Why am I a Christian? read my conversation with an atheist last year:
Religion can be a bad thing, and it generally is. Religion is usually a bunch of rules on people’s lives that 1) they do NOT follow, and they end up hating religion because it is “mean” and “restricting” or 2) people DO follow and rise up with pride in themselves that they followed all the rules and they make themselves great. Christianity is much less about Religion than it is about the climax of history: the life of Jesus. There are countless things to say about the Bible itself, which could go into days of research and debate, but I’m going to assume its authority and perfection as a holy book. After all is said and done, over a period of over 1000 years, multiple authors have portrayed events with incredible unity throughout its different books, including prophecy of things hundreds of years in advance. The four gospels are real life accounts that are dated within 30-50 years of Jesus’ life, and historians have proved his existence, and so on. When we get down to understanding Christianity, we are talking about simply that: Christ. It all focuses on the person and life of Jesus. The Bible tells us in multiple occasions that he is God, sent as a man to come to earth to pay our debt to God, to die in place of all the sin and unrighteousness we caused on earth.
Implicit within this is the idea that the human race indeed needs a savior. If we step back and notice the world, we have great disagreements, wars, shameless murderers, pain, and suffering. We have people who claim their ideas are ‘right’ and others who say the same but act differently. I could touch on the philosophy, but for brevity let’s just say that crap goes on and nobody has great reasons to explain it. No matter how much money is poured into support efforts, particular political parties, causes, the environment, etc., the world’s problems will never be solved. And, if that doesn’t suck enough, we are all going to die. That’s not a very happy thing. We are then assuming that there is a God above that is powerful enough to control things and, ultimately, to “save” us as the Bible records. This is where things truly may go astray for non-believers that simply say there is no God because of science, inconsistency, mysteriousness, or what have you. Once again, to defend all of these arguments in detail would be ridiculous, but I’ll do my best shortly. First, science in no way disqualifies the existence of God; in many ways, it supports it—think how much “luck” would have to be involved for our universe to happen in such a way that the speeds worked correctly for a solar system to exist where planets orbited around a sun, and the third one was at the exact distance, exact tilt, and had the precise elements to contain an atmosphere, water, and presence of life (I think you get the point). Also, when we look at the mountains, the beauty of nature is one of awe; same goes for the idea of a human ‘soul’ separate from the mind capable of feeling; and the intricacy of the human body and it’s impressive abilities like the stomach, digestion, healing, and sexual pleasures and processes. Although none of these things proves the existence of God, they are explained with much more clarity to be made by a Creator on purpose. There is a nifty idea from C.S. Lewis that says something like “proving God to someone is like Hamlet trying to prove to his friends that Shakespeare exists.” After thinking about that for a little while, the difficulties soon become apparent. The conclusion is that the only way Hamlet could fully convince anyone within the play that there was a creator of it is if Shakespeare actually wrote himself into the storyline. God did just this: the Bible is a story about God, and it ultimately culminates with Jesus (God) entering the human story to proclaim witness of himself to the world. Christians believe that the hearts of men are inherently bad and without “salvation” will turn AWAY from God and his commands, which he gives us in love because he knows what is best (after all, he created us). Christians believe that Jesus took the wrath of God that all sinners deserve in exchange that we could be reconciled with God. All who believe this and continue to follow him in faith are offered eternal life in Heaven with him, not because he loves some and hates others, but because we ALL deserve death and he has been so loving as to save some. So I would say the Bible reads me more than any other book, it continues to proclaim greater truths about my life than I could think of, it maintains modern relevancy, and nobody in their right mind would make up a story where the hero is nailed violently to two pieces of wood in order to love all the people of the world. This stuff really happened, and it demands some response. Faith in Jesus is necessary to eternal life reconciled to him, the way God intended life to be lived. To deny this is to deny and repress the loving God that has made himself clear to us through the Bible, creation, and the words of people proclaiming the gospel. This is of utmost importance because it affects our eternal future and the way we are able to love and serve people now. It also gives our life a meaning that we otherwise would not have, and it changes the way many things are done than if I knew I would be dead and gone at age 90. ——————————————————- I’m afraid I myself will never be able to convince you of anything. I’m not that big and not that smart, and there are many answers I 1) do not currently have and 2) will never have. That’s right, I’ll never be able to fully defend myself, and, in respect, I submit that you won’t either. We each, to an extent, are taking some leap of faith to arrive at what we believe in. You are just coming more from the side of not believing something until it is scientifically proven, and I from the side of (and don’t take me for just an ignorant one of ‘blind faith’) someone who knows something, feels something, and experiences something that may not be able to be seen or “proven.” How much power over us would something have if it