Evan Almighty

I saw Evan Almighty again tonight and and enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first time. I tend to dislike movies where, if they were remotely realistic, everything would end badly, and you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. So here we have a newly elected U.S. Congressman going to seed, followed around by wild animals, and shouting about a flood and how God told him to build an ark. There's simply no way this is going to end well, or maintain any believability if it does. Nor does the film itself provide a convincing resolution to the mess--I'm pretty sure that even if everything could happen as it did in the movie, the authorities would be more likely to believe Evan sabotaged the dam than that God actually warned him of the danger. And I'm certain that any flood that could carry a boat right up to the Capitol Building would destroy most of Washington D.C. in the process.

But whatever. This time I knew what to expect and so wasn't as distracted by the absurdities and just enjoyed it as a humorous parable about a man far too concerned with outward appearances with whom God has some fun, and uses to do some good. And as a parable, it works pretty well (for instance, see Carmen's excellent observations here). What I especially like about it, however, is its exploration of how God answers prayer. On one side, of course, the movie is full of instances of direct, miraculous, acts of God, but on the other hand, it suggests that God's usual practice is much more subtle and personal:

Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for their family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?

Ultimately, and as I've said before, God is less interested in fixing our circumstances than he is in fixing us--making us into the kind of people who live for and love one another, regardless of our circumstances. Yet it is still we who must choose how to live in each circumstance. Though God wants to transform us, to cleanse us of our self-focus and make us into the people we are meant to be, he can only do so through our choices.Whatever its failings, Evan Almighty explores that tension very well, and has a lot of fun doing it.

Evidence for the Historical Jesus

In his several posts on the subject, Stephen Law’s primary argument for skepticism about Jesus’ existence is that the inclusion of so many miraculous events in the Gospels should lend doubt even to the mundane details given. This is, in fact, a valid objection to which could be added the important point that the gospels do show some evidence of embellishment and fabrication. He is correct that we cannot uncritically accept these texts as straightforward historical accounts. But neither can the simple fact that they include miracles automatically disqualify them as fabrications. Even if we reject all the miracle stories as too poorly attested to be believed, there are, in fact, many other aspects of the Jesus tradition which make it almost certain that it derives from a genuine historical core.

In my last post on the historical plausibility of Jesus’ existence, I noted that, even in the absence of any other evidence, the claim that he was crucified is itself very good evidence for his existence. In short, the argument runs as follows: 1. We know from independent sources that a number of messianic claimants were killed by the Romans in 1st C. Palestine; 2. We know from independent sources that crucifixion was seen as an extremely shameful death, more likely to be covered up than made up; and yet 3. We know that the early Christians were emphatic that Jesus had been crucified. Quite apart from any dubious reconstruction of motives, it is much more probable that the Christians really did believe their leader had died in this way than that they created the story from scratch. It was simply too big a liability to have been invented (indeed, it opened them up to insistent ridicule from both Jews and Greeks, leading some later Christian heretics to claim that Judas was actually tricked into dying in his place).

Thus, the crucifixion rightly stands as the most important point in any case for the historicity of Jesus, but it is by no means the only reason to believe he existed. I would now like to lay out a few of the other important evidential points which, all combined, not only make Jesus’ historical existence almost certain but also lend a level of support to the broad-scale reliability of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). Here I am building on Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd’s 2007 book The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition:

External Evidence: As has widely been recognized, the external evidence for Jesus’ existence is far from overwhelming. If we lacked the New Testament, we truly would have little reason for confidence in Jesus’ existence. None of the extant sources provide unquestionable evidence, but several of them are important. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas seems to include some early traditions about Jesus that are independent of the canonical Gospels. Since it is a collection of sayings rather than a narrative, it obviously provides no evidence of the activities of Jesus, but it does offer a measure of confirmation for his existence, and since it includes no miracles, Stephen’s objection on that point can be dismissed.

Among non-Christian sources, things are more dubious. Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews twice mentions Jesus, but both cases have been widely dismissed as later Christian interpolations. There are strong arguments both ways, so any conclusion must be tentative, but in my view, the reference to James, “the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ” (20.9.1) seems very slightly more likely to be original than an interpolation for a variety of reasons. In contrast, the fuller description of Jesus (18.3.3) has clearly been tampered with, but there are good reasons to think this tampering represents secondary attempts to Christianize an already existing reference. For instance, the distinctly Christian elements (“if it be lawful to call him a man,” “He was the Christ,” “for he appeared to them alive again the third day”) all interrupt the flow of the passage. When these are removed, the resulting text is as follows:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

This reconstructed text boasts a number of elements which are unlikely to have been invented by Christians (such as the claim that the Jewish leaders who accused Jesus were “men of the highest standing among us” and the reference to Christians as a “tribe”). It also finds support in the modern discovery of a 10th C. Arabic translation of this text (first published in 1971) in which the three clear Christian interpolations are all absent or altered, confirming their secondary nature. Admittedly, the case is not certain, but Josephus does at least provide potential confirmation of Jesus’ existence and crucifixion.

