ON DROWNING IN CREDULITY

In a recent light-hearted exchange with a stranger, presumably an atheist/agnostic, on Facebook, I was cautioned to not “drown in credulity” as a Christian. I assured him I had my floaties securely on my arms, particularly since the time of my deconstruction/reconstruction phase. He then asked me what reasons convinced me of the veracity of Christianity, particularly the Resurrection. I responded that I wanted to take my time with my answer, as it’s difficult to “reach back” and re-form a cumulative case all over again. So here’s that answer.

By the way, if you’re wondering what it means to “drown in credulity,” that’s understandable. In this context, the word “credulity” means a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true without proper evidence. In short, it means being gullible or overly faithful. And man, do I think many (if not most) Christians are this way. Let me explain.

PROPERLY BASIC BELIEFS, EH?

I have long said there’s at least two different kinds of Christians — those who believe because they have good reason to believe, and those who believe because they’ll believe just about anything, and they’re only Christians because Christianity got to them before any other major belief system did. The latter group is the class of Christian who I would agree are “drowning in credulity,” as it were. This is the kind of Christianity that largely (with some exceptions) characterized the first half of my life, even though I’d have been really hesitant to admit that. I was raised in a Christian home (a pastor and a missionary, no less) and was a Christian in my creeds and confessions all the way through.

Trouble is, that all fell apart when I began to encounter some really persuasive arguments against Christianity from the simple Ehrman-level stuff (how many angels were at the tomb?) to the more profound arguments of Hume and Russell. But more on that later. For now, though — can one really be a Christian if they’re only a Christian because they’re, well, gullible? I say yes, on the merits of something known as a Properly Basic Belief (PBB hereafter), made popular by Christian philosophers like Plantinga and Craig. In epistemology (the theory of knowledge), a PBB is a belief that is perfectly rational to hold without requiring any real arguments, evidence, or proof to back it up. For instance, you believe that you actually ate breakfast this morning and that the universe wasn’t just created 5 seconds ago with your memories pre-installed. You also believe that other people have minds, just like you. These are PBBs.

Critics (often atheists or agnostics, like my new friend) argue against this by raising an objection from absurdity, such as the “Great Pumpkin Objection.” They argue that if anyone can claim a belief is “properly basic” without evidence, then someone could claim that belief in a magical Great Pumpkin is properly basic. However, I believe this is defeated by the reality that such a Great Pumpkin is not (contra the Ontological Argument for the Maximally Great Being) a properly basic belief. There is a massive (a Great Pumpkin-sized, might one say?) difference between universal human experiences — such as experiencing the divine, trusting memory, or believing in the external world — and arbitrary and odd beliefs such as the Great Pumpkin.

BUT I DIGRESS

Though I hold that my beliefs in Christianity were, at least in part, PBBs (at least when it comes to general theism and fragments of what I later learned were arguments such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument or Leibniz’s Argument from Contingency), they were watered-down and borrowed beliefs, and they sure didn’t hold up when put under intense scrutiny. Just a brief perusal of parts of the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible was like a gut-punch that knocked the wind right out of me, and then listening to popular “New Atheists” such as the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris) nearly finished me off. I had no idea how exposed, infantile, and underdeveloped my Christian beliefs were.

Add to this that I was part of a denominational tradition that was characterized by its vilification of academia and scholarship, and held to some outlandish positions on everything from Bible translations (King James or bust!) to music styles (no drums!) — all of which seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time, given the misinformation and blatant untruths that guided my Christian formation — and I was a ticking time bomb, ready to deconstruct at a moment’s notice. And that’s essentially what happened on a wintery morning quite a few years ago now: After months and months of wrestling and struggling and rationalizing and shoring up one poor argument for Christianity after another, it all finally fell apart like a house of cards.

Then, over the next few years (while pastoring! I hid most of it well, but it was clear I was going through something), I began to seek for the truth, whatever that might mean. If that was atheism, I wanted in. If it was Roman Catholicism, then just call me a Roman Catholic. If it was some ascetic lifestyle on a mountain, then hand me some robes and shave my head. I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain: I just wanted to be right, even if that meant no longer being a Christian. And so the search, the quest, the journey began.

