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<\/a><\/div>\nThis post is part of the Ideological Turing Test Challenge<\/a>. Go to the tab above for an overview and remind yourself of the voting<\/a> and commenting guidelines<\/a>.<\/em> Christian doctrine has a lot of parts, so one really needs a sustained argument in several steps even to give the outline. However, I\u2019ll say this: my best reason for being a Christian is the sublime perfection of the ethics of the Gospels<\/em>. It\u2019s because of that, because the wisdom of His teachings so far surpasses all others, that I accept Christ\u2019s divinity and believe in His resurrection. The merely historical evidence ought to make atheists rather uneasy. The early Church had powerful enemies: why did none of them go to the tomb and dig up Jesus\u2019s bones to prove that He had not been resurrected? (Because they couldn\u2019t: He was risen.) Why did the apostles preach the Gospel so energetically\u2013 and presumably we must believe they did, else how did the Church expand so swiftly?\u2013 when it brought them trouble and persecution and death? Would someone really do that for a lie? Still, I would sooner believe in some inexplicable conspiracy than accept the stupendous claim that God became man, were it not for the sublimity of the Gospel teachings, which perfectly satisfy the conscience\u2019s thirst for moral truth.<\/p>\n What evidence or experience (if any) would cause you to stop believing in God?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ll split this question into two, and give two answers to the second. (1) What evidence would cause you to stop believing in God and become a scientific materialist<\/em>? (2) The question as it stands.<\/p>\n To (1), the answer is: nothing. Once one has seen through the fallacy of scientific materialism, there is no going back. It is a distinctively Judeo-Christian insight that the world exhibits law-like patternedness and self-regulating stability. This is an expression of God\u2019s faithfulness. Scientists borrow this truth as a warrant for their hard work and discipline. Scientific materialists turn it into an ideology. They forget that, as Hume showed, induction itself cannot be logically proved valid, and that, as Karl Popper showed, all scientific knowledge has a merely conjectural character. It is based, ultimately, on faith<\/em>: faith that the patterns will continue to hold, that the sun will rise tomorrow though it is perfectly conceivable that it will not. I support this kind of faith, generally, but one should not pretend that science offers any rational proof of the impossibility of miracles. It is science\u2019s method to assume them away, and for some purposes that\u2019s quite respectable, but it proves nothing. Moreover, there is no way to reduce subjective experience to material causes, to prove that the mind is merely the brain and that our thoughts and feelings are supervenient upon microphysical movements in our bodies. Scientific materialists like to appeal to Ockham\u2019s razor, the principle of not multiplying entities unnecessarily, of accepting the simplest explanation. That\u2019s generally a good rule of thumb, but in this case the appeal is illegitimate, for there is no simplest explanation on offer as an alternative to Christianity, since science, after all, hasn\u2019t explained everything. And it is not really even true that it\u2019s trajectory has been to explain more and more, so that we can extrapolate it will explain everything eventually. Its progress is decidedly uneven. It has illuminated physics and organic chemistry, but it has contributed almost nothing to our understanding of our own minds, of happiness or virtue or language; psychology and linguistics hardly even qualify as sciences (the phrase \u201chard sciences\u201d is helpful here in distinguishing sciences that studying deterministic phenomena from those that do not). Scientific materialism is groundless. It is dogma rather than reason. Worse, it is compelled to deny one of the plainest facts there is, a fact which, unlike scientific knowledge, is not mere conjecture based on induction but is founded on the unshakable basis of introspective certainty: free will. Scientific materialism must insist that free will is somehow a mirage or a delusion. Then it explains human nature with evolutionary hand-waving, offering shallow ad hoc explanations of what was conducive to fitness, without the least intention of testing them, which it could not do if it tried. Christians used to have a technical term for people who grab a simplification and cling to it as it forces them to deny the obvious and drains the meaning of life: heretics. Unfortunately the medieval popes abused the term, but if you use it in that older sense, it\u2019s a good summary of scientific materialism.<\/p>\n But now, what would make me disbelieve in God? First answer. Since this exercise is modeled on the Turing test, let me use that as a point of departure. A Turing test asks a person to interact with another human and a computer, and to try to tell which is which. The challenge is to design a computer that can successfully mimic a person. Now, there is a philosophical position, well-known though hardly anyone takes it, which would claim that the world has no people but only computers-that-can-pass-the-Turing-test. It is called solipsism<\/em>, and a solipsist would claim that he was the only person, i.e., the only conscious being: all the other hairless bipeds walking around and talking other than me would, by this hypothesis, be mere humanoid machines. Now, how do you know that solipsism is false? The something<\/em> that enables us to recognize other people (and that makes the ordinary Turing test so hard to pass) probably tends to be rather subtle and indefinable. If we said, \u201cI knew he was a person because he did x,\u201d the robot-makers would go to work on x and might soon learn to simulate it, and you would say, \u201cyes, but I knew he wasn\u2019t a robot because he did y,\u201d and you\u2019d still be uneasily aware that that might not be quite it, either. In the same way, the world bears witness in a thousand subtle ways that it is not a mere machine, that there is a Person, infinitely wise and good, working through it. \u201cHow manifold are your works, Lord, in wisdom hast Thou made them all\u201d (Psalm 104:24). My belief in God would wane inasmuch as this ceased to be the case, that is, inasmuch as the world started to seem merely mechanical and uninteresting, or uncanny and evil like a nightmare or a horror movie.<\/p>\n Second answer: sin. And here I\u2019d like to raise a subversive question: Is the set of people who say they believe in God the same as the set of people who really<\/em> believe in God? There are probably a lot of closet atheists, who stay in church \u201cfor the community\u201d or to teach their kids moral discipline, but are really quite consciously atheistic. There are probably others whose belief in God is mostly self-deceit. On the other hand, are there people who are nominally atheist but whose lives are suffused by the light of a glad faith in some pervasive and transcendent goodness in which they take delight and which they gladly serve? The intellectual artifact \u201cI believe in God\u201d is always in my mind, but my faith waxes and wanes, and it tends to be strongest when I am serving others. That is one of the meanings of \u201cGod is love,\u201d I think: in the practice of active love towards one\u2019s fellow man, one\u2019s faith in God and immortality is strengthened. \u201cThe book of life is brief \/ And once the page is read \/ All but love is dead \/ That is my belief,\u201d sings Don McLean. I think that expresses a powerful intuition. Let me be clear: the immortality of the soul is a truth we can derive from mere induction. We observe that our souls continue, as we observe that the sun rises every day, and so (assuming one has seen through materialism) we should expect it to continue. The question is whether this is good or bad. And without special grounds to hope for anything better, it seems bad. So much of what we take delight in is the gift of nature: sunlight and starlight, the sound of wind on the leaves, the murmur of a brook, crickets chirping in the night, ice cream, wine; and also, all our communication with our fellow men seems to be mediated through nature. What a horror to be deprived of that, to be left alone in the whirling, self-consuming, phantasmal realm of our thoughts! (That we may hope for heaven we believe only by God\u2019s promises, but that we must fear hell, our own reasons is sufficient for us to figure out.) Only in love do we come to know, first-hand, something stronger than death, and I think many atheists have known that first-hand, too, even if they do not know, as the Christians do, the true<\/em> way to articulate that.<\/p>\n
\nWhat is your best reason for being a Christian?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n