Reason For The Hope In Me
by Tommy Karlas
..and always be ready to give a defense to
everyone who asks you a reason for
the hope that is in you,
with meekness and fear
- 1Peter 3:15
Just as the title of this paper states above, I am going to attempt to give some thoughts I've had lately about defending the Christian belief in God. I'm going to start by suggesting an idea that says when we, as Christians, talk about our faith, that we, in a way, should learn how to be bi-lingual. That is to say when we are talking to people who share our belief we can talk in terms of revelation or appealing to scripture or theology, but when we are talking to those who don't share our religious assumptions, we would talk in terms of reason. In other words we don't just say we believe it cause the Bible says so because they may not assume the Bible to be a holy, revelation from God. So this is where reason might be helpful. Reason is the shared platform you would see in a university or political debate on these kinds of issues.
So we might want to consider how to defend our belief in God using reason, logic, and skepticism. I would even suggest that we also have science, history, and common sense at our disposal as well. It is true that whether using reason or science or anything else, we could never get all the way to proof. In a way you can never prove that God exists the same way you can't prove He doesn't. But I think you can get to a point that shows belief in God is very reasonable and maybe even show that it takes more faith to be an atheist than a believer. But whether you believe in God or not, I think it's safe to say that both positions are of faith. Faith, or belief, is different from knowledge. The Ancient Greek word used in the New Testament for belief was often used in Ancient Greek writing as trust. Contrary to the misconception that faith is without reason, reason if very much a part of faith. So in a way we can only know something up to a point at which belief, or trust, gets us the rest of the way there.
Before I start with my reasons why I believe there is a God and later why I believe He is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, I first just want to say something briefly about why we should be ready to defend our belief in God at all. First, it is well researched that the fastest growing religion around the world is, by far, Christianity. Islam is a distant second but while it is second it is largely growing merely through being passed down and in many cases enforced. Christianity is often passed down paternally as well, but growing even more so at an incredible rate in other countries through conversion.
While Christianity is on the rise (mostly in other countries), atheism (the belief in no God) and agnosticism (not sure or don't know) is rising at a rate faster than ever before in history, especially in our country.
We are witnessing in our time a huge falling away from the faith once delivered to the saints (I refer you to any PEW research and polling for specifics). One reason, I would dare to say, is that many of our universities (especially the ivy league ones that were built by Christians and founded on Christian principles) are teeming with professors teaching that only backwood, unsophisticated idiots would believe in a 2000 year-old "desert god," to rebellious teenagers looking for any good reason to feel unaccountable for the illicit behavior that so often comes at that age. Many professors think its their job to deprogram all the nonsense their parents taught them, if they taught them anything at all. There is a big percentage of those kids who come back to Christianity later in life. I would also say that there is a large portion of people who become very disenchanted with organized religion (sometimes for good reason) and end up slowly pulling away. But often enough people can be overly cynical about God's existence because, in our time, cynicism is equated with being, or seeming, cultured and sophisticated.
We could continue to speculate why people stop believing in God and I will address some common and age-old questions in my argument for God's existence. But for now I just want to say this: For all the different reasons one may give for not believing in God, there are only two kinds, or extremes, of non-believers in my experience. The first is the kind of skeptic who genuinely seeks to know the truth just for the truth's sake and comes to the conclusion that it doesn't seem likely there is a God; and the second kind of unbeliever is one who, no matter what the truth is or what evidence is in front of them, simply does not want to believe in God. The latter (which are the more militant atheists I'm rebutting in this paper) often not only doesn't believe in God but thinks He is a cruel, unjust, megalomaniacal tyrant, as has been said by the best-selling author of "The God-Delusion," Richard Dawkins. He goes on in his book to say how in the name of science there is no God and yet how cruel He is, in the most hateful manner. His book could be summed up, or even renamed, "There Is No God And I Hate Him." In the end he sounds very little like a scientist and more like a wounded theist.