RUNNING TO THE END OF THE HIGHWAY

I was careful to not read only books that affirmed what I knew I secretly wanted to be true (Christianity) and instead read from non-Christians nearly exclusively, especially at first. I knew firsthand how powerful cognitive bias is, and wanted to be particularly careful not to coddle my mind right back into the same warm blanket of oblivion and ignorance that I’d just thrown off (or, to put it more accurately, had involuntarily ripped off of me). I didn’t encounter too many different arguments against theism or Christianity, as most of them ultimately came down to “if it’s true, I want more evidence.” And that’s totally fair — in our modernist mindset, we’re used to being able to shove something into a beaker, blast it with something, spin it in a centrifuge, and distill everything to its parts. If you live in the developed modern West as I do, you are an inhabitant of a very, very evidence-based society. It’s baked right into how we think, and it’s part of the very air we breathe: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” right?¹

So after acquainting myself with a whole range of arguments against God and Christianity in particular, some far more compelling than others, I considered my mind wide open to whatever reality in which I was going to have to live. If this life is all we have, if we’re all just “dancing to our own DNA,” per Dawkins, then I was going to happily step down from the pastorate (it was unpaid anyway) and make quite a few changes in my life. It wouldn’t have crushed me to change; after all, if Christianity isn’t true, then changing the way I live was only going to be a natural consequence of that reality. Freedom, really. But on the other hand, if Christianity was true, then that would have an effect on my life the other way: no longer would I be satisfied with the bottom-shelf, gullible, Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul-style tripe that so often characterizes Christianity. No, if this whole thing was real — if someone actually, literally died and then came back from the dead — this was going to mean a change in the other direction. Naturally.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

So then — given that you’re reading a blog written by a Christian, you already know on which side I landed. And I can almost hear it now: “Oh, big surprise: the Christian who deconstructed ended up rubber-banding right back to being even more of a Christian. Typical backfire effect of confirmation bias!” And I get it. I do. The influence and psychological staying power of ingrained identity is powerful. But for as much as I can tell, I approached this topic with about an open mind as is possible. I was genuinely, truly determined to follow the facts wherever they lead, and if the facts were inconclusive (shocker: they are, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation), I would take the shortest leap of faith. If that meant having a hard conversation with my wife about how she is still free to take the kids to church, but I wouldn’t be going anymore (I rehearsed this conversation in my mind a time or two), then so be it. I didn’t care what people thought of me: my desire to be right far outweighed my desire to be liked.

So then — after all of this ado, what are my reasons for remaining (re-becoming? Is that a thing? The Calvinist in me says “no,” but the Arminian in me says, “dunno…probably, I guess”) a Christian? Was it a dream? An experience? An emotional appeal from a friend? No, not hardly. Those things would have actually pushed me further away from being a Christian, as I would have pulled an Ebenezer Scrooge and blamed an “undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” I tend to be very skeptical when it comes to things like this. Probably unhelpfully so, but I suppose it served me well to some degree during my time of reconstruction.

So why, then? What were (and are) my reasons for believing in Theism, and then Christianity?

FIRST THINGS FIRST

First, theism. I’d argue that anyone arguing for theism has both an intuitive and rational head start; after all, the leap of faith required to believe in Aquinas’ First Way and First Cause and Aristotle’s Prime Mover is, to me, much shorter than to believe in, well, nothing. Now, to clarify, men like Carroll and Krauss have argued that, in a quantum vacuum containing quantum fields (like our universe can be arguably demonstrated to contain), the realities of space-time, mathematical constants, and physical laws are not “nothing” — in fact, they’re clearly something. But even if could be shown (and probably will be, to some degree) that the universe came from a quantum vacuum, this still doesn’t answer the ultimate question: Where did the quantum fields and the laws of physics come from in the first place? Not only can these not be infinitely regressive, but they cannot be self-creating. So I believe that it is far more logical to assert that these things came from a mind, not an absence of one. And I further think that this is a very PBB, by the way.

And so Carroll and Krauss end up going the way of Russell and instead of trying to actually answer the question of God, they simply ignore it, asserting that the universe, along with its mathematical laws, is ultimately a brute fact (and a somehow eternally regressive one, despite the laws of both time and thermodynamics). This is a cop-out to me. This simply asserts, against all evidence, experience, and intuition, that the universe doesn’t have an ultimate cause or an external creator; rather, it simply is, and looking for a deeper reason is, well, trying to apply the rules of everything we know to the rest of reality itself. As if that’s somehow not a good idea (facepalm).

Furthermore, we’re looking at a universe that, by all accounts, was carefully designed to support life, even if only on Earth (and yes, that actually does make us rather special). It went from chaotic and fluctuating to a state of isotropically homogeneous predictability, something that physicists are still scratching their heads about. Now, critics argue that this, just like any argument like it, is really just a “Puddle Argument.” This argument, posited by humorist Douglas Adams, goes like this: Imagine a conscious puddle of water waking up one morning and saying, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” In short, of course a puddle is going to think that the hole was made for him, when in reality he’s just conforming to the hole.