Outside of Josephus, matters are even less clear. Though we have a variety of later non-Christian references to Christ, it is unlikely that any of them provide genuine independent evidence of his existence. Still, it should be noted that the later critics—like Taticus (an early 2nd C. Roman historian), Celsus (who wrote an attack on Christianity in the late 2nd C.), and several references in the Jewish Talmud—all denigrate Jesus (and his followers) rather than dismissing his existence outright. Since ancient philosophers and historians did occasionally question the existence of various mythic figures (such as the Homeric heroes), it is reasonable to think that if these critics knew of any reason to doubt his existence, they would have mentioned it. This is, admittedly, an argument from silence, but the fact that such was never claimed is at least noteworthy, though by no means conclusive.

Again, if such references were all we had, Jesus’ existence would rightly be in serious doubt. Though these might provide a measure of confirmation, it is the New Testament itself which must provide the most important evidence for an historical Jesus, and it does in fact deliver. Of the many issues that could be raised here, we will focus on just three aspects of the Synoptic Gospels (particularly Mark, widely recognized as the earliest), in increasing order of importance: 1. The inclusion of various incidental details which point to early Palestinian tradition; 2. The omission of any retrojection of various issues of central importance to 1st C. Christianity; and 3. The inclusion of embarrassing details about Jesus’ life.

1. Inclusion of Incidental Details: The gospels include a number of details about early 1st C. Palestine (including knowledge of geography, customs, and figures) that do not appear to be “ideologically motivated,” and can point to an historical core to the story. This evidence is, admittedly, the least secure of those we will discuss, as a knowledgeable author could perhaps have added such details even if writing fiction, but at the least, they help establish the knowledgeability of the Gospel writers (or the traditions they are based on) and point to the early, and very Jewish, nature of the tradition as it has come down to us.

To name just one class of evidence here, note that despite the fact that our Gospels were written in Greek (and are widely claimed by Jesus-deniers to be thoroughly Hellenized), they include a number of Aramaisms which point to much older Jewish traditions. Examples from Mark include Jesus’ use of Abba, meaning “father” (14:36); talitha koum, meaning “little girl, get up!” (5:41); Ephphatha, meaning “Be opened!” (7:34); Rabbi , meaning “teacher” (9:5); and especially Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, meaning “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (15:34). The fact that all of these (except Rabbi) are glossed into Greek points to their being holdovers from an older tradition. Additionally, the last of these also fulfills the criterion of embarrassment (see below), as it runs counter to the usual depiction of Jewish martyrs as unperturbed and confident of their salvation (cf. Acts 7 and the 1st C. text 4 Maccabees), and is thus omitted from Luke and John.

That such Aramaisms were not simply added to give the account an artificial sense of antiquity is evident from the fact that the tradition itself shows a tendency to remove rather than add them (thus Matthew and Luke eliminate most of these). This, by itself, does not prove that the tradition goes back to Jesus, only that it goes back to the earliest Christians who spoke Aramaic, but it does lend considerable doubt to the notion that Jesus was fabricated to correspond to the Greco-Roman redeemer myths. If there are parallels to such non-Jewish myths (they are never explicitly invoked in the New Testament), such is more likely to be a secondary layer of interpretation of an older Jewish Jesus tradition than its original source.

2. Omission of Relevant Issues: A more important point is the omission from the Gospels of a number of items that we might have expected them to include if they were pure fabrications. The tradition does show some tendency towards reading later issues back into the life of Jesus (e.g. the anachronistic mentions of expulsion from the synagogue in John 9:22; 12:42 and 16:2), but it is surprising how many of the topics that were highly controversial in the first century church (as indicated by the New Testament epistles) go unmentioned in the Gospels. For instance, given that Jesus was incessantly referred to as the Christ by the early Church (the NT Epistles are full of references), it is remarkable that the Gospels present Jesus as downplaying this title. Such is extremely difficult to imagine being a fabrication.

