Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Dec 24, 2025 | Apologetics

I recently saw an article that attracted me because of the title, “The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed.” The author, Maarten Boudry, explains what the piece is about in the subtitle: “We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.” We have no idea just how much we take for granted. Unfortunately, the article is now behind a paywall on the Quilette.com site, but the first couple of paragraphs give us the basic idea of the author’s perspective. Here’s the first one:

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

This is primarily an affliction of the left which drinks deeply from the lies of Rousseau and Marx, but a lack of gratitude is a sinful human predilection, and not just for we modern people. My only disappointment with the piece was when Boudry said he’s an atheist. I really didn’t think they existed anymore, but apparently they do, and we’ll discuss that below related to gratitude. But I was inspired by what this atheist wrote to do some reflection on gratitude, and the importance of it for Christians.

Count Your Blessings One by One
This is the title of a hymn from the 19th century, and the chorus says:

Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;

I’ve often thought over the years if I actually did this it could take days. The blessings God has bestowed on us in the time in which we live are innumerable, not to mention all the non-material and spiritual blessings. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Paul also quotes a version of Isaiah 64:4 in I Corinthians 2, and I love it in the King James Version:

9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

The verse in Isaiah says our God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” This includes material as well as spiritual and familial blessings, but let’s focus on the material for a moment.

The reason we take for granted the blessings of living in the modern world is our ignorance of history, and how horribly difficult life was for people, from paupers to kings, prior to the 20th century. Recorded history goes back approximately 5,000 years, and for about 4,900 of those years, death, disease, and starvation were a common feature of life. Just staying alive was a challenge. Clean water and basic sanitation were something nobody took for granted because they were so rare—we think it’s our birthright. Cheap filtered water is available to us whenever we want it, and indoor plumbing is everywhere. For all of those 4,900 years people just couldn’t flush human waste away. Disease was often rampant because of it.

Child birth was perilous, both for the woman and the child, and children making into adulthood was something people hoped for, but didn’t count on. It always amazes me that people had children before the 20th century. God made the sex drive so powerful that despite all the risks, people kept having them. Diseases that are easily cured today with antibiotics and medical intervention, killed people. Plagues and famine were common. If someone had a toothache, they either got it pulled or died. One could go on, but we have no idea just how easy we have it. Are we grateful? Given our sinful nature, we have to teach ourselves not to complain and be grateful; that shouldn’t be difficult, but often it is.

Even in the 20th century the abundance to be found in America and the West was inconceivable to most people in the world. Boudry’s article has a picture of Boris Yeltsin visiting a grocery store in 1989 prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember that, and how the news was filled with stories about how blown away he was by the cornucopia of affordable goods available to all Americans. Grocery stores and modern food production, even as we complain about processed food, is a miracle. Like Yeltsin’s experience implies, people were amazed by it in the 20th century. I worked at a small college in Pennsylvania in the early 90s, and some students from Africa visited for a semester. Going to a grocery store for the first time was beyond their comprehension. They had a hard time believing it was real. We don’t have to grow our own fruits and vegetables, kill and prepare animals to eat, milk the cows, or bake the bread. We go to the store, put it in the cart, complain about inflation, go home and cook it on our gas or electric stove, and keep the rest in a refrigerator or freezer. We can now even have it all delivered to our door for a pittance. Thank you, God!

And it’s amazing what’s happened since I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Back then there was something called the Club for Rome, a think tank established in Rome in 1968. They published a report in 1972 called, “The Limits to Growth,” and it “warned of potential global collapse in the 21st century if growth trends continued unchecked.” This pessimistic assessment assumed a Malthusian perspective, (from 19th century British cleric Thomas Malthus), that we live in a world of finite resources, and the more of us there are, the less there will be for everybody. They and others predicted mass starvation as early as the 1980s. In fact, because we live in a world God created to sustain His creatures, the more the merrier! Poverty and starvation have declined dramatically since the 1980s exactly because of economic growth and increased population. Yet leftists still condemn both, while we give thanks. Now instead of overpopulation being a threat, the problem is not enough children being born!