All that to say, I want to not only know how to articulate my reason for believing in the incredible, awesome, loving God to the genuine seeker, or skeptic who has real questions, but also to defend my belief and counter the hostile naysayers that are becoming ever more prevalent in our secular society. There are some really interesting university and public debates you can watch online about this. Mostly it's the "four horseman of the new atheism" as they call them which are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris ("The End Of Faith"), Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"). These guys are major journalists and authors who have a big microphone and a hateful disposition toward Christians and want them gone. For them the battle isn't to just keep Church and State separate anymore. They want Christianity obliterated, as well as all other religions, from the face of the Earth. You can see them debate great contemporary Christian scholars and scientists like Dinesh D'Souza, John Lennox, N.T. Wright, and Ian Hutchinson on YouTube.
Regardless if you want to see what's being debated on the public platform and take part or just want to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you on a personal level, why not try to be clear about what and why you believe? Here are some of the reasons for the hope that is in me.
In my early twenties when I first moved to Nashville, even though I was very lucky to get so much going as quickly as I did professionally, I still found myself going through what I consider to be similar to a mid-life crisis. Nashville wasn't always the perfect paradise of reasonable, fair-minded, artistic people I thought it would be and often was very cold and petty. I would eventually come to love and appreciate the good parts, and people, of this unique town, but not before I found myself in a deep and dark depression where I questioned every belief about life I had taken for granted up until then. For many months I was convinced that there was no God or meaning to life. It was the hardest time of my life but it started a journey to try to find the truth about reality and my existence, whether it was comforting or not. Sounds a little self-absorbed, I admit, but what could matter more than if there was a God or not.
I was raised Catholic but growing up often went to Protestant churches with my friends and girlfriend. I always had faith in God up until Nashville, but quite honestly I was a luke-warm Christian; meaning God was just another small of many aspects of my life. When I started my "quest for truth," someone lent me a copy of the only professional recording of C.S. Lewis's voice in existence of him delivering a BBC radio broadcast during WWII called "The Four Loves." C.S. Lewis was a former atheist himself. It was life changing. I had never heard someone speak about Christianity in such an accessible, clear and yet original way. That led me immediately to his classic which has changed many peoples lives, "Mere Christianity." He basically starts the book getting you from atheism to deism and then finally to the very fundamental, agreed across the board, bare necessities of what Christianity is. The first big question that he helped me ask is if there is such a thing as Objective Right and Wrong, or Good and Evil. This is where I want to start.
Are right and wrong, or good and bad, subjective or objective ideas? In other words, are good and bad just something that differs from person to person, or are right and wrong universally true; independent of any particular person's own selfish needs or beliefs? The majority of people after a minute or two of thinking about this will answer that good and bad are undoubtably objective. If there are some that disagree, or don't know, this is where history comes in because if you study all the different religious beliefs in the world throughout time as much as possible, you find something somewhat surprising. You find that for all the cultural and societal differences, that most of the big beliefs are remarkably the same. C.S. Lewis and others argue this better than I do but I suggest "Mere Christianity" if you're still on the fence. He talks about how we all have this sense, or standard, of right and wrong that we hold ourselves and other people up to and that nobody, including ourselves, actually lives up to it. We all have this strong idea of how things ought to be that is very much different from the way things are.
Or think of it this way. Some atheists think that Christians claim to get there morality from the Bible but this is just not so. None of us were reading the Ten Commandments for the first time and said to ourselves "Holy cow! Stealing is wrong? Murdering and lying are wrong? I didn't know that." No, we knew that already because we have something called a conscience. What Adam Smith calls the "impartial spectator." It's that voice inside of our heads, which most humans have, that tells us regardless of how much we want to do something, we shouldn't. Or visa versa. Of course there are people who don't have a conscience: They're called sociopaths (or psychopaths). If someone goes years ignoring their conscience, eventually it will become dull and ineffective. On the flip side, the more you listen to it, the more it will demand of you.
So conceding that there is a Universal Right and Wrong, how do you explain where it came from? If all life is just a result of time plus matter plus chance, then right and wrong would be simply subjective for each person, and not universal. But how could accidentally created beings come up with something infinitely greater than themselves: Objective Morality? So if there is an Objective Moral Law, then there must be a Moral Law giver....God. (See Lewis, Francis Collins, William Lane Craig for more on this.)