could be fully explained? I would have trouble claiming that a being described perfectly by books and formulas is actually something that is greater and smarter than me. The problem with only believing things by the scientific method is that the world has not always adopted these processes and there are things within the world that will never be explained or proven by this. As a timely example (I was reading this in a physics textbook last Spring), scientists admit to not knowing why the magnetic poles of the earth have switched over thousands of years, yet they still believe that it’s true based on geological records of ancient volcanic flows. There is no systematic explanation, but they believe it. Likewise, I cannot entirely prove to you a Creator God, but I can certainly point to you hundreds of things in this world that I would consider evidence. In addition, human emotions themselves have no concrete explanation. We study responses that trigger other connections through the brain and body, and the behaviors that follow. We come up with hindsight trends and then predict things in the future, but I’m not sure anyone has an answer for why we first feel guilty when we do something against our parents as kids, or what it is that makes the affection for a girl something greatly captivating. Simply saying everything evolved from a single cell isn’t confirmed 100% scientifically—it’s just the accepted explanation of many. [I have not studied this stuff extensively, so you can discredit “facts” that I am assuming if they do not check out.] The problem I see, though, is that there is not clear and frequent data for the evolution of humans. Archaeologists and anthropologists may have constructed best guesses for an evolutionary sequence, but I’m not sure that perfect data has been discovered to confirm the “chart” that is so often put out in science class. Regardless, here are my (yes, limited) views on the Bible as it relates to science and evolution. For one, I am in no way claiming that the Bible is a scientific historical record of the Earth or lineage. No one said it had to be. I believe that it highlights the necessary events and stories that point to the life of Jesus. It follows that there is disagreement whether the days in Genesis are literally 24-hours, how old the earth was when Adam and Eve were made, etc etc. But yes, I believe the whole Bible is true and “breathed out” by God. Thus, I believe in Adam and Eve, the depravity and weakness of man (yes, males), the stories of Noah, Jonah, and all the rest. I don’t think the Bible discredits science or vice versa. If a God can create the world, become born of a virgin, change chemical compounds of liquids, defy gravity, and rise from the dead, then I am sure that Jonah can survive three days in the belly of a great fish, life can continue after a great flood, etc. So my stance on evolution specifically is just that I see no way microevolution is impossible. I clearly acknowledge that changes in the body adapt over time to climate and other things, and the human mind can slightly change with environment. What I find no hard proof of, though, is how macroevolution can be possible, with thousands of species coming from a single organism. The man and woman were created for a specific purpose, equal but distinct, as the height of God’s creation, full of a soul that longs to worship something. Some fill this yearning for acceptance from others, some to bands and music, some to sex and pleasure, some to games and boredom. We all want to pour ourselves and time, our efforts, our devotion, into something—it’s the way we were wired. The problem is, we have drastically failed that to which this time, energy, and worship are given. Although the views even differ among Christians, I personally believe the Earth to be older rather than younger. I consider science to be great and reliable for explaining and advancing all kinds of things, and I think the 6000-year-old earth argument falls fairly quickly. That doesn’t mean the Bible is wrong, it just means that it didn’t bother to lay out the perfect history of the earth and its people. Again, nobody said it had to. There may be gaps in genealogies, and the Earth may well have been sitting for thousands of years, desolate, before any life or human beings existed. Regarding the Bible and fulfilling prophecy: Jesus couldn’t tell anyone where he would be born, he never told anyone to betray him, with how many pieces of silver, how to kill him, etc. These prophecies would be impossible to simply “fulfill” after-the-fact.
I, too, have trouble believing something with no “proof.” I think it highly important to do one’s proverbial “homework” and be able to defend something, but I don’t think the intellectual issue is the only one of importance here. With honesty, I can tell you that I was highly suspicious of all this not three years ago. I believed God to be an idea that was optional and for me, pointless to consider. I didn’t have a major problem with friends who believed in God, but I didn’t think he was important, passing the idea off as something “not for me.” It wasn’t until I learned more and was convicted heavily of truths about myself that I had denied for years, that things became clearer. There is an emotional aspect as well, and as ‘fake’ or ‘arbitrary’ as this may sound, I know down to my bones that I do not follow a lie. It doesn’t make any sense. I can feel it. Christianity is the only “religion” with a personal God that came to earth to experience everything that human beings do. He claimed to be God, was made fun of, denied, hated, and finally killed. He claimed to be the one man that had come for the reconciliation of all to God. He is the one the Bible had been talking about, and those who saw him and witnessed miracles still disobeyed and disbelieved. Our selfishness and denial continues to grow greater, but it’s only until we acknowledge our own sin—and cease to believe lies that we are good, worthy of glory, and can sustain ourselves—that we believe God is not just important but necessary to our everlasting joy.