Alternatively, other vital issues are entirely ignored by Jesus, such as the necessity or unimportance of Gentiles being circumcised in order to become Christians (an issue which divided Paul from the Jerusalem church, including Peter, James and John). In fact, the Gospels evidence a remarkable lack of interest in matters relevant to Diaspora Judaism, despite the fact that they almost certainly reached their final form in the Diaspora after the fall of Jerusalem. They are simply dominated by Palestinian concerns, which is extremely difficult to square with claims that the tradition is entirely fabricated. This provides strong evidence of the relatively conservative nature of the Synoptic Gospels and suggests that they contain at least some genuinely historical information about an early 1st C. teacher.

3. Inclusion of Embarrassing Details: The most compelling evidence for an historical Jesus, however, is the inclusion of so many “embarrassing” details in the Jesus tradition. Though the crucifixion itself stands at the head of this group (and its importance must not be underestimated), the canonical Gospels are full of details that are unlikely to have been invented. By tracing the Jesus’ tradition across the various gospels (canonical and non-canonical), we can clearly see that the later texts do tend to soften or omit these items, proving that their embarrassing nature was evident to the early Christians themselves, and thus their fabrication is unlikely. The following is only a partial list, drawing exclusively from Mark, but should establish just how widespread this phenomenon is:

Mark admits that Jesus’ own family questioned his sanity, while others accused him of demon-possession (3:20-30); Jesus was rejected by the people of his hometown and could not perform many miracles there (6:1-5); he sometimes seemed to rely on folk medical techniques, which were not always immediately successful (e.g 7:31-37, 8:22-25); he associated with people of ill-repute (e.g. 2:14-17) and seemed to disregard a number of Jewish laws, customs and cleanliness codes (e.g. 2:23-27); he spoke and acted in culturally “shameful” ways (e.g. 3:31-35); he cursed a fig tree for lacking fruit even though it was not the correct season for figs (11:13-14); the disciples—including the leaders of the early church—are frequently presented in an unfavorable light, often seeming dim-witted, obstinate and cowardly (e.g. 10:35-45; 14:37-40; 14:50); indeed Jesus was betrayed by an inner-circle disciple (14:43-46), while Peter himself is called “Satan” (8:32-33) and denies any association with Jesus at the crucial moment (14:66-72); and the empty tomb itself was discovered by women (16:1-8).

Some of these are easier to explain away than others (e.g. Jesus’ disregard of purity regulations could well be an interpolation reflecting later Christian practice), but others are virtually impossible to imagine as fabrications (e.g. that Jesus’ own family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’” [3:21]; a detail omitted from all the later gospels). In most of these cases, the tradition after Mark indicates a strong tendency to downplay or omit such details (an exception is the betrayal by Judas, which was subsequently played up), verifying their embarrassing nature. Taken together, the inclusion of such material strongly suggest an historical core to the Jesus tradition as preserved in Mark, not only making Jesus existence almost certain, but even providing a measure of confirmation for the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels as a whole.

Conclusion: Though individually the above arguments (which are by no means exhaustive) might be questioned, their combined force is considerable. They do not, of course, prove the New Testament accounts “inerrant” (nor do I believe that they are), but they do make the plausibility of a purely fictional Jesus extremely unlikely. Yet as they say, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and ultimately the near unanimity of New Testament scholars (from conservative to liberal) about the basic details of Jesus’ life—that he was an itinerant preacher who was crucified in the first third of the 1st C.—is not based on such arguments so much as the basic usefulness of the assumption. The alternatives offer no where near as much explanatory power, and depend on far too much speculation and skepticism. In contrast, the rise and shape of early Christianity and the New Testament simply make the most sense when viewed as a reaction to an historical Jesus. In every way, the early church evidences its profound debt to the unique personality, distinctive teaching, shameful death, and (purported) resurrection of Jesus.

How I Became a Christian Part III

Commenting on the last segment of my story, Hugh questioned why God would waste his time focusing on such “paltry” matters as a high schooler’s social life. I must admit that on the face of it, it does seem preposterous, like a king worrying about the petty concerns of a beggar. But that is precisely why Christians insist on God’s goodness and love because, preposterous as it may be, he does seem to take an interest even in such trivialities. If God is infinite as Christians claim, then he is in no way hampered by the time constraints that force us to limit our involvements, but that doesn’t change the loving and compassionate nature of the matter.