If you want to cultivate more of an attitude of gratitude, a great practice is to teach yourself to be amazed at common, every day features of life (and if you have children, teach them to be too!). A few years ago, for example, I was visiting my sister and her husband and had taken a shower. I walked downstairs and exclaimed to them: You won’t believe this, but I turned these knobs, and hot water came out of the wall! Can you believe it! They rolled their eyes. Open a refrigerator or freezer, and be amazed. Flip on a light switch, marvel. Turn on your computer or phone, and the Library of Alexandria or of Congress can’t match it. I am surrounded by books in my office, and not only are they affordable and widely available, but I can read them! Most people prior to the 19th century were illiterate. And I have my very own Bible! Something unheard of until the late 19th and 20th centuries. Take a plane, train, or automobile and zip to the other side of town or the state or country, and be astounded. One could go on, but you get the idea.

Lastly, Hollywood. We watch movies or TV shows set in the past, and things don’t seem all that bad. Production designers do an incredible job, and we think we’re getting a real picture of how life was hundreds or thousands of years ago, but we’re not. As good a job as Hollywood does, nothing can capture just how perilous and fragile life was in the past. Remember, count your blessings, name them one by one . . .

The Theological Grounding for Gratitude
The basis of all true gratitude is in God, the theos in theology, the study of God. Without a personal, sovereign, Creator, and Savior God to whom to be grateful, gratitude can only be a fraction of what it was intended to be. The author of our piece as an atheist can only argue for gratitude on a pragmatic level. It’s better if you are grateful for the benefits of modern life, so be grateful. The atheist, and agnostic for that matter, can be grateful to other people for their role in providing those benefits, but being grateful to a divine benefactor who makes it all possible in the first place is what we were created for. Not to mention the truth that God and not random acts of chance are responsible for all of it. In a sly mocking of atheist pretensions while my kids were growing up, when we would see something amazing, like a beautiful sunset or full moon I would exclaim, praise chance! One has to be educated into atheism because even to a child the created world appears to be, well, created!

One of my family prayers as my kids were growing up was asking God to give us hearts of gratitude. I did this because I know how inclined we are to complain and see the negative. I know this had some traction with them when I’ve heard my daughter, who now has her own growing little family, pray for hearts of gratitude. I also taught them how being thankful, even for the tough things in life, keeps us from falling into self-pity and seeing ourselves as victims. Those two emotions are evil because they reflect a lack of trust in God. In fact, they turn our circumstances into God, as if they were sovereign and He is not. Paul addresses exactly this in I Thessalonians 5:

18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

This was Paul being even more direct than usual. Complaining in any manner, even if it’s just annoyance or frustration (a major challenge for me), is sin. So, I give thanks a lot because I’m so tempted to “trust” my circumstances. My morning prayers always start with repentance and giving thanks, and I try to practice thanksgiving throughout the day, especially when I don’t feel like it. Another verse from Paul is especially challenging in a fallen world living among fallen people in a fallen body, Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I would joke with our kids that Paul couldn’t possibly mean all. Maybe 98%? Nope, all. And notice how Paul prefaces it with, “And we know,” not speculate, hope, but know. We can be certain God will somehow, in some way, use it all, everything and every moment of our lives, for our ultimate good and His glory. It is on this foundation upon which we can obey Paul’s injunction to give thanks in all circumstances, knowing our sovereign Creator God who made us and died for us has our back, always.

Another way to theologically ground gratitude is looking at one of its synonyms, appreciation. To appreciate can connote, “to understand a situation or thing fully,” to appreciate it. When we are grateful in this sense, we understand that the ultimate rationale for a thankful disposition is agreeing with God’s definition of things, not ours. This can be difficult, but from Paul’s perspective gratitude becomes the assessment of reality as it actually is, not what we wish or hope it would be. This is something our atheist friend cannot hope to capture in his perspective of a lonely God-less universe that came from nothing for no reason at all. Not only are we dependent and limited creatures, but our view of things and our reason is clouded by sin. Without God’s revelation to us in Scripture and in Christ we’re in spiritual darkness. As Christians we submit our perspective to God’s omniscient characterization of things, and teach our kids to do the same. Gratitude is obedience.

The Self and Gratitude
The Bible is full of commands to be thankful. But what if I don’t feel thankful? What if the circumstances I’m encountering are really crappy? These reasonable questions assume gratitude is about us, about our feelings and our circumstances. A perfect recipe for misery is to make sure it’s all about us. Who are the most insufferable people to be around? Those who think everything is about them.

Augustine and Luther describe sin as, Incurvatus in se, or being turned or curved inward on oneself. If we are the center of our existence, and if our desires, our ideas, our accomplishments, our comfort, our glory are what counts, we will never be thankful. These things are rightfully important to us, and to God, but they must never be most important. If they are, everything in life will be out of proportion, and reality distorted. By contrast, Augustine defined virtue as “rightly ordered love”:

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.

