A few years ago a pastor challenged me to tell the story of why I am a Christian. I began a Google Doc and have worked on it since. For me, it’s not a simple exercise.
My mind works differently than many people’s. I have a natural scientific bent, in that I try to model the world based on evidence, doing my best to reason without preconceived notions or biases of the way I’d like things to be, and bring my beliefs into alignment with that evidence. I cannot, then, offer a traditional religious testimony as sufficient for belief. I wouldn’t ask anyone to believe based on my subjective experiences, which while personally meaningful are not a rational basis for someone else to entertain faith.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in the small rural town of Holden, Louisiana. It was an old-school southern church, a form that has been mostly lost to history. Our liturgy consisted of the hymns and responsive readings of the Baptist Hymnal, the old black one with the glossy cover, accompanied by an upright piano and an electric organ. Behind the pulpit was a baptistry with a painting behind it that made it seem continuous with a river in the distance. The deacons, mostly blue-collar workers during the week, dutifully wore full suits to church and when praying, addressed the Almighty in King James English; their fear of a holy God was manifest in both their dress and language and out of respect for our older parishioners, some born in the 1800s, who were used to such formality, perhaps a relic of a time when people had to be hard and tough rather than self-indulgent in their emotions, routinely losing children and loved ones to infectious diseases and other privations. Our pastor had stark white hair, something I as a young child assumed had happened to him because of his closeness to God, like Moses on Mount Sinai.
When I was seven or eight years old, the church hired a seminary student named Michael to work with the children and youth. Michael taught the basics of the Christian faith to us, and for the first time, I understood what was being offered. I could feel and know that sin was real, that is, it was a fundamental intuition of mine, probably universal in all children, that certain acts were certainly, morally wrong. I knew, to the extent I had moral agency at this age, that I had committed some of these wrongs. The Christian faith said these wrongs deserved God’s judgment and wrath, but offered salvation to any who would believe and accept the sacrifice God Himself made through Christ for our sins. This, if true, was a no-brainer to accept. And, I wanted to do the right thing. Christian theology would say the Holy Spirit, at that time, changed my heart to begin to want what was right.
Of course, I had the skepticism and credulity of a child at this point. I had grown up in a Christian family, a Christian community, and had never evaluated alternative claims to Christianity. Given how my mind would develop, it was inevitable that a rational crisis of faith would come. Because loyalty is one of my highest practical values, I never stopped going to church, which in retrospect is evidence I never truly lost my faith. There was a part of me that would never turn my back on the way I was raised and taught, or distress my family with public apostasy. I had experienced the love fellow Christians had shown me, and the beauty of the faith in comforting people in their distress. The last thing I would ever do, as my grandmother might say, is “show my butt” by making some big public spectacle of an emerging agnosticism to repudiate the faith of my family and ancestors. Butt-showing, which some pass off as “authenticity,” is, unfortunately, one of those inverted values ascendant in today’s culture.
If necessary, I would have taken Pascal’s wager, attending to religious duties and trying to believe as best I could. Perhaps I did this for a while, and sometimes I still do. Developing gradually in high school and intensifying in college and my early 20s, I had to reformulate why I believed. I needed intellectual plausibility, at minimum, to take me back to the edge of the chasm of faith. What follows is a summary of how I got there.
Christianity is a form of theism, which is a generic belief in a creator God. So for me, that was the first question to answer. Is God a necessary conclusion from the world we see? At first glance, this would appear to be the case, as was the universal conviction of mankind before the 19th century. The universe tends toward disorder from an ordered state, which would entail, from a gross view, that an ordering force must have created it. Life in particular represents a highly ordered process that escapes explanation except by creation.
Darwinism challenges this intuition. It posits a mechanism by which order can emerge from chaos, life from death. This is bleak, in that human life would have no intrinsic meaning, which is why many Christians reject it. I, however, had to entertain it as a possibility because I know that our preferences for how things ought to be have no necessary relationship to how things actually are. Human life might actually be meaningless.