Implicit within this is the idea that the human race indeed needs a savior. If we step back and notice the world, we have great disagreements, wars, shameless murderers, pain, and suffering. We have people who claim their ideas are ‘right’ and others who say the same but act differently. I could touch on the philosophy, but for brevity let’s just say that crap goes on and nobody has great reasons to explain it. No matter how much money is poured into support efforts, particular political parties, causes, the environment, etc., the world’s problems will never be solved. And, if that doesn’t suck enough, we are all going to die. That’s not a very happy thing. We are then assuming that there is a God above that is powerful enough to control things and, ultimately, to “save” us as the Bible records. This is where things truly may go astray for non-believers that simply say there is no God because of science, inconsistency, mysteriousness, or what have you. Once again, to defend all of these arguments in detail would be ridiculous, but I’ll do my best shortly. First, science in no way disqualifies the existence of God; in many ways, it supports it—think how much “luck” would have to be involved for our universe to happen in such a way that the speeds worked correctly for a solar system to exist where planets orbited around a sun, and the third one was at the exact distance, exact tilt, and had the precise elements to contain an atmosphere, water, and presence of life (I think you get the point). Also, when we look at the mountains, the beauty of nature is one of awe; same goes for the idea of a human ‘soul’ separate from the mind capable of feeling; and the intricacy of the human body and it’s impressive abilities like the stomach, digestion, healing, and sexual pleasures and processes. Although none of these things proves the existence of God, they are explained with much more clarity to be made by a Creator on purpose. There is a nifty idea from C.S. Lewis that says something like “proving God to someone is like Hamlet trying to prove to his friends that Shakespeare exists.” After thinking about that for a little while, the difficulties soon become apparent. The conclusion is that the only way Hamlet could fully convince anyone within the play that there was a creator of it is if Shakespeare actually wrote himself into the storyline. God did just this: the Bible is a story about God, and it ultimately culminates with Jesus (God) entering the human story to proclaim witness of himself to the world. Christians believe that the hearts of men are inherently bad and without “salvation” will turn AWAY from God and his commands, which he gives us in love because he knows what is best (after all, he created us). Christians believe that Jesus took the wrath of God that all sinners deserve in exchange that we could be reconciled with God. All who believe this and continue to follow him in faith are offered eternal life in Heaven with him, not because he loves some and hates others, but because we ALL deserve death and he has been so loving as to save some. So I would say the Bible reads me more than any other book, it continues to proclaim greater truths about my life than I could think of, it maintains modern relevancy, and nobody in their right mind would make up a story where the hero is nailed violently to two pieces of wood in order to love all the people of the world. This stuff really happened, and it demands some response. Faith in Jesus is necessary to eternal life reconciled to him, the way God intended life to be lived. To deny this is to deny and repress the loving God that has made himself clear to us through the Bible, creation, and the words of people proclaiming the gospel. This is of utmost importance because it affects our eternal future and the way we are able to love and serve people now. It also gives our life a meaning that we otherwise would not have, and it changes the way many things are done than if I knew I would be dead and gone at age 90. ——————————————————- I’m afraid I myself will never be able to convince you of anything. I’m not that big and not that smart, and there are many answers I 1) do not currently have and 2) will never have. That’s right, I’ll never be able to fully defend myself, and, in respect, I submit that you won’t either. We each, to an extent, are taking some leap of faith to arrive at what we believe in. You are just coming more from the side of not believing something until it is scientifically proven, and I from the side of (and don’t take me for just an ignorant one of ‘blind faith’) someone who knows something, feels something, and experiences something that may not be able to be seen or “proven.” How much power over us would something have if it could be fully explained? I would have trouble claiming that a being described perfectly by books and formulas is actually something that is greater and smarter than me. The problem with only believing things by the scientific method is that the world has not always adopted these processes and there are things within the world that will never be explained or proven by this. As a timely example (I was reading this in a physics textbook last Spring), scientists admit to not knowing why the magnetic poles of the earth have switched over thousands of years, yet they still believe that it’s true based on geological records of ancient volcanic flows. There is no systematic