Understanding the relative value of things is a big part of curing the sinful inward curve.

Some years ago I came across a wonderful example of someone who understands Augustine, a young Christian mother, 35, who learned she had stage four cancer (since recovered and doing well). Kate Bowler is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School and the author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” She didn’t see much prosperity in that moment. Her insights about how Christians ought to think about life, not only in the face of terminal cancer, but every day are worth contemplating:

When we overly‑instrumentalize prayer, we become convinced we’ve connected all the dots between us and God. To be totally honest, I cannot say things like “It would be better for my son not to have a mom, because surely God is working in all things for the good of those who love him.” That sounds like a lie to me, because I’m working from my desires forward toward God’s.

What I can say honestly is things that work backwards from God’s desires to mine ontologically: God is good, God is faithful, God’s desires for me are good. When I work from God to me I can say true and beautiful things. When I work from me to God, I end up lying.

This is brilliant! These are the two stark choices of existence. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:

Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.

Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:

Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.

Such a mindset leaves little room for living in an imperfect, fallen world. If you want to be miserable, make your life all about your happiness. We will never understand what seems to be a contradiction, how we can be grateful and not happy, grateful and unfilled, grateful and miserable, grateful and dissatisfied, grateful and grumpy, simultaneously. We can’t completely avoid these negative attitudes. The question for us, then, is do our internal responses or interpretation of circumstances actually make them what we interpret them to be?

Gratitude is inextricably tied to God’s definition of things. Rephrasing Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, who are you going to believe, God or your lying eyes? We are simply not capable of any kind of ultimate, eternal, accurate assessment of anything apart from God’s revelation. Unless we frame things in the biggest of big pictures, that which is eternal, all we are left with is distortion. Our perspective is not authoritative, or accurate, merely because it is ours. Thus we give thanks because we agree with God, we trust God, and that in the end is how we develop an attitude of gratitude.

 

 

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

Dec 10, 2025 | Apologetics

Ever since the French philosopher Voltaire in the 18th century, the existence of God has been debated, especially among cultural elites. There have been atheists throughout all cultures and times because life can be so absurd, but with the Enlightenment and the modern world, atheism became intellectually respected and culturally dominant in the form of secularism. A soft agnosticism would be an accurate description of the masses in Western culture, God pretty much an irrelevance, his existence not all that important one way or the other. Many atheists and agnostics will argue that if God really did exist, why wouldn’t he make himself more obvious. Thus the idea of the hiddenness of God, or if God exists why doesn’t he make it more obvious. Does the God of the Bible delight in making himself obscure, in effect hiding himself from his creatures? Their premise is that if God is real and good and loving, then he will make his existence undeniable to people. That begs the question: They assume their conclusion in their question, and then declare, he must not exist!

I was thinking of the hiddenness of God recently as I was reading through the book of Jeremiah, which can be a brutal read. Jeremiah lived in Judah during the fall of Jerusalem in the 580s BC as the armies of the Babylonians destroyed the city, and he saw the people of Israel exiled to Babylon. It was a horrific time to be alive, and is one reason Jeremiah is given the title, “the weeping prophet.” It was fitting he should write a book called, Lamentations. If Jeremiah, or we, live by site, judging our lives by circumstances, and not by faith, or by trust in God, then the hiddenness of God can be a real problem. I’ll deal with this from an apologetics perspective below, or how we can defend God’s existence and the veracity of Christianity against it, but I want to establish that it can indeed be an issue for some people. I went through my own “plausibility insanity” phase in my Christian life where God just didn’t seem as real to me as he used to. I could actually feel some sympathy for the atheist and agnostic, although I could never have become one of them. Something brought back God into the realm of the plausible, which I’ll share below as well.

Jeremiah and the Occupation of Prophet
Being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough job. The life insurance was really expensive. Having finished Isaiah prior to reading Jeremiah, the contrast is stark. When you read through the book of Isaiah there are plenty of declarations of judgment on a wayward, rebellious people, but it is interspersed with promises of hope and salvation. In the first several chapters there are glimmers of hope among the judgment, then we’re told in chapter 7:

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Instead of destruction, God against us, Isaiah is telling Israel that there will come a time when something remarkable, something unprecedented will happen, and through this son God will somehow be with them, not against them. Hope! In Jeremiah it takes 29 chapters to get any hint of hope amidst the unrelenting gloom. Then we get the great New Covenant announcement in chapter 31, but the book is almost all gloom and doom. From chapter 13 speaking of the people he is trying to warn, Jeremiah says: 

17 If you do not listen,
    I will weep in secret
    because of your pride;
my eyes will weep bitterly,
    overflowing with tears,
    because the Lord’s flock will be taken captive.

