romans 1:16-17 says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, "The righteous shall live by faith."
In our salvation, God's righteousness is revealed to us. From faith... for faith.
The problem, I think, is that we want to be in control and to feel in control of our own lives and destinies and minds. We want reality to flatter us and our critical ability to understand and evaluate reality. It is not flattering to us to know that faith requires faith. Because this pushes us to realize that - if God is real - faith in God is a gift. If we cannot generate our own faith, if we cannot muster it up by our own willpower, we must - especially in the first instance - receive it as a gift.
We find Jews and Greeks, rich and poor, stupid and smart, good and bad people among the ranks of Christianity. The gift of faith is spread liberally. To show that God does not play favorites. To remind us that it is not about how smart we are. We want to be flattered as the critical and neutral judge of the evidence, but God knows that this is not what we need need. We need to be humbled. In our humility we will have greater capacity to enjoy him. We need to realize that we have not earned or deserved this faith, but that it comes to us as a free gift. This is grace.
If we need faith to have and sustain faith, we must first get it from somewhere. If we cannot generate it, it must come to us from outside of ourselves. I think Jesus would say that we need to be born again...(You were not the cause of your own birth. You will not be the author of your own faith. I am fighting all of our most cherished modern creeds in saying this.)
If God is real, then I need faith. (If he is real, I do not want to disbelieve in him.) If God is real, then I need for him to break into my circle, into my life, into my thoughts, and plant a seed of faith. I need him to open my eyes to truth.
Let's think about my other circle from the beginning of this entry. Why do I believe in God? I believe in the Bible. Why do I believe in the Bible? I believe in God.
I have read enough apologetics to have been trained that this is a bad way to answer these questions. But when all is said and done, I feel the gut reality of this line of reasoning, and I know that for probably the majority of honest Christians, this is not far off the mark. It would feel like I and Christendom are in a helpless circle. Except for the presence of God!
I have never met God face to face. I have never spoken with him audibly. I sometimes have doubts. For these reasons, I am hesitant to declare so boldly, "I know God," in answer to the question, "Why do I believe in God?" or "Why do I believe in the Bible?" Some people share that hesitation. Others are strong enough in their relationship to God that they do not need to share that hesitation.
I may be in a circle, but from where I sit, it is more like a circle supported by the hand of God. I do not simply believe in the Bible because I believe in God or vice versa, but I believe in the Bible because I believe I have experienced the true God speaking to me through the Bible. I have felt his presence, though my words fail at description. A true experience of God is a very good reason to believe. My faith is by no means foundation-less, even if communication about it is difficult. And it is not that talking about such experience is impossible or useless. We can give testimony to this relationship and experience. This is simply evidence of a sort that does not necessarily compel belief in the listener. But because neutrality is impossible, that is not unique to testimony of personal experience. There does not exist such evidence that will compel any listener no matter how skeptical. Thanks be to God that I am simply called to witness to Christ, but the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the testimony compelling and causes people to believe and come alive and see Jesus. He moves where he will.
From this perspective, my circular reasoning need not bother me. If God exists, it is reasonable to believe that he created me with this capacity for faith and relationship with him, that he wrote Scripture as a vehicle for that, and that when he chooses to, he may awaken faith. He may present himself to me through the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit to believe in the truths of Christianity. Now, this does not guarantee the truth of Christianity, but it means that I can feel justified in believing in Christ without having to mount a full apologetics case. Though my skeptical friend may present me with a question that I don't yet - or may not find - an answer for, I may still sleep at night with a clear conscience concerning my faith. The ultimate ground for my faith is the presence of Christ in my life, not the strength of my own arguments.
I used to look down on the masses within my congregation and around the world who did not know all the awesome apologetic arguments that I know. I do think that apologetics are important and edifying, but my reasoning as spelled out above helps me to not feel so sorry for the older Christians I know who will soon go to be with God. They have walked with God and they have prayed and they know his voice. And to know and hear the still, small voice of God even a little is more to be treasured than ten-thousand rock solid apologetic arguments. If God is real, we might expect him to awaken faith by presenting himself to people, not merely as the end of some syllogism. God is far more than the end of a logical argument. Thank goodness! Who would want to worship a God who was merely a logical necessity and not a living Lord, a loving Savior?!
