Drawing conclusions

Fact or fiction

I will repeat the question I posed in the first article: If we (Pete and I) hadn’t been exposed to Christianity at a young age, if we encountered it instead now, would we be convinced it is true?  What this really asks for is the objective evidence for Christianity.  These articles have explored this from every angle I could think of.  (I do wonder if people are going to skip right to this article to just get to the bottom line.  Not much of what follows will have any context if that is the case.)

There are two broad possibilities regarding Christianity.  It is either true or it is a fiction created by man.  What would a fiction look like?  Well, all one has to do is consider other religions that we know to be so (you can fill in your own blank here).  Here are some characteristics one would expect of its writings and followers:

• They would be limited by whatever knowledge was available at their time, perhaps containing ideas we now know to be wrong.

• They would reflect the morality of their time.

• Over enough time, teachings would not remain consistent, in part because of the prior two points.

• Stories would not be historically accurate.

• Claims of power and miracles would not be demonstrable.

• Predictions would be hit or miss, particularly regarding the end of the world.

Everything in my research was to find those things about Christianity that do not fit these characteristics.  Those things would be the evidence that it is true.

Being true has a wide spectrum of possibilities, though.  One extreme is that everything aside from prophetic symbolism would be literally true and absolutely correct.  And the prophecies would be fully correct too if their symbolism were understood.  The other extreme is that most of the supernatural stories are metaphorical, and that the writings were produced by men and are no more perfect than any other writings.  Nonetheless, they broadly capture essential truths, in particular about Jesus’ death and resurrection.  (In theory, there is one more step to go in that direction, that all of the supernatural elements are metaphorical, including the resurrection and even God.  Only the moral teachings would matter.  But at that point, it is no longer a religion, but rather a philosophy.)

As I moved through the different areas of research, I continued to eliminate possibilities on that spectrum.  If you’ve read all the preceding articles, it should be no surprise when I say I eliminated all the possibilities.  I found no evidence that broke the pattern of a fictional religion.

This is not what I set out to do nor what I expected.  Like a courtroom trial, any number of hypotheses can be considered, but one of them will fit the evidence the best.  I expected to find some evidence that supported Christianity and some that didn’t, things I wouldn’t like.  It was a matter of how much and what, not if.  But I cannot convince myself I found something just because that is what I wanted.

I do not want to be ambiguous about my conclusions, so let me be explicit.  I no longer have any reason to believe in Christianity, in any of its forms, so I no longer do.  Nor do I have any reason to believe any other religion either, because there is no evidence for modern miracles, regardless of religion.  I don’t see evidence for God, but I can’t say there isn’t one.  Maybe that makes me an agnostic.

Faith

I can hear the response already: I just need to have faith.  Perhaps.  But why?  If I am choosing to have faith in Christianity without any basis, why not something else?  Why not Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism?

Pascal’s wager

Pascal’s wager essentially states that it is much better to live as if God exists and be wrong than to live as if He does not and be wrong.  Because of the relative consequences, logically one should live as if God exists.

This argument is all well and good if there is only one possible way to live to please God.  But various forms of Christianity have different dictates, and other religions have other ways altogether.  There is no way to live that covers all the situations.  One cannot play it safe and meet the requirements of both Christianity and Islam, for example.  I still would need a basis to decide which belief system is more likely to be right.

Moderation

Some may ask why I didn’t just adopt a more moderate view of Christianity.  Instead of going through all this, why not just accept what I could and treat the rest as metaphorical?  Indeed, there is a very modern style of Christianity that many people hold, that seems to me to boil down to this:

• Much of the Bible is a reflection of the times it was written in and is not relevant today.

• Some of Jesus’ teachings are relevant though, particularly the Golden Rule.

• Most of the supernatural aspects of the Bible are meant to be understood metaphorically.

• However, the parts about Jesus’ resurrection and people going to heaven are not a metaphor.

• Good people go to heaven.

• The line that determines what is good enough is not clear.  But I know that I am safely above that line, as are most of my friends and family.  Hitler is well below the line.

The result is definitely something that would be easy enough to follow.  One rarely, if ever, has to take any stance that stands out as weird or deny oneself from what most everyone else is doing.  In practical terms, it is basically the same as a non-Christian life, just with fire insurance.

There is one massive fly in the ointment, however.  If 95% of what the Bible says is not to be taken at face value for one reason or another, how do we know that last bit about going to heaven is?  Me, I would not be able to just accept that part without some evidence.  And once one begins investigating that, it ripples outward to the rest of the Bible.  Jesus and Christianity did not occur in a vacuum, but builds on what came before it.

In the end, though this moderate view works for many, it wouldn’t work for me.

Why do this?

At any point in this, I could have stopped.  Once I reached the end of my research, I could have kept it all to myself.  There are many people that actually find themselves in the same place I am, but they just don’t say anything because they don’t want to deal with the fallout.  But that is not me though.  I am not going to pretend to be something I am not, and I want my friends to know where I am at in life.  I am not naively doing this, however.  As far as I am concerned, my friends are still my friends, but I know there will be fallout.  I just don’t know how extensive it will be.

Another reason is the admittedly dim hope that someone will point out something I have missed.

This was also cathartic.  I had to work through years of belief and justifications as I was wrestling with this.  On some level it was a relief to resolve some long-standing puzzles and tensions.