That said, if I am anything like typical, I suspect social matters are the most important to most teenagers. I know for a fact that my teen-aged self would have been more willing to be killed for my beliefs than to be thought uncool, and I don't think I was alone. For that matter, I'm not sure how much things have changed: how many of us wouldn't more readily accept a grand sacrifice than the small and daily sacrifices which are in fact far more important? Perhaps that is precisely why God does focus on such small matters in our lives, for he recognizes that fixing the world is not so much a matter of solving the “big” problems, but of changing us, making us into the kind of people who live selflessly in community and love. After all, history has constantly revealed the terror and violence that attend all attempts to enforce morality, even for society's own good. True justice can only be established on a person-by-person basis, through the free choices of individuals, and my own long experience with God confirms, for me at least, that this is how God does in fact choose to work.

Nevertheless, not every aspect of God’s role in my life can be reduced to such small matters. I could name many examples of God’s work at significant points in my life, but as this story is already growing long I’ll skip to the most important: The next fall, during my Junior year of high school, my dad was informed that his company needed him to move to a different office in Denver (several states away). As you might expect, I had no desire to leave my friends (and church) just a year and a half before finishing high school, especially considering how much I was enjoying my life there. In deference to my concerns (and likely his own as well), my dad went looking for options and found job opportunities at two start-up companies, one of which would have allowed us to stay where we were, and the other which would require moving, but only across the state. All three jobs (including the original) were roughly comparable in pay and responsibilities, and I was adamant that he take the one that didn’t require moving.

It wasn’t long, however, before that now familiar nudge began telling me something quite different. Though I had no additional information to suggest that it would be better to move, and outwardly I continued to insist that we ought to stay where we were, deep down I couldn’t shake the feeling that we actually needed to take the job across the state. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew, and I hated the idea. For weeks I held to my line that my dad should take the job nearby, knowing full well that this was a lie, until finally, with just three weeks to spare, I admitted the truth. I suspect that my parents were already planning on taking the job anyway (though they have never admitted this), but in respect of my wishes they had not done anything to pursue it. So when we moved, just three weeks later, the delay forced us to live in a rental house until we had time to buy one. It also meant much more abrupt goodbyes for all of us than it would have, had I not stalled for all those weeks.

Yet once again, when I did obey, I found that God knew what he was doing far better than I did. My dad was much happier with his new job. I ended up at a far better school than I had been at previously. My parents marriage, which had been in a very poor state, improved dramatically, as did my own with my brothers. We also found a new church that I not only liked as much as the previous, but that reinvigorated my parents’ own faith, which had (particularly for my dad) long since grown cold. And to top it all off, I met my future wife on the second day I was there.

In time, however, I discovered that the most important thing about the move was what it saved our family from. Within a year of our moving away, we learned the start-up for which my dad would have worked had we stayed had gone bankrupt. Worse, the group of friends my middle brother had been hanging out with before we moved had since taken a dark turn towards drug addiction and my brother, up to that point always the rebel of the family, would almost certainly have joined them had we stayed. On that score, it was probably my brother who most benefited from the move, for later that year one of his previous friends shot another and then killed himself, at a party that he may very well have attended had we stayed.

Nor was this the first time that our family had such a near-miss with tragedy. When I was in middle school, my dad’s company had once before tried to move us to Denver, and we actually visited and looked at houses in the Littleton area. That time, my dad took a different job nearby (though eventually the old company wooed him back), which postponed the move until, as I said, my Junior year. But my life might have been very different if he hadn’t. For it was only a few years later that the Columbine massacre occurred in the very school in Littleton that I would have attended.

I remember reading the newspaper the day of after the attack and being so angry at God that he would allow such a terrible thing to occur. It was only much later that I realized how close my own family had come to being there. Sometimes, I can now see, we are so eager to blame God for “failing to act” when people use their God-given free will to do terrible things, that we fail to consider the possibility that he has acted to limit the damage as much as he could without violating our freedom. As it turned out, when I got to college I discovered that one of my roommates had been there at Columbine, and was himself spared when the bomb under his table (miraculously?) failed to detonate. Perhaps God was there, even at Columbine, after all. In any case, I can now say with confidence that he has saved my family from far worse fates than the petty concerns of a self-conscious teenager.

Continued in Part IV

Quote - C.S. Lewis on Miracles

From his book, Miracles:

Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known. We have already seen that if you begin by ruling out the supernatural you will perceive no miracles. We must now add that you will equally perceive no miracles until you believe that nature works according to regular laws. If you have not yet noticed that the sun always rises in the East you will see nothing miraculous about his rising one morning in the West. (pg. 75)

Divine Invisibility

This was previously posted here.