With our more advanced understanding of cosmology, it could be that materialistic Darwinism is true while still requiring a god. Most physicists now believe the fundamental constants of the universe are arbitrary. Yet, these constants, in our universe, are extremely fine-tuned to allow the possibility of the existence of life. I don’t understand all of the physics, but I find it revealing that the idea of the multiverse has gained mainstream acceptance. Materialist cosmologists seem to understand that the fine-tuned constants of the universe imply the existence of a god. Their solution to that conundrum is to posit the existence of an infinite number of universes, each with random values of cosmological constants. That we happen to live in one of them consistent with the physical constants necessary to support intelligent life is not surprising. By definition, we can never test the hypothesis of a multiverse. To believe in it is a form of faith.
While cosmological arguments add to the weight of God’s existence, I was never sufficiently convinced by Darwinism as an adequate explanation for the emergence of life. We must recognize the limitations of Darwinist science in explaining remote origins. It is, in its broadest claims, a historical or observational science attempting to analyze past data, like climate science, not an experimental science. We cannot test the emergence of the first self-replicating RNA in a laboratory like we can test the heat capacity of lead or the molecular weight of copper. So far, the mechanisms involved are too complex for our understanding, much less our ability to demonstrate them in a lab. Small evolutionary changes in a population have been demonstrated experimentally, but there is no observational, empirical proof of the emergence of life from non-living matter, nor any major changes to body plans in more complex species. Darwin did discover an extremely useful, self-evidently true mechanism for the adaptation of populations to their environments. Whether it can explain the emergence of entirely different orders of animals, or the emergence of life itself, is more doubtful.
Since macro-Darwinism cannot be empirically demonstrated, we are left to the question of whether we should evaluate evidence ourselves or trust scientific consensus. Our experience with other observational sciences, such as climate science, and lately, pandemic science, should urge caution in simply accepting a consensus when scientifically-informed claims are not easily subject to experimental falsification. If our intuition, in agreement with nearly all historical human civilizations, tells us that highly ordered systems such as life, systems vastly more complex than anything humanity has designed, cannot emerge from disorder, shouldn’t we consider arguments from the other side? So I did, reading the literature of the intelligent design movement, including Darwin’s Black Box, Signature in the Cell, and Darwin’s Doubt. These books are written by qualified theistic scientists in the field and contain not an iota of theology or Biblical reasoning.
Reading this literature cannot be conclusive for me, because I am not an expert in any of these fields such that I can evaluate the claims confidently. However, by studying the opposing claims I can see if it is coherent and consistent, and compare the same to the mainstream view. As a heuristic, I tend to trust scientific voices that are more humble in their claims. We live in a vastly complex world, and there’s a lot we don’t know. In nutrition science, this is why I trust the work of Rhonda Patrick, P. D. Mangan, and Stephen Guyenet over say Gary Taubes, the low carb guru. Taubes has a pet theory that explains everything, whereas the former make more measured claims. In studying origins, Stephen Meyer comes across as a much more reasonable voice than Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. Whereas Dawkins and Harris make absolute claims of atheism, the Intelligent Design camp is comfortable leaving many specific phenomena as open questions to be revealed by further study.
Further, without specific expertise we can still look at the sciences as a black box, a sort of logic-based dimensional analysis. Are their claims even internally consistent? Do they themselves actually follow their prescription of “methodological naturalism?” Or do they, in pursuit of explanations, resort to non-falsifiable, non-testable hypotheses? If so, these would be what the law calls “admissions against interest,” which is where an opposing witness accidentally admits something inconsistent with their testimony. In court, such statements are considered particularly powerful evidence such that they are an exception to the general rule excluding hearsay.
Some may respond that intelligent design ought not to be considered because it is merely a rationalization, a cope, of Christians seeking to rescue their religious conviction from the consensus of Darwinism. This, however, is not a logical claim. The motivations behind an argument are not reasons to reject it. It must stand or fall on its own logical merits.
Even if one accepts the intelligent design hypothesis, it proves nothing about the Christian religion, so it’s not like considering and being convinced of it corners you into joining the church tomorrow. It simply says that there is evidence of design: by whom is an open question. Such a designer, if it existed, would have to have capabilities far exceeding our own. If not the God, from our perspective it must be a god of some sort.
