I've spent some time deconstructing other's people's ideas here. I figured it might be time to deconstruct my own.
This is not the rationale of why I *became* a Christian. I became a Christian as a teen, due to the example of another teen, a very admirable young lady who had her stuff together. Most teens don't have their stuff together, so her example stood out very significantly. It also
helped that she was clearly smarter than me (obnoxious comment: my IQ is pretty decent), so I was prepared to respect her and hear her out on any topic, includng religion. And so I did. But it was her kindness (we
call it agape these days) that did the trick for me.
But I'm an intellectual snob to the core. I was prepared to acknowledge the possibility of God (only fools demand a priori that He can't exist), but if the basis of Christianity could not be handled intellectually, coherently and consistantly, I would have rejected it. That's still true, by the way. Prove that Christianity is likely to be a sham, a lie or a delusion, and my
faith is dead. (Paul the apostle said the same thing) However, I don't believe this is too likely. People have spent their lives looking for a way to demonstrate Christianity false. It could be done by disproving any one of a handful of historical assertions. In 2,000 years, no one (including some of the world's brightest people) has come close; so I suspect that no one here is really informed enough or clever enough to come up with something new, something that has eluded the last 20 centuries of the world's greatest athesists. I could be wrong; surprise me if you can.
Atheism can make the parallel claim. Plenty of atheists have ended up a Christians, but nothing's come along to make them *all* bend the knee. Because of this, I don't believe argument alone can drag someone into or out of the kindgom of God. I do believe it can set the stage, though...
So let's start out with the non-religion stuff I believe. Axioms, if you will.
I believe that reality is "real." That is, I think that space and time are not fantasies and illusions, that time moves only forward, that what happens in space and time is generally subject to fixed physical laws (any exceptions I'll call supernatural events, or sometimes miracles for short), and that things derive significance from context. So I reject the "this is all someone else's dream" argument, as an axiom.
(Why? Because if it is someone's dream, then I do not truely exist and anything "I" conclude is meaningless, so there is no point in "my" building a system of belief. In that philosophy, nothing can be really proven true or false, so I might as well discard it and try something richer. If I'm wrong... absolutely no harm done, since I don't exist anyway.)
I also believe that things can exist that I don't know about and can't measure. That's a self-evident axiom. If you really want a substrate for it, I posit that there exists a pebble of some sort at the bottom of the Pacific. I have never seen it and I never will, but I'm reasonably
certain it and a lot of other pebbles of that sort do exist, though I will never be able to describe them or measure them. So I'm comfortable with the idea that not everything that exists is
apparent to me. I believe in the unknown, and maybe even in the unknowable.
From these two axioms I conclude that I'm not the omniscient God of reality. That's a useful first proof, because, quite honestly, sometimes I act as if I am, and that's a tendency that I *need* to be curb.
Thirdly, I believe in what we'll loosely call the scientific method. I believe that we can learn about reality by observing and measuring, by making guesses and testing them. That's actually a whopping big axiom. It implies a lot. It contains the idea that the universe is orderly enough and self-consistent enough that it can make *sense*. It means that being rational is possible and even useful.
If you leave out that third axiom, you can decide that the universe is real, and partially unknown, but also totally insane, with physical laws which were either sporadic in operation or so impossibly complex that you could never understand any of them. The sort of universe where you would be walking along and for no reason whatsoever, your toe would turn into a
whelk. It would be impossible to be sane in such a universe.)
That's my starting point. What good is it? Glad you asked.
My first observation is that science got the 2nd law of thermodynamics right. Disorder increases with time. Things fall apart and the center really *can't* hold, to quote the poem. The universe might be interesting at the moment, but it's heading towards a featureless soup of random disorder. The only exception to entropy that's immediately apparent is life itself,
and it's a limited exception - eventually living things die and get very disordered. Even more to the point, living things exist by vastly decreasing the order *around* them: it's a huge net loss of order. If you ever raised a toddler, you understand this. God help you, you do.
