Why I Believe, Part Two: Christianity

From Theism to Communion with God

In the previous entry in this series, I discussed my reasons for disbelieving a materialist explanation for the universe and life:

Why I Believe, Part One: The Case for Theism

In this post, I will move forward presupposing an intelligent creator as I make the case for Christianity specifically. I would challenge readers to separate these two questions, as our feelings on religion can get quite emotional and illogical.

Arguments like “I can’t believe in the vengeful God of the Old Testament, therefore I’m an atheist” are not logically connected. The necessity of a creator is a separate question on whether a particular religion, or any religion, correctly identifies that creator. That we tend to such emotion on this subject speaks to our natural religious impulse, to be discussed shortly.

My audience for this post is generally conservative people who may see benefits to religion but for whatever reason struggle to believe. I found myself in this camp sometime in high school, and parts of college, as I questioned my faith, and the reasoning in this post is how I found my way back.

I wouldn’t describe myself as naturally religious. At times I have a hard time relating to other people’s more intense religious experiences. In fact, according to my genetic testing, I have certain alleles associated with both liberalism and atheism. You may have noticed that I have a great need to rationalize my conservatism such that I write thousands of words a month about it. My continued faith comes from my upbringing, my probabilistic assessment of Christianity’s plausibility, and the internal testimony of original sin and Christianity’s uncanny internal consistency in describing the human condition, and my condition specifically.

The most natural form of religion for me is some form of Deism modified by pantheism. I never really questioned the necessity of a creative agent, but for a time I flirted with a deistic understanding of a creative god who set up an elegant law-governed universe. I posited that one of those forces must be a creative force, a begotten pantheism of sorts, that pushed life to higher levels over time. Such a view, while interesting for a time to an overconfident college student, is insufficient for the actual human condition.

Man’s Religious Instinct

All known pre-modern human populations are religious. From an atheistic point of view, this religious instinct must be a useful delusion that serves some evolutionary purpose, perhaps in reinforcing ingroup cohesion and disincentivizing cheating.

If we grant, however, that there is an intelligent creator, man’s religious drive, it would be reasonable to assume, must have some legitimate, real end. Throughout nature, we see every aspect of every creature designed with some purpose. Deism seems less plausible if it posits this master creator gave an unfulfilled religious drive in his highest creature. Man is so religious that even nominally irreligious people cannot help but practice pseudo-religions such as environmentalism or wokeism.

It would be remarkably inconsistent if the highest and most complex creature, man, in his highest abstract capacity, of considering the spiritual and eternal, would have those drives and capabilities for futile ends. Implanted in man is a desire for a direct relationship with a present creator, not an absent one.

I further assert that if this is the case, then an interface for connecting to the creator god would be present in human culture, initiated by the creator. And since the drive is universal, this interface would manifest as a large, universal religion. In the world today, two such religions exist: Christianity and Islam. While we can’t feel the wounds like Thomas, we do get to see the flop on the historical A/B testing of world religions.

Among the two, we can observe that Islam is at least partially derivative of Christianity, in claiming Jesus Christ as a prophet but denying Christ’s own claims of divinity, and reversing the ethnic polarity of much more ancient Scriptures such as the story of Abraham. Its claims, in attempting to incorporate the Bible but outright denying what the Bible actually says, feel like incredulous special pleading. Further, Islam is just barely a universal religion, having fewer overall adherents than Christianity, and is more regionally confined.

Christianity alone could be considered truly universal with a strong presence on every continent and among every type of people. While I am not writing an anti-Islam apologetic, I expect few of my readers could consider it as the universal religion that historically maximizes human flourishing, or plausible that the god it portrays is the same as the creator god of the universe.

If we seek a mass religion promulgated by a creator to fulfill man’s religious instinct and raise him to his highest potential, Christianity is our only historically empirical candidate.

Plausibility of Christianity

I cannot prove that Christianity is true, only that it is plausible. I divide the evidence into three broad categories: external, internal, and historical.

Externally, it is undeniable that Christianity led to the highest expression of human culture and development, and that Christianity was a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) condition of Greater Europe’s, including America and the Anglosphere’s, eventual cultural heights. The work of Rene Girard shows that Christianity ignited in human relations a sense of compassion for the weak unknown to the pagan world. This fundamental shift in morality moved mankind from zero-sum interactions of conquest to positive-sum cooperative interactions economically. Eventually, this led to the Industrial Revolution and the vast improvement of the human condition.