Next let's deal with the age-old question of evil or suffering. This question has been around as long as a belief in God. How could there be an all-good and all-powerful God when there is so much evil and suffering in the world? I'll be the first to say that there is no simple or easy answer for this. I think anybody who has ever experienced a serious bereavement or injustice has felt this sense of disappointment, or doubt, in God. Even Christ right before His death on the cross cried out "My God, My God. Why have You forsaken Me?" He was actually repeating King David's own words from the psalm which was in part a fulfillment of prophesy and in part, obviously, how He really felt.
The best way I know how to make sense of evil and suffering is free will. Think about it. The only other kind of world God could have created that would have been perfect is a world full of automatons, not free beings. God thought our free will more important than a perfect world because that's the only kind of world where our choices would, or could, mean anything. And if we're free to choose to do good, then we are free to choose to do bad. And just like the Bible shows, a free world leads to a fallen world where free beings commit the most heinous acts one could imagine. Just because God allows suffering does not mean He is the cause. Besides, if God stepped in and fixed everything we did wrong, how would we ever learn to do right. Suffering is a tough question for believer and non-believer alike. You also can't deny there is evil in the world. But where do the many atheists who ask this question get their idea of Evil from? Where do they get this standard or moral absolute from? Doesn't wrong in a materialistic, or naturalistic worldview, just really mean not right for them or wrong in their opinion?
Like I said this doesn't easily answer the question but I think it is a reasonable attempt to understand it. Contrary to post-modern thought, our knowledge is very limited as human beings, but that's not to say that God isn't working everything toward our ultimate good. For now we only see in part and through a glass-darkly, as St. Paul says. We must keep our faith in God, and His goodness, even through the most testing times which we will all have. For St. Paul also says that suffering produces perseverance, and to perseverance character, and to character hope. Thus suffering is another reason for the hope in me.
Next I want to turn to a subject that has especially interested me: Science. (Disclaimer: Feel free to skim or skip the science stuff if it's not something that particularly interests you) There are some atheists today, who are also scientists, that will say "science proves there is no God." In fact, there is a whole sub-culture of people out there who hear, or read scientists make this statement and believe it before the scientists even qualify the statement, which they never do. They don't have to qualify it for those people out there who don't want to believe in God. They just take those six words and repeat them until they become a part of pop-science.
While many scientists are atheists, only a select few popular atheist scientists out there claim that there disbelief in God is because of their science. Can science really answer those kinds of questions? An MIT physicist, Ian Hutchinson in his book "Monopolizing Knowledge" argues that while science is hugely important, it is limited to it's particular kind of knowledge. He calls this claim that science can answer everything "scientism," and shows how it is not only misleading about the issue of God's existence, but it is also damaging to science itself. Like someone once said, when it comes to the big questions that we all ask like: why are we here? what is our purpose? where are we going? the scientific answer to these three question are not a clue, not a clue, and not a clue. It's not the right tool set for those questions. That's where you need things like philosophy, religion, and reason which deal with the transcendent, not the materialistic.
Science is not contrary to religion, or against it as some would have you believe. It is complementary to it. It cannot prove there is no God just as it can't prove there is one. In fact, so many of the people that built up science believed in God like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. They started from their theistic belief and presumption that the universe was rational because it had a Creator. Why would we expect there to be any intelligence or order in nature from a purely materialistic view point? And in fact, many scientists who started out as atheists have come to believe in God precisely because of science, not in spite of it. One of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, later in life came to believe in God because of the incredible design and sophistication in a strain of DNA. Even Bill Gates said that "DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created." It has it's own language in a four letter alphabet containing 3.5 billion bits of information in exactly the right order. Someone once said that the chances of the first cell (which DNA is in) forming just by chance is like an entire volume of encyclopedias forming out of an explosion of a printing press.
But let's go back further to the beginning of creation and see what science has had to say about it. Up until a few decades ago, it was universally believed in the scientific community that the universe was eternally expanding and contracting and that it had no beginning and always existed. It was called the "steady-state universe." This gave sway to the atheistic position that the universe didn't have a beginning like the Bible said, therefore there is no God.