So this universe is a goner, eventually. Total disorder awaits, with no way out. More to the point, it isn't totally disordered yet, so it hasn't been here forever, either. Which means it has an origin. We measure, and volia, background radiation and so on provide decent evidence for that origin. We can even date the event, very roughly.
Which means we have our first proof of a supernatural event. Not supernatural in the sense of ghosts and gods, just in the pedantic sense of "outside of nature". The universe did not give birth to itself, as
things that don't exist can't actually do that, so however it formed, it happened outside of nature. Maybe there's a meta-nature that spins off new Universes once every three seconds. Maybe there's a God. Maybe a lot of things. We don't know, and we can't know from our own physical observations, because our observations are limited to space and time. About all we know is that, a few fematoseconds after birth, it was *really hot* around here. Hot and, curiously, not quite uniform. And that lead to galaxies, this world, and us.
But we do also know there was this supernatural (by definition) event. Maybe only one: but it happened and everything you can see is the proof. So whatever this universe of space and time is, it is not the whole story, and if you rabidly insist that it is, then you have to deny science's most reasonable evidence. Frankly, strict materialists are stuffed, and have been since the first radiotelescope picked up the first evidence of uniform cosmic background radiation: the aftereffect of a really wild birthday party.
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So much for proofs. Now for the speculations.
Welcome to Earth. During your stay, you'll observe that we have a reality, with fixed rules. We have evidence of a supernatural event (which might or might not imply a super-nature or a super-being). And we have intellect and will, at least we think we do.
Now with fixed physical laws, reality should be simple. Matter follow rules, so everything should be predictable. Completely predictable. Which means I should have been foreordained, by physical laws, to write exactly these sentences at exactly 9:16pm. There is no way out because
all matter, inclding my brain, is governed by fixed laws.
Except the laws keep certain secrets. If you dig deep enough you get Uncertainties. Some events appear random. Other events happen in ways that infallably conceal information from you: if you know the speed of a particle you *cannot* know its position, for example: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is unassailable. So while the universe might or might not be deterministic (you can't tell), the one thing it is not is utterly predictable, no matter how clever you are. You can't even model the rolling of a marble down a slope with perfect precision. True fortelling of distant future events is not possible within the natural universe.
The strange thing is, despite the fact that we have fixed laws (which should crush all possibility of free will and meaning out of the universe, since it's all pre-scripted by physics, right down to what thoughts you think), and despite the fact that we have quantum uncertainty (which could make sanity impossible, because *any* outcome is randomly possible), it turns out that neither is true. We
do think we have free will (if we don't, don't bother reading the rest of it because there's no useful information here - or anywhere, because everything is meaningless), and we
do think it's possible to be rational. There is
(apparently) just enough uncertainty in phsyical systems (like brains) to make free will possible, but not so much as to make sanity impossible.
How the hell did that happen? By chance? Planck's constant just happened to settle on a usable value during the Big Bang? Maybe. But it's awfully convenient, and bloody suspicious. It's almost as if the game was rigged to allow both rational consciousness and freedom to exist...
That's one point. The next is that humans have these really odd ideas. Like "fairness".
Now lots of people will tell you that evolution wrote ideas like fairness and mercy into our DNA, because it's better for the species. Sounds good. However, it doesn't work. Evolution doesn't care about a species. Not even slightly. Evolution optimizes one and only one behaviour, and that's successful reproduction. If a change occurs that gives you another shot at reproduction, evolution can favor it. Anything else is ignored, unless it gets in the way of reproduction and then it's ruthlessly weeded out.
Now certain social traits are definitely plusses for evolution. Consider a predator and two humans. If the humans cooperate, they have a much better chance of killing the predator, and then going on to score with their mates later that evening. If they don't cooperate, the predator can pick them off individually, and they don't get to reproduce anymore. For a species that is bright enough to comprehend cooperation, cooperation is a good evolutionary strategy.
Up to a point. Imagine the scene: two cooperating humans, Ugh and Thug, have just clobbered the viscious curly-clawed wombat. They lived, and they will get to reproduce. Yay!