And they will be taken captive. The suffering, misery, and death will be overwhelming.

As I was reading chapter 26, I couldn’t help thinking of how God communicates to His people, and this fallen world in general. Jeremiah is commanded by the Lord to go out into the courtyard of the temple and speak to all the people of Judah who come to worship the Lord. The people are continuing with their religious duties, going through the motions thinking that’s good enough, but not living it out in their lives. Generally, we sinful human beings don’t like being told we’re wrong, and the priests, prophets, and people were not happy with Jeremiah. They seized him and said, “You must die! 

As I was reading through the chapter I kept asking, why are the people responding that way? I suspect it’s because they don’t think it is actually a message coming from the Lord. If they really believed it was from God Himself, I suspect they’d repent immediately. Then I asked another question. Why doesn’t the Lord just make it obvious he’s the one behind the message, make it clear this is not just something Jeremiah made up? That’s when the phrase “the hiddenness of God” came to mind, a phrase I’ve never much liked. Those who struggle with belief in God use it to justify their lack of faith. If, they claim, God only made his existence clear, made it easier to believe in him, then I would believe. But if he is there, he sure makes it difficult to believe in him. Why is that? The implication is that it’s just not fair. I’m sure Jeremiah wondered the same thing.

Around 587 BC the Babylonians were laying siege to Jerusalem, and Jeremiah’s message of divine judgment and urging surrender to the Babylonians wasn’t going over well. So, a plot was hatched to kill him by lowering him into a well or cistern (chapter 38). There wasn’t any water in it, but it was filled with thick mud at the bottom, so he either sinks into the mire, facing a slow death by starvation or suffocation.

6 So they took Jeremiah and put him into the cistern of Malkijah, the king’s son, which was in the courtyard of the guard. They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern; it had no water in it, only mud, and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.

We can imagine Jeremiah thinking, okay, God, as if I haven’t suffered enough, now this? We could add another question: Why does God allow his servants, or us, to suffer? Who knows! He does, but even amidst the suffering God remains faithful to his eternal promises. The question before God’s people is always this: do we trust him, or not. For me, I always go back to the character of God revealed to us in Scripture, and most specifically Moses’ glorious declaration in Deuteronomy 32:

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

Either this is true, or not, either I believe it, or not, even in the darkness or amidst the flood, even when I don’t want to believe it! If our hope is eternal, then this mist of a life, blink and then it’s gone, is nothing in comparison, as the Apostle Paul declares in Romans 8:

18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 

And this from the man who endured unimaginable suffering for the name of Christ (2 Cor. 11), eventually to have his head lopped off as an enemy of Rome.

Is God Really Hidden?
He most definitely is not! This, of course, depends on your starting point, your premise, your most basic assumptions. Because we live in a dominant secular culture awash in scientism, or the idea that science can give us all the answers for life, we think questions regarding God can somehow be proved empirically, as if the world’s a laboratory with test tubes and measurements. It’s not.  No metaphysical (i.e., beyond the physical world) questions can be answered with absolute certainty, or what we know as proof. We must start from somewhere, and where you end up will be determined by where you start. We, of course, start with God’s revelation of himself in Scripture, which tells us that God has revealed himself in his creation, what some call nature. So Paul tells us in Romans 1:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

It can happen the other way round as well. Many people start with “nature,” and eventually come to “creation” because God’s hand in it all it is unmistakable, so they end with Paul’s declaration, that God is “clearly seen” from what he’s made.

For many, though, the obviousness is an inconvenience; being their own God is preferable. Paul is saying that whatever people may claim, they are without excuse. This applies both to acknowledging that God exists, but further that they don’t measure up. In general terms we call that conscience, the guilt that comes from breaking God’s law, basically the Ten Commandments. God’s wrath against sinful humanity as well as his existence are obvious, even though people deny both. As Paul explains:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

The word suppress means to hold firmly, restrain. Even though God has made himself plain to them, sinful human beings stuff this truth down in their hearts, but it’s futile. I envision it like trying to hold down a beach ball under water while the pressure up is unrelentingly up. It takes constant effort to keep it down, but one way or the other that ball is coming up. It does so in varying ways, hopefully by getting people to acknowledge their sin, repent, and trust in Christ. What does this wrath look like? Contrary to Hollywood, it’s not lightening and thunder and fearsome storms and raging fire. It’s more prosaic than that, every day, humdrum. It starts with their minds becoming perverted:

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 

Remember Satan’s temptation to Eve: “You will be like God, knowing Good and Evil.” You get to call the shots now, not that tyrant God who is keeping you from fulfilling your potential because he’s just jealous and insecure. How’s that working out for sinful humanity? Paul starts the litany of sinful consequences with sexual sin, especially homosexual sin, but that’s only one of the most obvious. Dysfunction of every variety is found among people who reject their Creator God.