One of the more common objections to theism concerns God’s “invisibility.” Many atheists insist that if God existed, we should expect his presence to be undeniably obvious. For instance, if God is all-powerful and wants us to believe in him, why not provide a steady stream of miracles, that we might see and believe?

There are many problems with this argument. One, as has often been noted, is that it would reduce God to a cosmic vending machine: Just enter the right prayer and—every time!—he'd have to oblige. But God is not a machine to be manipulated, but a person. Another problem is that miracles are always open to interpretation. No matter how improbable an event, its very improbability leaves it open to doubt. The atheist can always insist that even the most far fetched natural explanation is “infinitely more probable” than a miracle. In fact, Jesus himself highlighted this, saying: “If they do not believe Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

For sake of argument, however, let's assume this is mistaken. Let’s assume that if only God provided enough miracles (say one miraculous answer to prayer every week, for every person in the world) that would be enough to prove his existence. Is that really the kind of world we would want?

Many atheists claim that, if God exists, they just want him to prove it to them. Perhaps this is true of some of them, but I don’t think this makes up the majority. No, for many atheists the absence of God is something to be glad of. With no God, we are free to choose our destiny as we see fit (unless we’re not free, of course), whereas if he did exist, we’d have to submit to his authority. The existence of God, many claim, would forever reduce us to the status of children, unable to care for ourselves.

I do not say this in a derogatory manner, nor am I assuming that all atheists think this way, but many do, and it is to these that this argument is directed. The problem is that these two objections work against one another. For what would it accomplish, really, if God were to provide us with a constant stream of miracles? It might convince us of his presence (or perhaps we would simply dismiss it as another, rather odd, law of nature), but it would certainly reduce us to infants.

For if God were to bombard us with constant miracles, not only would he render the world completely unpredictable, but he would undermine our own freedom and responsibility. What motivation would we have to study or grow, if we knew God would solve our problems for us? What need would we have to advance or learn in such a world? For instance, why would anyone become a doctor, if they knew that God would cure every illness within a week? Why would anyone avoid getting sick or injured at all? How could we learn to take care of ourselves in any way, if God did it for us? Indeed, if he ever failed to do so, would we not complain of his inconsistency: “you perform miracles every day, how can you not take care of this as well”?

Occasional miracles are one thing—they can give evidence of God’s power, though only to those who look for them—but if God were to reveal himself as constantly and predictably as many atheists seem to demand, he would in fact be denying us the very thing these same atheists treasure: our freedom to live and learn for ourselves.

Quote - Chesterton on The Permanent Miracles

G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross:

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles.

Wendell Berry on Christianity and Creation

Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation":

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine - which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes. (in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, pg. 103)

Quote - Faith, Skepticism and Miracles

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (cited by Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew):

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.

Why I Am a Christian

For Carmen’s sake, here is a reworked version of a comment that appeared at the end of my last post:

If you compare the Bible with the myths of ancient Israel's neighbors, the differences are striking. Read Enuma Elish alongside Genesis 1; both describe creation in similar mytho-symbolic language, but the former is ridiculously elaborate and implies theological propositions that simply cannot be maintained, while the latter is simple and profound. Or read Gilgamesh alongside the biblical historical books; both include miracle stories, but while the first is dramatically exaggerated--turning its hero (the first king of Babylon) into a superhuman--the latter seem to go out of their way to emphasize the ordinariness of their heroes.

Though important, biblical miracle stories are surprisingly few and far between, compared to most ancient “histories” (including early non-biblical Jewish and Christian works). Further, the fact that so many embarrassing stories are retained in which central Jewish figures explicitly violate Jewish law, gives us good ground for placing higher epistemic value on these histories than those others.

There are problems with the text, to be sure (which is why I do not subscribe to plenary verbal inspiration), but they are too often exaggerated. Most supposed “contradictions” evaporate with a modicum of scrutiny, and few of those that remain have any impact on the central themes of the Bible.

The remarkable thing is not that there are scattered tensions, historical inaccuracies or exaggerations and unfalsifiable myths--the Bible was written in the language of the ancient world, after all--but that these diverse books, written over the course of at least 1000 years, present such a consistent and engaging historical and theological message at all. The Koran was written over a handful of decades by one man and can’t even get its theology, morality or history straight.

But all of that is window dressing. I don’t trust the Bible because its historical claims are beyond dispute (they aren’t) or because it contains no apparent errors (it does); I trust it because its consistent teachings about human nature and what it takes to live in community, the kind of world that we live in, the kind of God we have access to, and much more, are logically coherent and continually confirmed by my daily experience.