If you know God, be able to share why. And do not be afraid or ashamed. Consider the following analogy. If you have been falsely accused of a crime, it does not matter how convincing a case the other side can make against you. You still know your own innocence deep down with a stubborn sort of conviction. They may ask you to explain the evidence away, and you may not be able to effectively do so, but that should do nothing to shake your own confidence that you are innocent.
Similarly, it would be absurd for someone to try to convince you that your best friend didn't exist.
What may look like a circle to my skeptical friends may not, in reality, be a circle. Christ alone should be the ultimate ground of my faith in Christ. I need not dilute my own foundation, even as I try to give reasons that will appeal to my skeptical friends.
The truth of Christianity does not depend on your own personal preferences. The truth of Christianity does not depend on how eloquent you are. The truth of Christianity does not depend on your recognition of the truth of Christianity. The truth of Christianity does not depend on whether or not your reasoning looks circular.
"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." (Flannery O'Connor)
As my Dad would say, "It is what it is."
What happens to reasoning then? Is it null and void and useless? By no means! First, we are commanded to give a reason for the hope that is within us. Those reasons exist.
Coming to God, and accepting the Bible as true, does not mean that we must shut our brains off. It may mean - and I believe it means - that we are for the first time submitting it to the ultimate standard that will free it to really explore truth.
If faith is a gift, what is the point of presenting evidence? I think that we can only look at this sort of thing retrospectively. There are plenty of examples of atheists who set out trying to proving that God didn't exist, and a good look at the evidence convinced them otherwise. Now in retrospect, I think they would attribute their examination and understanding of the evidence as the drawing of the Holy Spirit. Seeing reasons to believe can certainly be part of a person's testimony in how they became a Christian.
For this reason, I consider the use of evidences the same way I do the presentation of the Gospel. I am called to share. I spread the seeds, and God gives the growth. I do not know which seeds will stick. But I am not called to know that.
I think a lot of this comes down to the same mystery between God's sovereignty and the dignity of free will. There is a mystery here that I do not understand and cannot fully harmonize or explain with my finite mind. But God's sovereignty over everything is really real. And our ability to freely choose things is really real. God addresses us with things to do, and we are given the freedom to do them or not. And he is in control.
So it is with someone examining Christianity. They really need help to see the evidence, to believe the evidence. But the believing and trusting is given to them as a choice. I do not know how all this will reconcile in the end.
Though I must affirm - and gladly affirm - faith as a gift, I think the nature of God's love is such that he will not control and manipulate his creatures. I offer this only as a possibility, but I think this freedom-giving love is also part of what keeps God from compelling our belief outright. He gives us evidence that may be interpreted either way. I am a very intellectually fulfilled Christian. By now I have seen enough evidence of God's reality that I could not be an intellectually fulfilled atheist even if I tried. For me, it would be like trying to pass through the eye of a needle. But there are also plenty of intellectually fulfilled atheists. God woos us but does not drag us away to heaven. Nor does he drag us to hell. I think, therefore, that if you are really seeking him with an open heart, you will find him. And your seeking with an open heart will be seen to have been a gift in the end.
Romans indicates that everyone knows God, but that we have suppressed our knowledge of God by our own unrighteousness. Coming to faith in God will probably not come calmly at the end of a syllogism - it might - but it will likely strike in an unsuspecting moment with a bubbling up of, "Of course." This may involve a lot of intellectual wrestling. Or it may involve none at all.
Dear friends, consider this post a prologue to further and more specific apologetic entries. This is more like a lengthy airing out of epistemological preliminaries. I have already catalogued a quick and basic list of reasons why I believe in God. I certainly will also be coming up with a list of reasons why I believe the Bible is reliable. For the sake of others, I will move my argument beyond the circle above.
Perhaps this has all just been a long personal reminder for myself that I ought not to forget God among all the thorns and rabbit trails of finding reasons for him. And that I ought to talk to him more than I talk about him.
As always, Soli Deo gloria!
Monday, April 29, 2013
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!
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!
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