Put simply, God created reality to work a certain way, and he’s revealed himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ to tell us how to live in it. The contrast between those who live in Christ and those who reject him is stark, and for our purpose evidentiary. In other words, it is evidence for the existence of God, and our obligation to worship and obey him. In apologetics terms, this is part of the moral argument, that living in a moral universe, one of good and evil, right and wrong, can only be accounted for by God.

Evidence for God’s Existence
When we speak of apologetics proper, or defending the veracity of the Christian faith, all of the above applies. Man’s moral nature is evidence. We are not merely lucky dirt, matter in motion. Everyone knows we are born with a bent toward doing wrong. Leave a toddler to his own devices, and you will get a monster. The bad must be disciplined out of children. Crooked sticks cannot make themselves straight. Why is this? Of all the world’s religions only one gives us a plausible explanation why this is the case. Guess which one. Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. Why are people the way they are? Why does evil exist? We know why because of Genesis 1-3. If right and wrong, good and evil exist in the universe, then where did they come from? Mere matter cannot provide an answer. If they exist, then God must exist. If evil exists, then the devil exists, and if the devil exists, God exists.

For me, the moral argument is probably the most compelling of the evidences for God, but a close second is the design argument. This was one I could use most easily on our children because the material world was clearly created. A la Romans 1, a person has to work really hard at suppressing this undeniable fact, and few people now proudly proclaim they are doing that. We’ve seen a lot of conversions to agnosticism from atheism in the last two decades, not to mention to Christianity. The reason for that is critical to understanding the power and persuasiveness of the design argument in our historical moment.

First, what is this argument? It is also known as the teleological argument, from the Greek telos meaning “end” or “purpose.” When atheism became an accepted intellectual position in the 19th century, ridding the universe of purpose was a priority. Purpose implies a designer, and at just the right time Charles Darwin provided the answer to the problem. His system of evolution implies that the universe is a product of chance because it has no designer or creator. The design argument, by contrast, says we can infer a designer from the material world because of the implicit design, and obvious order and complexity of everything. Anything that has such order and complexity must be designed, and therefore must have a designer. Not too long ago this was vigorously denied by the greatest minds in Western culture.

In the 19th century atheism became a respected intellectual position because the knowledge of the material world was limited. Science and technology were in their infancy, and a Darwinian explanation for the world we inhabit had some credibility. These intellectuals further assumed that as knowledge increased, the case for God’s existence would become even weaker and religion would eventually wither away. Karl Marx certainly thought it would. But something strange happened on the way to the funeral: God wouldn’t die! In fact, as knowledge has increased the existence of God has become even more undeniable.

If you were alive and culturally aware in the first decade of this century you will remember the “New Atheists.” There was nothing new about them at all, but they thought so. They were an arrogant, loud-mouthed band of God and religion haters who became famous seemingly overnight, but their success contributed to their downfall. They failed to take into account that for the vast majority, like 95 percent, of human beings, the existence of God is not at all problematic. Again, it’s too obvious. It wasn’t too many years after their rise that their arrogant certitude started turning people off, and the exploding knowledge of the material world was increasingly revealing a preposterous complexity that could only be explained by a creator God. Now those atheists once as loud and confident as roaring lions, are as meek and quite at little lambs. If I ever wonder about God’s existence, I just look outside.

There are other evidences for God’s existence, not least for me is the Bible. I wrote a book called Uninvented, How the Bible Could Not Be Made up, and the Evidence that Proves It. That says it all, but I’ll end this with the most powerful apologetics argument for me: the consideration of the alternative. Whenever we believe something, there is always an alternative. If one thing isn’t true, something else must be. There is no neutral space where we can safely reside without having to make a decision, especially when it comes to ultimate questions: Why do we exist? What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why is there evil? What is the meaning of life? As the band Rush sang, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that the choice should be easy—he is not hidden.