However, careful thinkers point out that the fundamental constants of nature, such as the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, or the cosmological constant, are tuned to a ridiculously precise degree. If any of these values were altered by even a hair’s breadth, atoms couldn’t form, stars couldn’t ignite, and life could never exist. So it should be clear that the universe’s fine-tuning isn’t like a hole that can change shape. If you alter the fundamental constants of physics, you don’t just get a different kind of universe where a different kind of life evolves. No, you get a universe where nothing can exist at all, one that collapses back into a singularity in two seconds, or a nightmarish hellscape where atoms fly apart and chemistry is impossible.

This is something like a Teleological Argument for God’s existence and involvement in Creation. And for what it’s worth, countless scientists and brilliant thinkers — not just the gullible Southerners you might like to mock — including most Nobel prize winners have been religious. The inventor of physics was a Christian, and his contemporary who invented calculus was, too. I could go on and on, but my goodness — the things I learned when I researched this stuff. It turns out that the most serious thinkers I encountered, from Blaise Pascal of yesterday to today’s Josh Rasmussen, were overt, clear theists.

Time fails me to expound on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Argument from Contingency, the Argument Against Infinitely Regressive Multiverses, the Ontological Argument, the brilliant EAAN (Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism), the Moral Argument, the Argument from Reason, the Argument from Beauty, and the Argument from Intentionality. But just know this: these arguments proved to be infinitely more intellectually formidable than the lazy, popular internet secularism that claims theism is just a primitive “God of the Gaps” myth. We’re well past that and are looking directly at a cumulative case of data that demands a logical verdict.

Ooh, A TRANSITION

That should make for a relatively clean switch over to Christianity. I do think that while the arguments for theism are more universal and involve more PBBs, I nonetheless am persuaded that Christianity, too, (while I have heard some really dumb arguments for it, maybe even more than there are against it) has some good arguments that cannot be rationally swept away if you’ve any shred of intellectual honesty. We’ve seen the likes of Bart Ehrman and Dan McClellan try this tactic, only to become quite discredited as it becomes increasingly obvious that they’re not actually addressing the evidence at all. Hand-waving — for Christians or non-Christians — does not an acceptable argument make. Nor do bare assertions, either.

So: Christianity. Why believe this, particularly the Resurrection? Isn’t this story just something that the Roman-era Jews made up about their failed prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, to comfort themselves in the face of persecution and death? In fact, hasn’t every religion basically been just an invention of men because we’re “afraid of the dark,” per Hawking? I don’t think that’s the case, and I want to explain why. Now, I certainly can’t make a wide, sweeping case for Christianity in just an afternoon of writing, but I’m happy to leave some recommended books written by non-weirdos that you could peruse if you’re interested. But here’s the tall and small of it.

For starters, I think that the accounts of the Gospels, by whomever or whenever they were written (that’s for another day), demand some degree of interaction and honest engagement. In fact, Gary Habermas, one of the foremost experts on the idea of the Resurrection of Christ, developed these twelve “minimal facts” that are completely verified by a massive wealth of early historical documentation and are virtually unanimously agreed upon by every serious historical scholar on the field, whether that scholar is a devout Christian, an orthodox Jew, or a staunch atheist.

• Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
• He was buried in a tomb.
• His death caused the disciples to despair and lose hope.
• The tomb was found empty just a few days later.
• The disciples had experiences they believed were literal appearances of the risen Jesus.
• The disciples were radically transformed (from cowards to bold proclaimers).
• This message was the very core of the early church’s preaching.
• The resurrection was publicly proclaimed in Jerusalem, right where Jesus was killed.
• The birth and growth of the Christian Church exploded as a result.
• Orthodox Jewish practices changed drastically (shifting the Sabbath to Sunday, altering views on animal sacrifice).
• James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, was converted by a post-resurrection experience.
• Saul of Tarsus (Paul), an active enemy of the church, was radically converted by an appearance.

As I said earlier, I believe these facts necessitate some sort of engagement. One cannot fairly hand-wave them away as hysteria, or — as some have tried and failed — “mass hallucinations.” How laughably stubborn, to concoct something as far-fetched as multiple mass hallucinations (which are medically impossible²) simply to avoid dealing with the facts presented above! You don’t have to believe in the Resurrection — just say, “yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird, huh?” But instead, what I found as I studied the works of many atheists and agnostics was a smorgasbord of conspiracy theories that were just as irrational as the Resurrection (maybe Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. Maybe he was brutally tortured, bled nearly to death, hung on a cross, had his legs broken, suffocated for a while, stay in the tomb for a while and walked out at a later time. This is the Swoon Theory, and it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds) itself!