Except Thug is not stupid, and he still has the sharp rock in his hand. And if he kills Ugh, he gets *all* the wombat meat, *and* he gets to mate, and if he's really unscrupulous he gets Ugh's mate, too. ("Ugh fall off cliff. There there, me help you get over it. Bend over.") Evolution is going to *absolutely adore* that outcome. Your really successful reproducer is one that lies, cheats and kills just enough to get lots of the mating opportunities of his group, with just enough unscrupulousness to keep his position intact and pass on his genes, without doing it so much that he imperils the whole group (or race.)
You can complain that this strategy reduces variability in a species because it kills off too many reproducers, some of whom, while not too swift about sharp rocks and turing their back on the wrong people, might have some other value to the species. Evolution should object. It doesn't. Not for humans. Low variability is only a problem in very small populations that are imperiled and can't outsmart their peril. That's when you need a lot of wide variation, in the hopes that one of the variants will have a way to unthinkingly survive the peril. But humans have evolved to use intellect to solve their perils - not extreme variability. You can kill a lot of humanity, and humanity comes bouncing back. We're not the prisoners of blind evolution anymore, we have other tricks.
So if evolution was going to write a code of behaviour into us, it should have written an especially complex mix of honesty and dishonesty, violence and fast-talking, cooperation and a sudden (if nasty) facility with sharp rocks.
Which, looking at the newspapers, is *exactly* what happened. What should not arise out of evolution is the Ten Commandments, or any other do-good-always moral law. There's no percentage in always being the good guy all the time: they usually finish last.
But all human races are *adamant* about things like do not murder, do not steal and even (in many cultures if not all) do not lie. Morality is universal or nearly so,
but it's very hard to account for in evolutionary terms alone. Evolution should be trying to squeeze a lot of what we call morality out.
The model of a successful evolutionary human is a dishonest politician, not Mother Teresa.So how did we invent it? How did it even *occur* to us? Fairness is not a natural concept: if a boulder falls on a marble, the boulder wins, every time. It's not fair to the marble, but that's life for you. Mercy is even worse. We didn't discover mercy by observing physical laws.
And yet, people think these moral elements are very important and even obvious, even when it means overruling the call of their own genes. And morality means overruling the call of genetics
quite often. The more you think about it, the less it seems
natural. And quite a number of modern philosophers (not the Christian ones, of course) have flat out said as much. Logical Positivism and Nihilism and their children have no interest in morality and want it abolished, as a fantasy.
That's another point. The third depends on history.
In my experience, if you torture someone, they will eventually tell you whatever it is you want to hear. Torture as a way of extracting information is very old and rather effective. If it has a flaw, it's that people will make up things to escape the torture, so sometimes you
end up with information plus invention. There are people who have resisted torture and kept some secret, but in every case they were motivated by a *very* strong belief in something more
important than their own existance. If someone drags out the thumbscrews and demands the name of your second girlfriend, you'll probably tell them before the tightening even starts. If they want to know something you learned, that will enable them to destroy the earth, you'll probably make a serious attempt to resist the torture. You might even succeed. Maybe.
The Romans had a problem. Christianity was starting to sweep in. The damned thing just wouldn't go away. Too many people in Judea has heard and seen too many things, there were still living eyewitnesses to unexplained "miracles", and too many people in the Roman empire were starting to buy into politically inconvenient beliefs. The problem was the blasted apostles. Some of them were still alive, and they were still claiming Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and they had seen him afterwards.
So they tracked down 3 or 4 of them (accounts vary) and tortured them until they would admitted that Jesus had not been resurrected after all. Roman torture was the real deal and this was being done out of political necessity; I don't think anyone was pulling any punches.
None of the apostles folded. They all died refusing to recant. If one had broken, Rome could have gotten a public "confession" and wrapped the whole thing up. No resurrection, no CHristianity. No Christianity, no problem.
So either the apostles really believed a dead Jesus had risen bodily from a sealed tomb, and that that truth dearly mattered - in other words they were not in on some sort of longstanding hoax - or the Romans had gotten curiously inept in extracting the "confessions" they needed.