I said above I would share what got me out of my “plausibility insanity” phase. It was two things. One was a deep dive back into apologetics in 2009. Being reminded again of all the evidence for Christianity being the truth, and the logical, rational reasons for its veracity makes it easy for me to believe it’s real. The other was in 2012 making a commitment to read the Bible and pray every morning. Communing with the living God every morning is what really did it, and I can’t even recognize the guy who would relate to the atheist and agnostic. This shows us that the so called problem of the hiddenness of God is a heart and not an intellect issue. As Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:

7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

 

 

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Nov 5, 2025 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

On Twitter recently I saw this short video of a young British Journalist, Louise Perry, explain why she became a Christian. In 2022 she published a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which indicates like many secularist liberals she had been mugged by reality. It is obvious from the devastation coming in the wake of “the 60s,” and the rejection of traditional Christian sexuality morality, that something is terribly wrong. The rejection of monogamy and the sexual exclusivity of marriage, and yes between a man and a woman, destroyed the foundation of civilization and source of true human flourishing, the family. Not only have we seen the explosion of divorce and single parent households, but we’ve discovered that children raised in such an environment are often emotionally and psychologically damaged. Every study over the last 50 years makes this undeniable. Everyone agrees, even those who reject the primacy of the family, that children do best in a two parent, mother and father family.

Frenchman Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the academic discipline of sociology, which can be defined as “the study of human society, social behavior, and the structures, institutions, and interactions that shape them.” It is clear from such study that certain things work better than others, meaning they bring human happiness, peace, safety, and prosperity, or they don’t. Normal human beings tend to prefer these to misery, war, crime, and poverty, so it makes sense to try to order our lives and society so they produce more of the former than the latter. For Ms. Perry, she saw that the sexual revolution and everything associated with it clearly wasn’t working. I don’t know her story, but she clearly saw a connection between what was working, what could work, and Christianity. So in her studies she came to the conclusion that if Christianity “were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” In other words, for human beings to function optimally in a society, the truth of Christianity could be verified by that, and she found that it is. That realization is happening to a lot of people in this age of Great Awakening. For some reason people prefer harmony over chaos, love over hate, beauty over ugliness, liberty over tyranny. Go figure.

Living in a Christian World: Gospel Influence Everywhere
A journey through Western history allows us to see these contrasts in living color. We can also clearly see this in other countries and their cultures today, but so much of the World is Westernized it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how unique our Western culture is specifically because it was created by classical and Christian influences. I say classical because both ancient Greece and Rome have had significant influences on the development of the West, but those pagan civilizations were as unfamiliar to us as aliens from some distant galaxy far, far away.

Historian Tom Holland’s journey to an appreciation of Christianity in the development of the West is chronicled in his highly influential book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Here was someone who grew up enamored of everything he thought ancient Greece and Rome stood for, until one day he realized he had absolutely nothing in common with those people. Their moral value system and view of the world was completely, well, alien to him, something he could not relate to at all. Mind you, he’s not a Christian, yet sees the world through Christian lenses, and realizes we don’t have the modern world without Christianity.

Holland’s book was a profound revelation for me, and multitudes of others. We’ve all grown up in a Western culture that is what it is because of Christianity. On some level we know that, but like the air we breathe we take it for granted, as if it’s just the way things are supposed to be. The problem with this is that living in a dominant secular culture, we just assume the blessings we enjoy of living in a modern society just happened for no reason at all. We live with a modicum of peace and prosperity, political liberty, education, health, etc., just because. In other words, they come from chance, just like they think the physical universe came from chance. The “narrative” of the secularist is that the Enlightenment saved us from religious fanaticism and tyranny, and because of science and technology we have the modern world in spite of Christianity, most certainly not because of it. That gets the reality of the situation exactly upside down, as well as inside out.

The ancient world was a brutal place, brutal in a way unimaginable to us now. We see this in movies and literature, but it’s difficult for us to comprehend the realness of it, and how difficult everyday life was for most people. Because of Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder, I’m reading the 1951 novel, Spartacus, from which a movie as made in 1960 with Kirk Douglas. The story is about the slave revolts in the Roman Empire, and a line from the story is apropos for the time, “I am Spartacus,” as other slaves stood up to protect and affirm what Spartacus stood for. A lot of people today are saying, I am Charlie Kirk.