That the excess of both the moral and developmental shift led to overreactions — whether wokeism as a metastasis of concerns for victims, or materialism due to our industrial comforts — does not change the fundamental blessing both entail in proper measure. I think few of us want to return to the cruelty of Roman infanticide and bloodsports or a world before antibiotics and public sanitation. Christ himself suggests such a standard, “By their fruits, you shall know them,” which is why woke attacks on the achievements and relative justice of Western Civilization are among the most dangerous attacks on the Christian faith.

The internal proofs of Christianity concern how its internal self-consistency meshes with the human condition. All historical human cultures sought reconciliation with a god or gods through animal or human sacrifice. The fantasy of a pre-Christian world where Nietzschean pagan supermen went around free of supernatural angst is simply ahistorical. The universal experience of human beings is that we all do things we know are wrong, that we feel are deeply, objectively wrong, and for which we desire some resolution.

Christianity proposes a single, universal sacrifice for sin in the form of the god-man Jesus Christ. Its theology alone resolves mercy and justice, and thus life and death. All of this is offered to us by unearned grace, and dispensed, sealed, or memorialized (pick your theology) through the elegant word pictures of cleansing by water through baptism, and the blood and body of Christ through the bread and wine of Holy Communion.

Christianity further explains our fundamental problem, our hearts. We are all perpetrators and victims, such that the interactions of our guilt, responsibility, and experience of being wronged are a hopelessly tangled knot. Abuse and dysfunction breed abuse and dysfunction, all the while we know in our hearts that there is some standard of right and wrong we are helpless to meet. Unlike lower animals, we are pitiable because we both know right and wrong but are unable to ever fulfill it on our own.

The sacrifice of Christ cuts the knot of our guilt and sin that we are helpless to ever disentangle in all of our relationships. Grace is offered, a fresh start, where we can move forward, as best we can, in our relationships with God and others without the weight of guilt, the awful experience of which often compels us to sin more to find temporary relief and escape.

In both its external cultural results and its internal resolution of our deepest problems, Christianity represents an amazing, singular religious technology. On this ground alone one could find plausible faith.

Finally, we come to the historical plausibility of Christianity. If Christ in fact rose from the dead, I think most would find that sufficient proof for the remainder of Christ’s claims, and Christianity generally. I’m far from an expert apologist, but I’ll recommend William Lane Craig as among the best on the subject. As best I can tell, it is undisputed, from evidence independent of the New Testament, that at least several apostles died as martyrs for their claims of Christ’s divinity and resurrection.

Now martyrdom alone proves little, for all religions have martyrs who die for their beliefs. All martyrs die for what they believe to be true. Christianity is unique in linking its truth claims to an observable historical event, the resurrection. People might have believed Mohammed (whose claimed revelations were private and unobservable), and died for that belief, but they could not know if he was lying. No one, however, dies for what they know to be false, and the apostles were in a unique position to know whether Christ’s resurrection was true or false. They did not have to believe in it or have faith in it; they either observed it or made it up.

Since they were in a position to actually know, it makes little sense that eleven of them would be killed for a belief they knew to be false. And they weren’t even asked necessarily to deny the resurrection! In many cases, polytheistic Rome simply demanded they acknowledge Caesar as a god, and Rome would accommodate a strange cult adding a guy named Jesus Christ to the pantheon. But because they believed Christ was the one true god, proven to them by their observed fact of the resurrection, they were willing to die rather than recant.

Admittedly, many of the historical claims of Christianity are hard to believe. Nevertheless, the apostles wrote to their contemporaries in the region as if Christ’s resurrection was a known fact, and based their authority on the same. If such a claim was known to be false, why make the claim? Why die for it?

Negative Evidence for Christianity

If man were merely an evolved creature, he would be merely selfish. When we see the cheetah track and kill its prey, it is simply following an instinct as a predator. But man goes beyond self-interest and displays behaviors that make no evolutionary sense. They can only be described as evil.

Think of the sickness of soul associated with Tony Podesta’s art collection, or Jeffery Epstein’s abuse of teenagers. It’s very clear that a) human beings engage in depraved evil far beyond that which would be predicted by evolutionary self-interest and b) those that practice such evil, and advocate for other evils, are very prominent among the power elite.

Christianity, in its positing of both man’s sinful nature and a powerful spiritual adversary with influence over the world, seems to describe something we can observe in the world and that we feel with every ounce of our being. As I’ll continue to argue, Christianity has an internal logic that provides great explanatory power for the human condition, further enabling faith.

Fundamental Questions

There are three fundamental questions at the heart of our existence, and the materialist answers are ultimately unsatisfying.

1. Who are we and where did we come from? The materialist answer is that we are random results of a blind process of physics and chemistry, lucky to live in the right universe with the right local conditions, and our perception of our own consciousness is an evolutionarily useful delusion.