The mainstream consensus today is far from purely materialist, if we define this as classical materialism, the idea that the world we observe is sufficient to explain its own existence. While Christianity is mocked in the intellectual mainstream, it is not because of its logical claims but because of its moral claims. Our intellectual mainstream seems perfectly content with faith-based, unverifiable explanations of existence that do not make specific claims of appropriate personal behavior. I’ve already given an example of one, the multiverse theory. I’ll give an example of two more: the Simulation Hypothesis and panspermia.
The Simulation Hypothesis holds that, from our current vantage point, virtual reality environments are technologically possible that are indistinguishable from actual reality. That is, the technology we have already gives us a plausible belief that a system like that of The Matrix will eventually be technologically feasible. Thus, if virtual worlds are possible, what is the likelihood that we happen to inhabit the real world instead of some virtual world one or more levels down from ultimate reality? There are many respectable adherents to the Simulation Hypothesis.
When properly defined, it is compatible with Christian theology. The Bible famously declares that Christ, the logos, precedes all Creation and that all Creation is held together by him. The first chapter of the Gospel of John was intellectually revolutionary because the logos was a concept from Greek philosophy, which without the benefit of revelation had derived the necessity of a fundamental order of creation beyond the material. I don’t think it’s a stretch to extend the logos to the computer term of “source code.”
God’s spiritual plane is the hardware running the software that we observe as creation. Actual reality one level up from us is spiritual, and what we see as physical is the virtual world sitting on top. The strange behavior of matter in quantum mechanics seems to imply there is a software layer on top of the physical world. Christian theology further holds that humans are hybrid beings whose essence is both spiritual (from the base world) and physical (in the virtual world we observe). This is why the three major “simulations” of Scripture - Creation before the Fall of Man, Creation after the Fall of Man, and Creation after Christ’s return - all have man existing as a spirit within a physical body. C. S. Lewis anticipated this in his sci-fi trilogy, where he describes the experience of angels in “passing through” physical creatures as if we were ghosts. They perceive themselves as solid, as the base reality. Of course, this is no proof of Christianity, simply an acknowledgment that Christian theology is a specific form of a mainstream secular theory entertained by many intelligent people.
Panspermia is a similar respectable hypothesis that holds that aliens seeded the Earth with life. Of course, this does little to answer the origin-of-life question, if we hold that these aliens are material life forms from our own universe. If life did not spontaneously emerge here, how did it happen somewhere else? I suppose there’s an appeal to ignorance in that we can’t possibly know the initial conditions for the billions of planets in the known universe. But given we can’t engineer laboratory-controlled conditions under which life emerges spontaneously, what confidence can we have that any such conditions would occur in an undirected, random fashion even among billions of planets? The distribution of initial conditions is finite and much more constrained than those we can simulate in a laboratory. The timescales (billions of years) and potential conditions (billions of planets) are large but not infinite, and many orders of magnitude smaller than what would be necessary to randomly generate a single functional protein.
Panspermia is also a generalized version of Christian theology. A creator capable of engineering life on Earth would be so far advanced of anything we could conceive as an “alien” that we would call such a being a god. Some adherents of this theory have speculated of aliens that live in other dimensions, which would just be a novel way to describe what has been traditionally called God.
This again is no proof of Christianity, but rather a demonstration that the mainstream finds the materialist explanation of origins - “the cosmos is all there is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be” - to lack sufficient credibility to be unanimous in adhering to it. There is no mainstream scientific consensus for a purely material world.
The failure of pure materialism is demonstrated in the acceptance of theories like panpsychism, quantum weirdness, and proposed experiments to test the Simulation Hypothesis. Further challenges in the origin of life come from the ENCODE studies, which validated Intelligent Design adherents who successfully predicted that the “junk DNA” evidence of unguided evolution would prove false. In observational science, the best evidence of a theory is its ability to make accurate predictions about future discoveries, and in this Intelligent Design scored a huge win on an extremely fundamental biological question.
Further indirect doubts come from the evidence of convergent evolution. Some scientists cite this as strong proof of evolution, but this amounts to circular reasoning. Having failed to yet demonstrate a mechanism by which a blind process can build complex structures, they simply assume such a mechanism must exist because it happened multiple times! Yet when an improbable event is asserted to occur by an unguided process multiple times independently, it lowers the probability the event is unguided.