But it has been discovered since, and universally agreed upon in the scientific community, that the universe did have a beginning, also known as the Big Bang. Basically it shows that all of matter, space, and even time had a finite beginning around 14 billion years ago called the singularity, at which point it has been expanding ever since. Many atheists, who were also scientists, fought this until it had been proven practically undeniable. Why would they fight it so long if they were merely interested in the truth? Though the Bible is not a scientific document, science has proved what the Bible has said for over 3000 years; that the universe (all of space, matter, and time) had a beginning. The Big Bang also, for the first time in scientific history supports the biblical notion that time was created because Einstein showed us that space and time are actually one thing. Someone once put it this way: It's like there have been all these scientists going up and around this mountain only to get to the top and find a group of theologians that have been sitting there for centuries.
There is a logical argument now too for a Designer that comes from the Big Bang. We know that everything that began existing has a cause and we know that the universe exists and therefore the universe has a cause. We know that all of nature was created in the Big Bang (all matter, time, and space). So the cause of the universe would have to be a non-natural, or supernatural, source. It would have to be an eternal, or unmoved, first mover. Or think of it this way: can something come from nothing? No. That statement is illogical. So while the few atheist scientists might try to say that science refutes God, at the peril of science, they still have no good alternative explanation of how the universe, let alone life, came from nothing.
So here we are. All of space, time, and matter had a finite beginning 14 billion years ago. Some Christians out there would have a problem with this statement, and in fact a large number of Christians still believe the universe is only 6,000 years old. I think many Christians feel they have to believe it because their faith hinges on a very literal reading of the creation story in Genesis (God creating everything in six days). But just as St. Augustine said, all the way back in the fourth century AD, we must be very careful about that which we hang the hat of our faith on. Even Augustine back then believed that the creation story was not meant to be interpreted as literally happening in six days. In fact, the hebrew word used for "day" was mostly used to describe a period of time not 24 hours.
The Bible is a massive and diverse piece of literature and each book and verse must be read in context and in the way the authors intended it to be. To me, that is the most literal way anything can be read. The creation story in the Book of Genesis is not to be read as scientific but as allegorical. That doesn't mean God didn't really create everything. After all, allegory is an abstraction, but it still points to a concrete reality. Once they start with the first man, Adam, they are then intended to be read as historical documents. Just like when you read the psalms and proverbs, they are intended to be read as a poetic genre. And other parts of scripture are prophetic and law. Some ask "well how was there light before God created the sun on the fourth day?" This is only speculation but it's very possible that because most people worshiped the sun and other natural things as gods before Judaism (monotheism-belief in one God), this was a way for the writer to show the sun is not a god but merely a part of the naturally, created order.
So because we as Christians do not want to exclude and disregard other forms of knowledge like science, geology, and archeology (which often only support the Christian faith and the Bible), we should take Augustine's advice as to be careful what our faith is hinged on.
Moving on to evolution. I almost thought not to even say anything about this because it is such a loaded word that means so many different things to as many different people. But if we are talking about Darwinian evolution, which has been strongly confirmed to be accurate, let's be clear about some different ways of understanding it.
For many militant atheists today, Darwinian evolution is the center and most used aspect of their argument against God's existence. More specifically natural selection. When you ask someone like Richard Dawkins how did conscious beings come into existence, let alone life at all, he will answer simply natural selection...to him natural selection explains everything although you'd be hard pressed to get any further explanation out of him. But let's back up a little. First, natural selection (evolution) only explains what happens after you already have life (the first single celled organism) on Earth and how it evolves and transitions into other life forms from there. It does not explain how the first cell came to be. And the single cell is the most basic and essential building block of life. It's where DNA resides and is the most wondrous and complicated aspect of biological life. (I urge you to search "Inner-life of Cell" on YouTube for a 5 or 6 minute video). Even most biologists, once you get them outside of their biased university atmosphere, will admit they have no idea how the first cell could have possibly formed by time plus matter plus chance; the idea is that different chemicals and molecules came together in a warm, soupy pond hundreds of millions of years ago and a bolt of lighting, or something, came along and created life. Even a mathematician will tell you the unbelievable odds of this happening by chance are crazy. Oddly enough it has never happened since, including in the 70's when some scientists tried to create life in this hypothetical scenario. They of course never did but even if they would have, they would still have to show how it happened without guidance.