I know which of these I find more probable.
Throwing Christians to the lions (or armed gladiators) was tried too, but it was a huge failure. People in the stands watched Christians kneel and die rather than recant. That wasn't how people thrown to lions were supposed to act. Romans left the stadiums wondering what could possibly drive people, many of them fellow Romans, to be willing to die. So more people began to dig into the recent history and accounts of Jesus - and for a cynical nation of relatively pragamtic and surprisingly rationalistic people, this was
Rome, remember - apparently a lot of them decided the story hung together too well to dismiss. As one modern writer put it, "for every one Christian they killed, two new ones were leaving the stadium. In the end they gave it up, and stuck to the more subtle course of disinformation." Which also failed. Against living eyewitnesses, it often does.
In my opinion, the lions were 30 years too late, anyway. The time to stop Christianity would have been the day after Pentecost. "Jesus of Nazereth?
Resurrected? Alive? Don't be a fool, we got the dead body right here. Come take a look!"
Both the Pharisees and Romans would have done this in a heartbeat. They weren't idiots and Jesus had already been some trouble alive; they didn't need more trouble from a reputed resurrection. But they didn't have the body. They had no idea where it had gone, despite a confirmed kill, a witnessed, sealed tomb and a bunch of Roman palace guards on watch. "The disciples stole it" they said - only to construct a pretty decent proof that they hadn't, by being unable to torture a confession out, even decades later...
No, none of that is proof. History is written accounts about what people did, not provable prepositions. The history around Jesus is strange and suggestive, there is no denying that, but even stranger are eerie parallels between what happened, and a bunch of Jewish writings, provably written
centuries before, as prophecy. Isaish 53 gives me chills to this day, as does Psalm 22. The arrow of time points in one direction only: but somehow Isaiah knew more than he should have about his coming Messiah and how it would all go down. So did David. People who want details on how these passages and others fit can email me; this is already too many pages long, and I don't propose to attempt to drag folk like doug s. through a bible study.
There are enough hints, in other words, to make God plausable to me. We live in a universe that we can't account for, which is oddly tuned to allow free consciousness to exist, and we run around with a moral sense that doesn't quite fit the evolutionary picture we know, but which nonetheless refuses to go away. There are events in history which, despite what I know about the impossiblity of time travel, were so adaquately described
before they happened, to give me startled pause. These events are all connected to a messenger who claimed to be speaking about and *for* a supernatural entity, and that entity makes very distinct claims, which account extremely well for the unaccountable prophecy we know from 2700 years ago, what we know of human nature, and the findings of physics today. To top it off, the messenger then vanished without a trace after being dead, despite very intense atempts to find the traces - after claiming that that's just what he was going to do.
I dunno... color me deeply suspicious. There's nothing in the natural universe that makes me demand that there
can't possibly something like God outside of it - but I see plenty of hints that there might be, and the hints don't strike me as all that subtle, or easy to dismiss.
Are there other ways out? Well, you could decide that some unknown meta-nature (which you have never seen and which apparently spawns universe(s) for no apparent reason) spawed something out of nothing, and we sprang out of a series of random, meaningless accidents; that morality really can arise out of a meaningless dance of atoms; that
meaning itself can arise from a meaningless dance of atoms (be sure to explain how to me); that either Isaiah and David and others were the world's luckiest guessers, or Jesus was the world's cleverest hoaxster (except for getting himself killed letting himself get spiked to boards and speared to death - that would have to rank as a dumb bit of hoax-design); and that the conviction of billions of people across history, that we're not alone really, is just superstition, or aliens, or widespread madness. (Atheists, after all, are a tiny minority, taken across history - most people have believed in something meta-human). You have to assume that apostles put up with torture and deprevation to promulgate a pointless (and if untrue, also quite evil) hoax about the most important question in humanity. You have to assume that a lot of people, myself included, who claim experiences of this God are either deluded to the point of madness, or are all lying to you.
I think that's a lot to swallow. Y'all believe what you want. I know what I came to believe - and why.