If someone wins the lottery ten times in a row, it is more reasonable to assume the game is rigged or broken (i.e. that intelligent agents have intervened in a seemingly random process) than to assume the person is that lucky. When we further observe the supposed DNA transfer among species with no common ancestor, it implies blind evolution not only solved the same problem multiple times but did so in the exact same way! If we allow ourselves to entertain it, a much more parsimonious explanation is that these species share a single designer who has optimized a single solution and simply re-used the code, like a GitHub package, across different species facing similar environmental challenges.
A common objection to this type of reasoning is that theists are naively appealing to a “God of the gaps” rationalization. That is, as the material world was more and more explained to be governed by rational laws instead of gods or spirits, desperate theists grasp at those remaining unexplained phenomena to justify their continued belief in a god. Again, this is a logical fallacy, and at that not evenly applied. When respectable scientists hypothesize about the multiverse, the simulation hypothesis, or panspermia, they are not mocked for their explanations being “X of the gaps.” This mocking only works because of the low social status associated with theistic, particularly Christian, belief in academic circles compared to these other faith-based hypotheses, but has nothing to do with the argument. The formal logical argument would be something like the following:
Throughout mankind’s history, men have improperly ascribed spiritual causes to what were later discovered to be natural phenomena.
Some observed phenomena cannot yet be described by known natural causes.
Therefore, all observed phenomena must have natural causes.
These statements are not logically related. Scientific history is full of examples where initial complexity in edge cases was underappreciated, for example with Newton’s laws, which are correct for most practical purposes but technically incorrect in extreme circumstances.
Evolution explains a great deal of what we observe practically in biology. Darwin’s finches likely have a common ancestor. Natural selection explains everything from the microbiological development of antibiotic resistance to the macro-biological obesity problems among hunter-gatherer groups who are suddenly exposed to Western grain-based diets.
Some Christians engage in ad-hominem attacks on Darwin as the Great Satan undermining their Enlightenment-era blank slate ideology (a view, ironically, originally promulgated by the anti-Christian radical Rousseau). Natural selection obviously acts on humans in history and contributes to the biological diversity we observe in our species as adaptations to varying ancestral environments.
This angle of attack is particularly incoherent among prominent leaders of the Young Earth Creationists, who are the quickest to fulfill Godwin’s law in these debates. One must believe in a great deal of evolution, working with exceptional quickness, if all of today’s vastly varied land species share common ancestors that fit into the dimensions of Noah’s Ark a few thousand years ago. To exempt humans from this same process is specious and a misreading of the Imago Dei of Scripture. My family has a dog, a Havanese, very far removed from his wolf ancestors, which was selectively bred to be small, cute, and harmless, but I do not deny his “dogness” in observing that he is innately different in certain ways from a German Shepherd.
Natural selection, then, explains a great deal and is enormously useful as a biological and arguably socio-political concept. From this, it does not follow that the initial conditions are yet adequately explained, whether in the origin of the first cells or the lumpiness of the geological record, such as the Cambrian explosion, which puts practical time-based constraints on the probabilities of a blind process producing observed complexity. For the details of this, I would refer you to the work of Stephen Meyer or William Dembski.
The other major non-material view is that of pantheism, which we find in Eastern religions and to some degree in Eastern-influenced Romantics and modern “pagans,” for whom Zeus or Wotan are not literal gods but symbols of the life force. To overcome the obvious challenges of a blind process, some posit that there exists an impersonal force in the universe that slowly pushes it to higher orders of complexity. I reject this because it doesn’t seem logically sufficient. Such a force might exist (and it might play a role in theistic evolution, for example), something like Superman’s “blue beam” from Superman IV which rebuilds the Great Wall of China, but any such force would have to flow along a vector of design intent from someone. This simply kicks the question back to the intelligent agent who creates and implements such a force to choose certain arbitrary paths but not others.
Having examined a good bit of the evidence, I have come to the conclusion that an intelligent creator is the most coherent view to explain what we observe concerning the universe and the origin of life. I don’t think the fossil record supports a common ancestor, though I am open to being convinced of theistic evolution, which in my view would be a demonstration that natural selection is more than a blind process, perhaps guided by a divine force or will that itself varies across time (consistent with the “bursts” of evolution thought to be observed historically).