Secondly, Darwin's atheism was not because of his theory, it was because his daughter died at a very young age. This terrible tragedy made him lose his faith for some time in a creator. But he himself would have told you that nothing about his theory refutes God. In fact, a young seminary student wrote him a letter thanking him because she'd been taught that God created humans and had wondered for so long how this happened and his explanation was very informative. Darwin was so proud of this letter that he printed it in subsequent editions of "The Origin Of Species.
But lastly, even with the probability that we humans came from apes, there is still more questions this raises than answers from the atheistic point of view. If you ask an atheist, like Richard Dawkins, to explain the jump from an animal to a conscious and, aware that he is aware, human being, their explanation will pretty much be that natural selection can do anything, given enough time. You will also notice that many of them have a very low view of homo-sapiens.
But for most of us it is easy to step back and look at the difference between an ape and a person. Namely our awareness of our awareness, or our conscience, or our ability to know we will die someday or even just draw a picture. Has there ever been one animal or ape that can draw a picture let alone create art or science or do math or reflect on life, beauty, and love? There are probably better ways to argue this point and G. K. Chesterton explains a rebuttal to this in a way much better than I do, so I suggest if this subject interests you, to read his classic "The Everlasting Man."
Now I've saved my best and biggest argument for the the existence of God, from a scientific point of view, until now. Even the most hateful atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens admit this is the best and most persuasive scientific argument for a Creator. In the last several decades of scientific discovery, believing and unbelieving scientists, across the board, have recognized, and been astonished by, the incredible fine-tuning of the universe. In science and cosmology, there are these 20 or so constants in the universe such as the force of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the speed of light, and so on. Picture a desk with 20 nobs that control the values of all of these constants. If you were to change (turn) not many, but even one of them in the slightest bit either way, no universe or life would exist at all.
The physicist Stephen Hawking, in his book "A Brief History Of Time" writes that the initial conditions for the universe--its density and its rate of expansion--would have to be very finely tuned for the formation of stars and planets and creatures like us. If the overall density of the universe were changed by even 0.0000000000001 percent no stars or galaxies could have formed. Hawking adds, "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size." He concludes, "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."
Frank Tipler and John Barrow in their book "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" writes, "the present universe possesses features which are of infinitesimal probability amongst the entire range of possibilities." Astrophysicist Michael Turner writes, "The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bull's-eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side." If you want you know more about fine-tuning argument (The Anthropic Principle), there are many great books out there like "The Language of God" by Francis Collins (the decoder of the human genome), "Just Six Numbers" by astronomer Martin Rees, and "Godforsaken" by Dinesh D'Souza.
Now since this discovery of the anthropic principle, there have been many atheistic attempts to refute the obvious argument for design and a designer. The most popular, which I'm sure you've heard of by now, since it's made it's way into pop-culture, is the idea of multiple universes. The idea is that because the odds of our universe having such finely tuned laws of nature, without a designer, are so incredibly minute, that there must be an infinite number of universes that have been created by some big machine and ours just happens to be one of the few that got it right and are perfectly tuned for life. Mind you it would take practically an infinite number of universes (or a heck of a lot) to finally give us anywhere close to good enough odds to have formed a universe as finely tuned as ours without a designer.
Not to even mention that our planet is a rare exception in our universe and only sustains the conditions for life on a razor's sharp edge. While multiple universes are a fascinating idea, there is absolutely no empirical evidence for it whatsoever. If you ask me, the atheists have to stretch credulity a little bit too far to use this as a refutation to a Creator. I would respond to this using the title of Frank Turek and Norman Geisler's book by saying sorry, "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist."
Some Other Secular Counter-Arguments
I just want to address a few other "New Atheistic" arguments that have been made about religion and Christianity. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this but I think they are worth taking a look at for a moment.
You have probably heard it said, since Sigmund Freud said it around the beginning of the twentieth century, that the belief in God is just wishful-thinking. He believed man invented God due to the need, or desire, for an eternal father figure and that heaven is just an idea to comfort people who don't want to believe they are going to die someday. But I find two things wrong with this argument. First, if humans were going to invent their own religion, it would hardly have been something like Christianity. I think it's safe to say that hardly anyone is comforted by the idea of Hell. Hell is a lot worse of an idea than just dying and ceasing to exist. At least death would be the end of suffering in a naturalistic worldview. And secondly, you could easily turn this argument for wishful-thinking around on the atheists and say that atheism is just the desire to not be held accountable for your actions. As has been said in slightly different ways by many 19th Century philosophers, if there is no God, anything goes. Everything is permitted.