See, for all of the lack of epistemological humility and academic rigor that I discovered on the Christian side, I found just as much of a void on the atheist/agnostic side, too. The false dichotomy of the Euthyphro Dilemma was presented like it was some sort of amazing mic drop, when it’s been satisfactorily answered for thousands of years now, just like its weaker cousin, the argument from suffering.³ The Argument from Divine Hiddenness is presented as some sort of one-stroke defeater, but it’s already addressed in the Bible itself! As I began to peel back the layers of most of the arguments against Christianity, I found that most weren’t really arguments based in anything except emotional objections to the improbable.

BUT IS IT REALLY THAT IMPROBABLE?

This is where the idea of prophecy, typology, and patterns come onto the scene. As I began to read through the Old Testament (not as some modern Ken Ham-style science textbook, but as the Ancient Jewish Meditation Literature it actually is) and the New Testament, I began to see the cleverly-placed and carefully designed patterns in Scripture that gradually persuaded me that the Bible is, in fact, a “unified story that leads to Jesus.”⁴ This took awhile, as I did tend to say, “that’s just coincidence” or “you could have shaped the tales about Jesus to fit this Old Testament story easily.” But over time, the evidence for some degree of divine premonition became more and more evident in the text. I began to believe that this Jesus really is the one who he said he was.

Add to this the radical improbability of Jesus not being the hero who came to wipe out the Romans like everyone thought he was. Instead of killing them, he died for them. This isn’t something humans would quickly make up, especially a bunch of Jews who wanted nothing more than to see Caesar’s head rotting away on a pole somewhere in Judea. No, the whole thing doesn’t jive unless Jesus really is who he said he was.

Add to this the radical life-change of people who have come to Jesus in repentance and faith — this one is more anecdotal, to be sure, but I have seen faith in Christ move people to change in ways that a 12-step program never could. Again, I know this is experiential, but it is so universal and significant that it bears mentioning. Yes, there’s foolish, cruel people who leave church on Sunday and head right to the restaurant to treat their servers like garbage. And yes, there’s more psychopaths masquerading as Christians than I’d like to admit. But I don’t think I would go as far as to say that most Christians are like this. Some, yes, and they may not actually even be Christians (they might just be wrapped up in a sort of cultural Christianity that’s nothing more than convenient moralism at best). But not all. Not most, I say.

THIS IS GETTING REALLY LONG

As I’ve been typing, I’ve been gradually realizing that an essay like this could keep going on forever — I’m clearly at risk of subjecting my poor readers to a hastily cobbled-together compendium of fragments of argumentation. So I want to bring this full circle, if I could. I don’t blame my acquaintance on Facebook one bit for seeing Christianity the way he sees it. He looks at a Western church landscape that is largely defined by bumper-sticker theology, emotional manipulation, and a downright terrifying anti-intellectualism that treats blind, gullible ignorance as a spiritual virtue. He sees a community that is, by every metric, doing exactly what this article’s title addresses: drowning in credulity. So from the outside looking in, he sees an intellectual tragedy, a punchline, a laughingstock. Or, as Karl Marx once said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

But what I am convinced my new friend does not yet realize is that the alternative to a gullible and mindless faith isn’t empty nihilism or sitting around waiting for science to tell us it was anyone but God. No, the alternative is a more historically-grounded, insightful, mature faith, fully divorced from the inanity and folly of what has come to characterize Christianity in the West. A Christianity that has been dragged not through the mud of politics and personalities, but through the fire of intense skepticism, stripped of its cultural baggage, and rebuilt piece by piece on historical, cosmic reality.

I didn’t remain a Christian because it was comfortable, or because I was afraid of the dark, or because I needed a psychological security blanket. And I sure didn’t remain a Christian because my impulses and emotions wanted me to; no, they pointed in another direction completely. Rather, I stayed a Christian because after looking at the staggering precision of the cosmos, the historic improbability of the alternatives to the Resurrection, the undeniable and otherwise-unexplainable explosion of the early church from once-cowering group of ragtag apprentices of Jesus, and so many other factors over just as many months and years, I realized that Christianity is the only framework that accounts for the world as it exists. And to me, it is by far the shortest leap of faith.

So not drowning in credulity. Standing on credibility.

1. Though with my apologies to Carl Sagan here, I confess I’m still not clear on why the evidence for something has to be great in magnitude simply because the claim is. If I were to say there’s a small go-kart on the street versus a very large monster truck, the evidence required for this assertion would be the same, would it not? ↩︎
2. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/4/519 ↩︎
3. To head David Bentley Hart on the issue: “The atheist who argues from worldly suffering, even crudely, against belief in God both benevolent and omnipotent is still someone whose moral expectations of God—and moral disappointments—have been shaped at the deepest level by the language of Christian faith.” ↩︎
4. Thanks, BibleProject. ↩︎