Perry Marshall, an early Internet marketer, deserves credit for spending some of his fortune trying to reconcile evolution with theism by showing that natural selection, at least once we get past the first cell, is more complex than we originally thought. Bacteria, for example, do not follow simple natural selection when facing antibiotics - they actively communicate with each other and express different genes to resist the toxin. Marshall’s thesis is that the simplest cell is a supercomputer capable of iterative adaptations to its environment, not depending merely on random mutations of reproduction to arrive at lucky solutions. I still doubt this is enough to build all of the complexity of life from a single cell without external information, but it is an interesting alternative to classical natural selection. And if cells are not just self-contained replicating chemical systems but also incredibly energy-efficient self-adapting supercomputers far beyond the most advanced human technology, it raises the stakes further for their unlikely origin from completely unthinking primordial chemicals.
For much of my adulthood, I was convinced the winning synthesis was that of an old universe, for I trusted the observational cosmology (given our clear view of the history of the heavens due to light’s experimentally demonstrated finite speed), combined with extraordinary acts of creation throughout Earth’s history consistent with the sequence of the days of Genesis, which are themselves remarkably consistent with the fossil record, and written before the human observation of that record. The practical convictions of most petroleum engineers and geologists are that nearly all oil is both extremely ancient and biological in origin, in a field with no political or cultural reason to lie (and in fact, concentrated in the Bible belt) and every financial incentive to be right. That petroleum plays a huge providential role in human history further affirms my view of an old earth. Lately, though, I’m not so sure, for the Webb telescope is undermining old models of the Big Bang. I’m leaning toward having less of an opinion about the specifics.
It’s clear we live in an aged universe, at minimum, and if a perfectly aged one, then it would be impossible to prove it one way or another. And if physical reality is simply a virtual layer on top of base spiritual reality then time itself is just another tool in the design palette. Due to design objectives, it may be inconsistently aged, or aged at different rates depending on location, undermining our efforts to reach consistent conclusions with scientific observation.
In summary:
All scientific claims of origins are, at this time, rooted in observational, not experimental, science that is not easily falsified. The scientific method is powerful precisely because humans are prone to overconfidence in observation and only honest, open-ended hypothesis testing allows us to overcome these biases. Scientists are not personally exempt from bias when not disciplined by experimental falsification.
Observational science claims should be treated with general skepticism in proportion to the benefits that accrue to their advocates and inversely to their ability to successfully predict future observations.
We have observed in our lifetime the spectacular failure of two observational science claims: global warming and Covid. The apocalyptic vision of global warming keeps getting pushed back and strangely, those who push it still own prime coastal real estate despite their claims that oceans would reclaim low-lying areas in this decade. Strangely, those with skin in the game, insurance companies, are still willing to write premiums. We saw similar failed predictions and inconsistent behavior during the pandemic, with elites stampeding the public with fear while violating strict protocols themselves. Strangely, we were told the virus had political opinions like a pagan god, dangerous enough to smite those who gathered to protest the restrictions but posing no danger to those who riot against the police. In both cases, the elite adherents of these observational sciences were biased because their theory gives them political power.
A non-expert in the sciences surrounding origins can observe the admissions against interest in well-qualified experts having failed to predict many phenomena on a material basis, resorting to faith-based theories like the multiverse, the Simulation Hypothesis, and panspermia.
Historically, I think we can see the appeal of a materialistic view of Creation to our elites. The end goal for any elite is, ironically, insulation from the truly Darwinian forces of the free market, and the securing of government power and adjacent sinecures from which to maintain social status and power across generations. Atheists and agnostics are among the most reliable clients for expanded government.
The existence and revealed polarity of such evil is itself a strong apologetic for Christianity. But that’s for Part Two, which answers the following question: Having sufficiently convinced myself of theism, how do I arrive at plausibility for and faith in Christianity specifically?
Thanks for the writeup. It’s interesting to see someone describe a journey so similar to my own, including even the work of Perry Marshall (though I would say I always believed, just at times with more perplexity). In addition to your observations on political motives in science, perhaps the greatest revealer of the true state of things has been transgenderism’s nearly unchallenged advance. That Big Science was willing to declare holy war against Intelligent Design but would not even resist the advances of something as fantastical as transgenderism-which strikes at one of the most fundamental principles in all of biology-shows where the real motives lie.