2. What is our purpose? A materialist cannot answer this question directly, for the view already denies any actual purpose which is incompatible with an undirected physical process. The best answer offered is that we can use the delusion of our consciousness to ascribe our own purposes to life but with no ultimate meaning. It all ends with the heat death of the universe either way.

3. What happens when we die? For the materialist, the evolutionary algorithm running in our brains that gives what we think is “us” the delusion of existence will shut down sometime shortly after death as our brain’s electrical activity goes to zero. Since we are nothing more than those electrical states, once the substrate is gone so are we. There is nothing more.

The problem for conservative materialists is that of having one foot in both worldviews. They are hamstrung with a strong aesthetic preference for a decent society, and acknowledge the value of religion in helping people achieve such a society, but yet cannot shake the modern paradigm of a godless universe. They are forever in Darwin’s Cathedral, seeing the value of faith but unwilling (so far) to experience it. It is ultimately a dark worldview that says that man’s search for truth is incompatible with his search for goodness and beauty and that the latter, at least on a societal level, requires denying the former.

The Limits of Rationality

None of us are as rational as we pretend to be. One of the misperceptions that may keep decent, intelligent people out of the church is to assume that everyone who is a Christian experiences perfectly confident knowledge without doubt, that Christianity requires complete rational acceptance of its doctrines as the price of admission.

It can look like this for many believers, but again Christianity is a universal religion, and it’s certainly true many people have this sort of rock-solid belief. For some, this is due to many years in the faith and experiencing the things of God, but for many, it is simply the result of an accepting, non-skeptical personality. But what Christianity requires is not knowledge, but rather faith.

I will never know the tenets of Christianity like I know that the floor in my home will support my weight. The latter I get to test and experience every day over thousands of moments. My religious belief, however, will only be tested once, presumably when I die and either wake up to an afterlife or simply cease to exist. I find Christianity plausible and convincing, and I participate in a church to strengthen that faith, but it does not rise to the level of empirical knowledge.

This is, I admit, easier for me since I was raised as a regularly church-going Christian. But if you recognize the unqualified benefits of religious faith and affiliation, you can achieve, over time, the same acclimation to it for yourself and your family by attending church. You may find you aren’t quite so rational, and in practicing and confessing faith with a group, your own faith will strengthen. There’s a reason it’s described as walk of faith, not a destination. No one arrives to any kind of final state this side of eternity.

Your children will have an even better chance to achieve real faith with exposure during the most critical years of influence, and perhaps, even as you struggle, be endowed with a non-nihilistic worldview that is organic in them, rooted in eternal purpose, rather than grafted on as an aesthetic instinct. By giving them a sustainable, historically robust outlet for their natural feelings of guilt and sin, they are less likely* to fall for political cults of self-harm to assuage their religious instincts.

* In the 2016 white voter sample, weekly religious service attendance was the single strongest correlate with Republican voting.

A Higher Empiricism

The theologian R.L. Dabney described the darkness of atheism:

But our only master is an irresistible, blind machine, revolving forever by the law of a mechanical necessity; and the corn between its upper and nether mill-stones is this multitude of living, palpitating, human hearts, instinct with their priceless hopes, and fears, and affections, and pangs, writhing and bleeding forever under the remorseless grind. The picture is as black as hell itself. He who is "without God in this world," is "without hope." Atheism is despair.

Bertrand Russell, one of history’s most famous atheists, confirms the testimony:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Russell wrote these words in 1903. I leave it to the reader to judge whether atheism has proven adaptive as a safe habitation for souls.

Arguably, materialism is a weaker form of empiricism than Christian faith, if we define empiricism as belief based on experience rather than narrowly as the scientific method.

Our most consistent and grounded experience is that of our own consciousness. We know love and beauty, and sin and evil, more deeply than we know the modern rationalizations for a godless universe, which I have demonstrated are not airtight. We know the perversions of our own hearts, the dark and evil things we either desire or practice, and our instinct for needing reconciliation with what we innately perceive as an absolute standard of right and wrong.

To recognize the good and beautiful, but deny their truth will lead ultimately to despair. One ought, I think, at least attempt to escape this despair through the possibility of plausible faith, and all of the undeniable benefits that accrue to membership in a religious community.

My advice: if you’re conservative by instinct but can’t yet believe, go to church anyway*. What do you have to lose beyond your despair? To summarize my arguments:

1. I find compelling evidence to reject the materialist account of the origins of both the universe and life. I affirm the necessity of an intelligent creator.

2. An intelligent creator would not implant futile drives in man. The sex drive, for example, has an end in reproduction and companionship. Man’s universal religious drive, his desire for a relationship with his creator, also must have an end.

3. Fulfilling this religious drive at scale would require the creator to intervene in history to reveal himself through a mass religion.