The author, Howard Fast, paints a horrendous picture of slavery and how cheap life was in a way that makes American chattel slavery in the 19th century look like Disneyland. The brutality of it is incomprehensible to us. The story starts with some wealthy patrician Romans taking a trip on the Apian Way, and on both side of the road 6,000 slaves are hung, naked, on Roman crosses as a sign of Roman justice. They had put down the slave revolt instigated by Spartacus, and the book looks back in time at how it all developed. It’s brilliant in the way it depicts the image of God in man struggling to live with dignity against impossible odds. This was the world Tom Holland grew up with and loved so much he became an historian of the ancient world.

What’s powerful about the book is that the slaves are driven by visions of a world they think will never exist, but they are willing to die for a taste of freedom and their Utopian dreams. Spartacus is the inspiration for those dreams. Little could they have known that in a hundred years another man would die like a slave on a Roman cross to free mankind from the sin that enslaves far worse than shackles. In the book Holland focuses on the crucifixion and how absurd it is that such a thing would become the inspiration and symbol of a religion that would take over the world, and make it a better place. What the slaves in the slave revolt missed is that the nature of a civilization cannot be changed by force of arms because unless man is fundamentally changed, nothing else will change. To transform the nations, man must first be transformed, which can only be found in one religion on earth, Christianity. All religions in one way or another require people to confirm to some kind of law to change, whereas Christianity declares the person supernaturally changed by the power of God, and who because of that now wants to obey God’s law. The inner person is changed before the outer person can truly live a different life.

We call this gospel, the good news, man set free so he can live free. Then those set free can live in a way that enhances human dignity in everything they do because now they live according to their natures as created by God, the telos or purposes for which He created them. True human flourishing can only happen in a Christian context. God in the Old Testament reveals to us that obedience to his law is required for blessing, while disobedience incurs His curse. The gospel, the New Covenant, as the Lord tells us in Jeremiah 31, means God’s law has now been put in our minds and written on our hearts. This now spreads throughout society in everything Christians do, and personal transformation allows societal transformation, gospel influence everywhere and in everything.

Transformation and Truth
The contrast of the ancient pagan world, BC, to what the world eventually became because of Christianity, AD, is what prompted Holland to write an almost 600 page book. He was driven to such effort because he had to know what it was that made the modern world in which he lived and embraced and loved so different from the ancient pagan world. What exactly caused the change? Jesus of Nazareth! It’s unfortunate that Holland still hasn’t been able to embrace Jesus as risen Lord and Savior, but he’s on my heathen prayer list, so I trust God will bring him there in due course. Nevertheless, he has done the church a great favor by writing the book, and completely changing the nature of the conversation about Christianity and the modern world.

The book was published in 2019, and it certainly didn’t appear at the time anyone except Christians were buying his argument, especially going into the 2020s as the woke and Covid nightmare took over the world. But something amazing happened on the way to the leftist repaganizing of the world: Jesus of Nazareth! Even the once angry “New Atheists” are proclaiming the benign influence of Christianity on Western culture, when they once declared that “religion poisons everything.” Secularism is proving the feeble lie it’s always been. 

That is the contrast in our day, not to ancient paganism, but to a modern secularism that was just another version of the ancient, barbaric creed. As secularism has come crashing down in this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve been able to see the contrast juxtaposed, side-by-side with Christianity, and secularism is not looking like the dream Utopia our cultural elites promised. It’s in fact just another form of slavery Spartacus and the Romans slaves could have recognized as such. The reason so many are now coming to this realization, and that we’re seeing a Great Awakening among us, is what Louise Perry discovered. If Christianity is supernaturally true, it must also be sociologically true. In other words it is self-authenticating, obviously true, first lived out in an individual’s life, and then in society. If it’s true, it will work. If it claims to be an explanation for reality as we find it, how it got here, why it is the way it is, then it should also tell us how to make it work the way it’s supposed to work. If you want to fix a car engine that’s not working, it’s best to use a repair manual for that specific model, and everyone agrees the world we’re born into is very broken and needs to be fixed.

I’ve listened to hundreds of Christian testimonies in the last handful of years, and the more I’ve listened to the more I’ve realized what a powerful apologetic transformed lives are for the veracity of the Christian faith. The skeptic would chalk up changed lives up to psychology because that’s all they got, but mere human psychology can’t make fundamental transformations of human nature. In other words, thinking good thoughts of sweetness and light and fairy tales, doesn’t mean good results will follow. In fact, each human being knows there is a war going on inside of them, the proverbial angel on one shoulder and demon on the other. Pascal puts it perfectly as he normally does:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

Positive thinking without supernatural power can never fully address our wretchedness. When you hear enough stories of people’s personal transformation you realize lies cannot do that. Multiply that by entire societies and nations, and thinking lies can do that is every bit as ridiculous. If Christianity isn’t true, then it’s a lie. J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism that, “Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.” That event is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man tortured to death on a Roman cross. If that event didn’t happen, if Jesus didn’t come back to life as his followers claimed, and gave their lives for that claim, then Christianity is a lie, all of it. But it is not a lie, and the transformation that inevitably comes in its wake is powerful, even irrefutable, evidence of that.