Another argument that has recently become very popular among famous atheists is that religion poisons everything and should be eradicated. Not only is this the sub-title to Christopher Hitchens book, "God Is Not Great," but it is also a central argument in Bill Maher's popular, but extremely lopsided and unfairly biased, documentary called "Religulous." Basically, they say that all the worse wars and atrocities that have been perpetuated throughout history were caused by religion. They often overstate their case by saying that most wars were about religion when in fact they were over land and power. I would definitely grant them that the Crusades, Medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, and even the Salem Witch Trials were horrible things done in the name of God. In fact, I don't disagree that there have been countless evils done in the name of God.
But if they can use history to try to discredit the Christian worldview, then we could discredit their philosophy by showing the absolute most heinous acts of all time which were done in the 20th century by the atheist regimes like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong, which were all attempts to create their own religion-free utopias. And let's get a sense of proportion here. These three collectively murdered more than 100 million people which all the religious wars of history put together couldn't come anywhere near. In the end, I still wouldn't use that as an argument to say that all atheists are poisonous people. It's a non-sequitur and beneath anyone who tries to give it relevance to the issue of God's existence. Human beings are capable of doing exceptionably good things but they are also capable of doing incredible evil as well (whether a believer or not). It's part, and parcel, of free will and the human condition.
And lastly, I think the majority of scholars and historians, religious and secular alike, would agree that Western Culture, which has brought so much good and benefited mankind in incalculable ways, was built on two pillars: These two pillars are Athens (Greece) and Jerusalem (Christianity). Even in the constitution, when Jefferson was trying to think of the source of the idea that all men are created equal, he could only think of one. Our Creator. I won't qualify this much but if you study our countries history (which wasn't always pretty), it would be hard to deny that this country was built on Judeo-Christian values and beliefs. Including many beliefs and values that the secular takes for granted as having always existed. While it is true that the founding fathers of our country feared their oppressive, and disastrous European past of State being married to Church, they never once would have thought eliminating religion would be an option, let alone good.
Why Christianity?
Up to this point I have tried to show from a secular viewpoint how there is evidence (not proof) and good reasons to believe in a Creator. But now I want to attempt to show the uniqueness of the Christian belief specifically.
There is a very popular post-modern idea out there that all religions are the same (an idea only endorsed by Hinduism). You hear this from some atheists but it's just as popular with some less than fervent believers as well. In one sense, there are basic tenets that most religions agree on. For instance, Dinesh D'Souza, in his book "What's So Great About Christianity," says "all religions are an attempt to solve the dilemma outlined in Pascal's 'Pensees.' Pascal notes that for thousands of years man employed great intelligence and effort to solve certain basic problems. We want to have peace in the world. We want to live in harmony with one another. We want to raise our children well. We want our lives to matter. Pascal says we have been at this for a very long time, so why haven't we solved any of these problems?" Put another way, which I touched on earlier, we all have this idea, or standard, for the way things ought to be but are not. And we ourselves do not live up to that standard because we are all naturally flawed (greedy, lustful, selfish, and so on). We are all slaves to our self-centered and evil desires, and we give in to those desires because our will is weak. All religions pretty much diagnose the problem this way.
So in a sense, we all live at this lower level and all religions are attempts to raise us up to that higher, divine level. But here's the difference between Christianity and everything else. All the other religions, in one way or another, say that you can fix yourself by yourself. In other words, they are all based on the merit system: you can save yourself if your good deeds outweigh your bad ones. For Hindus, it's Karma that will decide whether you come back in the next life as a billionaire or a cockroach. Judaism and Islam say you will go to Heaven if you follow these laws. Buddhism doesn't have an after-life or God, but solve the problem of man's selfishness by prescribing the elimination of the "self" through meditation and self-renunciation (renunciation of possessions, sensual pleasure, and so on).