4. Christianity is the most plausible mass religion that also happens to perfectly fit man’s nature as a sinful, guilt-ridden creature who desires both mercy and justice to be reconciled. Further, Christianity has proven itself empirically in its undeniably unequaled cultural achievements, in comparing the before-and-after effects of societal conversion.

5. Christianity is internally consistent with rationality because it only asks us to have and practice faith as best we can, not absolute empirical confidence in its claims.

In my next article in this series, I will attempt to address common objections to Christianity that have, at times, troubled me. I’m not an expert theologian or apologist, but I will provide the practical answers I’ve found helpful. Some of those questions:

1. Does Christianity make us weak? (a response to neo-paganism)

2. Why is Christianity non-obvious?

3. If God exists and is good and all-powerful, why is there evil?

4. How do I reconcile the doctrine of eternal hell with a just god?

* Addendum - Finding a Church to Attend

A natural objection that I expect in some of my readers is an aesthetic objection to modern church services from many non-denominational, Baptist, and quasi-Baptist evangelical churches. We are in a weird period of church history where churches who have conservative doctrine tend to have what some consider cringe aesthetics, while those with beautiful, reverent liturgies and architecture are often merely going through the motions*.

(* This is painting with a broad brush. There are many faithful congregations and even more faithful parishioners in mainline denominations.)

The “cringe” of the evangelical world comes from a good place, from a desire to serve and make people comfortable meeting them where they are culturally. Senator J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy tells of the important role charismatic churches played in his rural Appalachian upbringing in helping him get his life together, and the amazing work they do generally among the addicted and hopeless*. That said, some want to connect their children to a religious heritage with at least some continuity with the historical church, so a church that feels like a shopping mall combined with a self-help seminar / rock concert may be a deal killer.

(* Vance is now Catholic, an all-too-common path for many smart evangelicals frustrated by the shallowness of their churches of origin. I’ve heard that at Hillsdale College that about half of the smart, often homeschooled kids matriculating there from general evangelical backgrounds end up Catholic, and the other half end up some kind of Reformed Calvinist when confronted with the robust intellectual foundations of these alternatives.)

If this is you, there are exceptions, communities of conservatives with historically-informed aesthetics, especially in most mid-size to large cities. I’ll give an overview of my impressions (in rough descending order of antiquity) without pointed theological commentary.

• The Eastern Orthodox churches are generally both conservative and have maintained their traditional — though somewhat alien to the Western church — aesthetic sense. Many Americans will find it difficult to not feel LARPy given the strong ethnocultural flavor of many of these churches, though less so in certain large city congregations with predominantly American converts.

• Catholic churches can be all over the place, but those who practice the Latin Mass are among the most intentional communities, often with large homeschooling families. Just Google Latin Mass and your city to find options. The SSPX churches also tend to be very conservative.

• I find Anglican liturgy to be the most beautiful, and there are several emerging conservative Anglican denominations. The largest is the Anglican Church in North America.

• Many churches associated with the Magisterial Reformation maintain conservative doctrine and aesthetics.

  • Perhaps the most conservative is the CREC, which wisely (IMO) accommodates both paedobaptist and believer’s baptism views among leadership.

  • Excluding the CREC (which for various inside baseball reasons is considered by the Reformed mainstream to be renegade and reactionary, i.e. maybe too conservative), there is a useful, well-maintained map of Reformed churches here. There’s a lot of theological hair-splitting in this world, and Presbyterians are good at it, so the map is very finely divided among various distinctives from Reformed Baptist to Congregational to Presbyterians of both Scottish and Continental confessional association.

  • There is a wide dispersion of practices among these churches. Some seek to ape the megachurches and hide the ball of their confessional standards, while others are reliably conservative in doctrine and practice. I’m personally part of a conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) congregation, which is the largest conservative-leaning Presbyterian denomination in the United States, whose congregations are included in the map above. PCA churches are widely dispersed in their actual practice, so YMMV.

• Lutherans are all over the place as well, but a very conservative friend of mine has found a home in the AFLC. More generally, the largest somewhat conservative denomination is the Missouri Synod, though practice varies widely from almost totally woke to very conservative.

• The Methodists have recently split, with more conservative congregations landing in the Global Methodists.

• In the American South, sometimes the more established Baptist churches will retain traditional worship styles. An association with the Southern Baptist Convention typically indicates conservative doctrine.

• Overall, I’d recommend searching your city for options you find theologically and aesthetically palatable, but there is no substitute for attending and seeing for yourself. You’ll find most churches like these are eager for new congregants and very friendly. There are no perfect churches, just as there are no perfect people, and a minor “compromise” is worth the benefits of being part of a faith community.