There is also an element of penance in this.  After spending years advancing the Christian cause in my own small way, encouraging others in their Christian belief, it seems right that I would provide a counterpoint.  Maybe some people will at least give some serious consideration as to why they believe what they do.

Slander

I have no doubt that what I’ve written will be unsettling to some Christians.  And I know that the reflexive response for some will be to attack me in order to make peace with their theology.  I am going to try and head off the two main attacks, but I also suspect it might not matter.  If these following views are the only way you can make peace with any of this, so be it, but keep it to yourself.  I have no desire to hear it.

Never saved

The “once saved, always saved” school of thought tends to have one way of explaining people like me: I must have actually never been saved.  This is Must Be True thinking in the extreme.  Because their theology cannot recognize that someone who has embraced Christianity would then reject it, the only way they can rationalize the situation is to cast that person as a fraud.  This view breaks down into two possibilities, both insulting.

One is that this was intentional on my part.  I stood to gain nothing from this, so I expect this is not the way people will run with this.  It is not like I was making money as a faith healer or something.

The other is that this was unintentional.  Though I went to church and whatnot, I never really, truly, deep down believed.  I thought I believed, but I was only going through the motions.  Anyone who knows me well, though, should know that I have lived my life consistently to the best of my ability.  I am by no means perfect, but in all areas of my life I have made choices consistent with my faith, even if it cost me.  Socially, to be sure, but time and money too.  So my only response here (taken from something Chuck Smith said, actually) to someone who would make this accusation is that, after all this, if it can turn out that my faith is not genuine and I was therefore never saved, how do you know your faith won’t turn out to be not genuine?  “Not me; I really, truly know that I know that I know.”  Yeah, so did I.

Sin

I would hope that it is clear that I made a genuine and thorough examination of Christianity.  My goal was to anchor my faith, not wreck it.  Nonetheless, some people cannot grasp that anyone would reject Christianity on its own merits, so they have to question that person’s motivations.  Perhaps I set out to find reasons not to believe because  I wanted to be justified in leaving Christianity because I got tired of walking the straight and narrow.  In short, I wanted to sin.

First off, let me say there is no followup bombshell waiting, like I secretly have a gay lover or have been visiting prostitutes for years or something.  My life speaks for itself.  That aside, this whole idea is absurd.  Perhaps someone who didn’t want to change their life would not accept Christianity in the first place on that basis.  Perhaps.  But having lived with Christianity for years and years is altogether different.  Consider the peace and joy that comes from knowing that life will go on forever, in a place vastly better than this one, with many of my friends and family there too.  Now imagine how it feels to have that all removed.  What sin could possibly be worth that?  Not to mention my concrete is pretty well set at this point.  I’m 51 years old, having lived as a Christian since a teenager.  It is not like I am going to start hitting the clubs now.

Realistically, if sin was my motivation here, I would just do what many other Christians do.  Go ahead and sin, making excuses for it instead of throwing away my entire belief system and potentially wrecking my social life in the process.

Late in the game

One might ask why it took me so long to figure this out.  If it is so clear to me now that Christianity isn’t true, why didn’t I see it a lot sooner?

It all comes down to axioms.  Every system of thought, be it philosophy or mathematics, has to have a starting set of assumptions that are just taken to be true.  For example, one of the axioms in math is that a + b is the same as b + a.  Math builds on those axioms to then rigorously prove everything else found in math.  If you start with different axioms, you will end up with a different system.  There are indeed other systems of math used by academics that do not behave like the math that most people know.

And so it goes with philosophy and religion.  If I take as axiomatic that God exists and the Bible is His inerrant communication to us, then I can build an entire worldview from that.  Even if that worldview conflicts with what I see around me, it must be correct, because it has been built up from those unquestioned, absolute starting points.

It is no coincidence that most people’s religious beliefs as an adult are dictated by whatever religious beliefs they were raised with.  Children in their formative years are taught things that they don’t have the experience to question.  Once those axioms are internalized as a youth, it can take a long time before someone questions them as an adult, if ever.

There are, of course, people that do accept religion as an adult.  But many times it is people coming back to something they had been exposed to previously.  The reality is that most people do not change their religions.  This study is dense, but Table 3 is the big takeaway.  In most countries, the conversion percent is in the low single digits.  The US has one of the highest percentages, but even that is somewhere between 12 and 16 percent.

For the people that do approach Christianity for the first time as an adult, church certainly doesn’t hit them with the hard stuff right away.  In my experience, people are told about heaven and the saving grace of Jesus.  It is all very hopeful and easy.  It is not until later, sometimes much later, that a person starts encountering the hard stuff.  But by then, the foundation has been laid, the axioms accepted, and they learn how to reconcile those things, usually from the people that have been there longer.

Honestly, if not for the last couple bizarre years, I probably would have never questioned my assumptions.  But once the axioms can no longer be accepted, it is like pulling out the bottom pieces in Jenga.  It all comes down.

What now

I don’t know.  Wait to see what the fallout is I guess.  I have researched all I can, that much I know.  But I am certainly willing to talk with any of my friends that want to discuss any of this.  Beyond that, it is too soon to know or really consider in any depth what my life will look like now.

So that is it for my articles, but there is one from Pete that summarizes his take on all of this.

Next article: Pete's conclusions