However, Christianity's premise is much different because it claims that no matter how hard you try, man cannot reach the divine level. It is way too high. God must come down to man's level and raise us up Himself.
So let's back up and look at the big picture, according to the Bible. The Old Testament shows us that we are not perfect, and indeed deeply flawed. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9) For some this is terribly insulting and offensive because it cuts deeply into our pride, which is the father of all sins. But the Bible also qualifies that statement through showing us how humans have, and do, behave. D'Souza puts it like this: "Sin structures our personalities and defines our thoughts and behavior. Sin is built into our habits so that we sin routinely, almost unthinkingly. Sin is not peripheral to humans, something we occasionally do, but much more intrinsic to our identities."
So in a just and fair universe where we are all sinful, should we not have to justly pay for that sin? Shouldn't we be held accountable for our mistakes? Should God who is intrinsically just and holy, compromise that justness and holiness? He probably couldn't even if He wanted to. The same way He couldn't make two plus two equal five or make a circle fit a triangle. After all, if He is not to hold fast to His own created morality and justice, then His justice means nothing; it's not objective or true. So He did the only thing He could do without compromising His perfect justice and holiness. He sent His only begotten Son to become a human and live a perfect life and pay a debt which we could never pay ourselves. By this sacrifice, He bridged the gap between Heaven and Earth and thus making us eligible to be with Him. The truth is now all we have to do is say yes to God and accept this gift He has given us. As C.S. Lewis says, "Christ offers us something for nothing. He even offers us everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists of that very remarkable offer." The Bible doesn't say salvation is the gift from God, it's the gift of God. The offer is Himself. Mistakenly, many Christians still believe that if you are good, you are saved, like all the other religions. But that would make Christ's sacrifice void and in vein. The whole point is we can't do it ourselves. As Lewis says, it is only those who really try to be good that understand goodness and how hard it really is to do. In fact, it's impossible. We need His grace. And it was on the cross that Christ took on all the darkness, loneliness, and separation of sin.
For the longest time a huge hinderance to my belief in Christianity was the idea of Hell. I felt deep down, as I think many do, that a loving God would never send someone to be tortured eternally just because they aren't perfect or don't go to church every Sunday. But this is where I think a better understanding of Heaven would be helpful. Most people think of Heaven merely as a place. It is, of course, a real place, but Christ also said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Heaven is better understood as a description of what it is like to be with God and to be with Him requires that we want to be with Him. Like I said above, salvation means that we accept the present of Himself.
It's sounds crazy to say that someone would choose to go to Hell but in a very real way, they do. I know I've quoted him a lot but once again I think Dinesh D'Souza makes this point very eloquently. In "What's So Great About Christianity," he writes, "The atheist basically wants to shut himself off from God, and this helps us see why heaven is not closed to atheists. Nor is hell the fiery pit into which atheists are flung for their misdeeds. Heaven is God's domain, where He is eternally present. Hell is where God is eternally absent. God doesn't reject the atheist; the atheist rejects God. God doesn't dispatch the atheist to hell; the atheist wishes to close his eyes and heart to God, and God reluctantly grants him his wish. In a sense, the gates of hell are locked from the inside."
Now does this mean that we can know specifically who is saved and who is damned? Absolutely not. Only God knows the heart of any man and only God is wise enough to judge anyone. Christ Himself said that there will be those who call Him Lord that will have no part in Him. And no doubt there are those who've never stepped foot in a church that are far nearer to the spirit of God than some clergy. I think it's fair to say we have enough on our plate with ourselves. For the Bible says we are to work out our own salvation, with fear and trembling.
So in a very real sense, it is true that we only need to say yes to God and we are saved from what would have been our just punishment (separation from Him). But does this mean all the work is done and we can now live our lives any way we want? As St. Paul would say, "certainly not." Good works may not be the cause of our salvation, but if we really turn our hearts sincerely to Christ's teachings and Christ Himself, they will be the fruits of it. Is it not true what Christ said: "you will know them by their fruits."? But this change will only come when we really try to obey Him, only to find that we can not do it ourselves. In "Mere Christianity," Lewis writes "[Salvation] is the change from being confident about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything ourselves and leave it to God. I know the words 'leave it to God' can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 'sonship' with us, will make us, like Himself, 'Sons of God.'"