When the Bible says humanity is inherently prone to sin I don’t have to accept that on faith, I can see it for myself every day (it’s the modern claim that “humanity is basically good” that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny). When the Bible says there is healing and freedom in Christ, I don’t have to accept that blindly, I have experienced it myself and know many others who have as well. Ultimately, I trust this book above all others because I find that the harder I work to live in line with its teachings, the better a person I become and the more of God I experience. I would not be the person I am today if it were not for the Bible.

And what of the other religions? I have no reason to deny that they also express a great many truths as well, and I am happy to affirm them when they do. I don’t see any particular reason to claim that only Christians have ever experienced real miracles or revelation, even if not all such claims can be trusted. I don’t even have any a priori reason to deny that other gods exist or that my God has spoken to others (though since I trust the Bible, I must affirm that any such “gods” are secondary beings).

But I also see many aspects of the history and theology of other religions (and sometimes, other Christians) that are not consistent with my experience, or are down right incoherent (some of which I mentioned in a previous comment). Thus, I have no problem at all rejecting such claims where I see them. I don’t embrace “my particular brand” of Christianity because I think everyone else is wrong, but because it is as close to right as I have yet discovered.

But most importantly, I embrace Christianity over all other religions because the central claim of Christianity--God on a cross--makes all other religious claims pale in comparison. If the creator of the universe truly did take human form and die to bring us life, then nothing else could possibly be more important.

Some might object that such a claim is unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless, but that is where I must part ways with them. God on a cross might be unfalsifiable, but it is not meaningless. Rather, it is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened. In his definitive study on the subject, The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann insists that the cross is the beginning and end of all Christian theology, yet itself resists all interpretation: The cross is how I know that God is good, how I know what true humanity is, how I know what it means to live fully, how I know that the universe has not yet arrived at its eschatological goal, and how I know that one day it will. Some of these truths are open to a degree of falsification, others are not, but I have found that reality as a whole makes the most sense when viewed from the vantage point of the cross. That is why I am a Christian.

As someone once put it: “I believe in the cross as I believe in the sun; not because I can see it, but because by it I can see everything else.”

Divine Invisibility

One of the more common objections to Christianity concerns God’s “invisibility.” Many atheists insist that if God existed, we should expect his presence to be undeniably obvious. For instance, if God is all-powerful and wants us to believe in him, why not provide a steady stream of miracles, that we might see and believe?

There are many problems with this argument. One is simply that miracles are always open to interpretation. No matter how improbable an event, its very improbability makes it open to doubt. The atheist can always insist that even the most far fetched natural explanation is “infinitely more probable” than a miracle. Jesus himself highlighted this, saying: “If they do not believe Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

For sake of argument, however, let's assume this is mistaken. Let’s assume that if only God provided enough miracles (say one every week for every person in the world) that would be enough to prove his existence. Is that really the kind of world in which these atheists would want to live?

Many atheists claim that, if God exists, they just want him to prove it to them. Perhaps this is true of some of them – genuinely open-minded people who would be glad to find evidence for God – but I don’t think this makes up the majority of atheists. No, for most atheists the absence of God is something to be glad of. With no God, we are free to choose our destiny as we see fit (unless we’re not free, of course), whereas if he did exist, we’d have to submit to his authority. The existence of God, to many atheists, would forever reduce us to the status of children, unable to care for ourselves.

I do not say this in a derogatory manner, nor am I assuming that all atheists think this way, but many do, and it is to these that this argument is directed. The problem is that these two objections work against one another. For what would it accomplish, really, if God were to provide us with a constant stream of miracles? It might convince us of his presence (or perhaps we would simply dismiss it as another, rather odd, law of nature), but it would certainly reduce us to infants.

If God were to bombard us with constant miracles, what would be left for us to do? What motivation would we have to study or grow, what need would we have to advance or learn? For instance, why would anyone become a doctor, if they knew that God would cure every illness within a week? Why would anyone avoid getting sick or injured at all? How could we learn to take care of ourselves in any way, if God did it for us? Indeed, if he ever failed to do so, would we not complain: “you perform miracles every day, can you not take care of this as well”?

Occasional miracles are one thing – they can give evidence of God’s power, even if only to those who look for them – but if God were to reveal himself as constantly and predictably as many atheists demand, he would in fact be denying us the very thing these same atheists treasure: our freedom to live and learn for ourselves.