explanation, but they believe it. Likewise, I cannot entirely prove to you a Creator God, but I can certainly point to you hundreds of things in this world that I would consider evidence. In addition, human emotions themselves have no concrete explanation. We study responses that trigger other connections through the brain and body, and the behaviors that follow. We come up with hindsight trends and then predict things in the future, but I’m not sure anyone has an answer for why we first feel guilty when we do something against our parents as kids, or what it is that makes the affection for a girl something greatly captivating. Simply saying everything evolved from a single cell isn’t confirmed 100% scientifically—it’s just the accepted explanation of many. [I have not studied this stuff extensively, so you can discredit “facts” that I am assuming if they do not check out.] The problem I see, though, is that there is not clear and frequent data for the evolution of humans. Archaeologists and anthropologists may have constructed best guesses for an evolutionary sequence, but I’m not sure that perfect data has been discovered to confirm the “chart” that is so often put out in science class. Regardless, here are my (yes, limited) views on the Bible as it relates to science and evolution. For one, I am in no way claiming that the Bible is a scientific historical record of the Earth or lineage. No one said it had to be. I believe that it highlights the necessary events and stories that point to the life of Jesus. It follows that there is disagreement whether the days in Genesis are literally 24-hours, how old the earth was when Adam and Eve were made, etc etc. But yes, I believe the whole Bible is true and “breathed out” by God. Thus, I believe in Adam and Eve, the depravity and weakness of man (yes, males), the stories of Noah, Jonah, and all the rest. I don’t think the Bible discredits science or vice versa. If a God can create the world, become born of a virgin, change chemical compounds of liquids, defy gravity, and rise from the dead, then I am sure that Jonah can survive three days in the belly of a great fish, life can continue after a great flood, etc. So my stance on evolution specifically is just that I see no way microevolution is impossible. I clearly acknowledge that changes in the body adapt over time to climate and other things, and the human mind can slightly change with environment. What I find no hard proof of, though, is how macroevolution can be possible, with thousands of species coming from a single organism. The man and woman were created for a specific purpose, equal but distinct, as the height of God’s creation, full of a soul that longs to worship something. Some fill this yearning for acceptance from others, some to bands and music, some to sex and pleasure, some to games and boredom. We all want to pour ourselves and time, our efforts, our devotion, into something—it’s the way we were wired. The problem is, we have drastically failed that to which this time, energy, and worship are given. Although the views even differ among Christians, I personally believe the Earth to be older rather than younger. I consider science to be great and reliable for explaining and advancing all kinds of things, and I think the 6000-year-old earth argument falls fairly quickly. That doesn’t mean the Bible is wrong, it just means that it didn’t bother to lay out the perfect history of the earth and its people. Again, nobody said it had to. There may be gaps in genealogies, and the Earth may well have been sitting for thousands of years, desolate, before any life or human beings existed. Regarding the Bible and fulfilling prophecy: Jesus couldn’t tell anyone where he would be born, he never told anyone to betray him, with how many pieces of silver, how to kill him, etc. These prophecies would be impossible to simply “fulfill” after-the-fact.
I, too, have trouble believing something with no “proof.” I think it highly important to do one’s proverbial “homework” and be able to defend something, but I don’t think the intellectual issue is the only one of importance here. With honesty, I can tell you that I was highly suspicious of all this not three years ago. I believed God to be an idea that was optional and for me, pointless to consider. I didn’t have a major problem with friends who believed in God, but I didn’t think he was important, passing the idea off as something “not for me.” It wasn’t until I learned more and was convicted heavily of truths about myself that I had denied for years, that things became clearer. There is an emotional aspect as well, and as ‘fake’ or ‘arbitrary’ as this may sound, I know down to my bones that I do not follow a lie. It doesn’t make any sense. I can feel it. Christianity is the only “religion” with a personal God that came to earth to experience everything that human beings do. He claimed to be God, was made fun of, denied, hated, and finally killed. He claimed to be the one man that had come for the reconciliation of all to God. He is the one the Bible had been talking about, and those who saw him and witnessed miracles still disobeyed and disbelieved. Our selfishness and denial continues to grow greater, but it’s only until we acknowledge our own sin—and cease to believe lies that we are good, worthy of glory, and can sustain ourselves—that we believe God is not just important but necessary to our everlasting joy.