I think sometimes Christians get stuck at a certain level (I know I did) because we think if we really put God at the center of our life, He is going to take all the fun stuff away or put unrealistic demands on us (like some churches do). After all, He does say we must "die to ourselves" and "be yea perfect." Be yea perfect? Why would He ask this of us? We already know that nobody is perfect and that often trying to be only leads to discouragement and shame. Not to mention the kind of self-righteous, legalistic, judgmental prigs this sometimes produces.
More often than not, we want God to help us out with, or get rid of, some sin that we ourselves are prone to commit. Even more often we only use God as a cosmic ATM machine to help us acquire some momentary need or materialistic good. But God does not just love us a little, He loves us more than any human love could ever match.
And part of that love, if we choose to accept it, is that we eventually (not in this lifetime) become the kind of creatures who are perfect, just like Him. Lewis borrows an analogy from George McDonald writing, "Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself." Or you might've heard it said that God loves us just the way we are, but He loves us too much to let us stay that way.
So there it is. Just as Christ says "unless a grain of wheat die to itself, it shall not produce fruit," so we too must die to ourselves. And we must do it all over again everyday. This principle runs through all life from top to bottom. C.S. Lewis ends Mere Christianity by helping us understand what it means to die to yourself when he writes, "Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."
A Few Closing Statements
Around the mid nineteenth century when the first big atheistic movement started to take place because of famous thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Huxley, some people started to question, and deny, that Jesus even really existed. But due to the archeological discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and other Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources and documents, this has been shown to be absurd. There is far more proof for Christ's existence than Socrates, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar and we take them for granted. And there is an incredible unanimity among historians now that Christ was a real person.
We also know that the earliest Gospels were written within about 30 years or so of Christ's death and the last books were definitely written before 100AD. Also in recent decades archaeologists have been compelled to reconsider people and events long regarded as legendary. Jeff Sheler notes that "the picture that has emerged overall closely matches the historical backdrop of the Gospels."
As for the resurrection of Christ, which is what the entire Christian religion is hinged on, there is good reason to believe it was an actual historical event. Some people immediately disregard it historically because the people that spread the good news were obviously biased in Christ's favor. But first of all, by his followers own admission, they did not expect His resurrection. They went to the tomb to anoint His body and found the stone rolled away. The fact of the empty tomb was admitted by the Roman guards and the Jewish magistrates (who told the Romans that His followers must have stolen it).
Plus, as D'Souza writes, "The apostles were deeply skeptical about the reports of a resurrection, and the Bible tells us that Christ had to appear before them several times before these doubts were dispelled. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:6 that Christ 'appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of who are still living.' Paul here appeals to direct historical evidence: the testimony of multiple witnesses who actually saw Jesus alive after His execution. Of this group, Paul says that some are dead but most are alive; in other words, many were in a position to confirm or refute him. In the history of hallucinations, is there a single instance in which five hundred people all saw the same person and were equally mistaken?" There is a great and extensive book about this called "Jesus And The Eyewitnesses."
But the most convincing thing to me is the fact that all of the founders of the early church went to their deaths for their beliefs when they would have been left alone if they just renounced their commitment to a resurrected Christ. It's a little hard to believe that they endured imprisonment, torture, exile, and death for something they knew not to be true. There would be no Christianity if they hadn't.
In conclusion, I just want to say that the arguments, evidence, and statements of theology I've presented here may be of some help for the person who is searching for the truth and reality of our existence on this little planet, but the most persuasive thing we could ever do to bring someone to Christ is to be Christ-like. What I mean is, our willingness to obey Christ--by forgiving, loving, praying for, suffering long, and keeping a soft heart toward not only our friends but our enemies--will do more to show the love of Christ and bring someone to Him than anything else. More importantly, it will bring us closer to Him. For each day our hearts are either getting softer or harder. And in the end we will either let our hearts be hardened in the "casket, or coffin of our own selfishness," which is really what damnation is, or we will choose to be humble and brave enough to accept the truly incredible and life-giving love of our Creator, which will overflow from us to our fellow man. And that is the reason for the hope in me.