Constantine the Great’s Conversion and the Beginning of Christian Western Civilization
Because of Pietism and dispensationalism, modern Evangelical Christians are confused about the influence Christianity should have on society and culture. The question confronting us reveals the confusion. Should Christianity’s influence on the culture be the incidental fruit of the gospel? In other words, mostly personal, and society influenced unintentionally because of that? Or is societal influence one of the main purposes of the gospel? Jesus in the Great Commission made it clear that entire nations should be discipled, not only individuals. Since the Second Great Awakening, however, discipling the nations came to mean discipling Christians within nations, not actually teaching entire nations. The word disciple in Greek means to instruct or teach, to become a pupil. So Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to go and teach and instruct entire nations, a foreign concept to the personalized Pietistic Christianity that dominates most modern Evangelicalism. I read something recently that captures the Evangelical mindset perfectly. Speaking of the Great Commission, this person said that “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” No he’s not. God is calling people within nations to Himself to transform those nations, starting with themselves and their families, then their communities, and so on.

Which brings us to Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor in the early 4th century who converted to Christianity and slowly brought Christian influence throughout the empire. Why do you think he thought doing this was an important part of his Christian faith? Or thought that Christianity wasn’t merely about his personal life? Because Jesus’ disciples, the Apostles, taught the world transforming power of Christianity, and the early church embraced that. We must never forget in this debate between Pietistic personalized Christianity and world transforming Christianity, that the declaration, “Jesus is Lord,” was treason in the Roman Empire. It was a blatant political statement. The societal transformation skeptics, let’s call them, tell us that we don’t see any political or cultural engagement in Acts or the New Testament church as if 2,000 years of history hadn’t happened. But most importantly they forget what “Jesus is Lord” meant in that context—Christians were radically political.

Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337, began this transformation not long after his conversion in 312. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 which stopped the intermittent persecution of Christianity throughout the empire, and granted tolerance to Christians, allowing them to practice their faith openly. The process was slow and no doubt imperfect, but his favoring of Christianity marginalized traditional Roman pagan religions, reshaping Roman cultural identity toward Christianity. He also introduced laws reflecting Christian morality such as banning the brutal practice of crucifixion, and ending gladiatorial games, which was just another use of slaves for Roman entertainment. He also enacted measures to protect widows, orphans, and slaves. He realized something that Martin Luther taught over a thousand years later, and Christians have forgotten in our day: law is a teacher. The laws not only reflect the cultural values of a people; they teach the people cultural values. The ancient pagan world was slowly becoming the modern Christian world because of Constantine.

I can hear some Christians complain about my describing the modern world as Christian. You’ll have to read Holland’s book to understand what I’m saying. It was the influence of Jesus through his church, his people, that we have human rights, slavery is outlawed, if not disappeared, the rule of law, the nation-state, science and technology, capitalism and free enterprise, among other blessings. All those Christians complaining about how rotten things are would never want to exchange modern life for life in the ancient pagan world. As you can see, the Christian influence that transformed the ancient brutal pagan world into the much less brutal modern world goes far beyond what we consider “spiritual,” but it is all spiritual.

And speaking of that, this allows me to address the contentious topic of Christian nationalism, or what a Christian nation is. You might be able to infer from what I’ve said about Christian influence in the world, that in a Christian nation not every person has to be an orthodox Christians who confess Jesus as risen Lord and Savior. What they do have to buy into Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, whether they are aware of them or not, or can explain them or not. It doesn’t matter what each individual in a society believes on a metaphysical or religious level, they will benefit if Christianity is the dominant cultural worldview. That doesn’t even take the majority of people to be Christians, although that is certainly what we want.

What counts on a sociological level is what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality. Since we’ve been talking about sociology, let’s use a sociological concept to describe this: plausibility structure. This is the mental and psychological societal structure, a mental map, that defines reality for a people. It makes certain things seem real, the way they are supposed to be; it’s just the way things are. Since the mid-20th century, post-World War II, and especially “the 60s,” the West’s plausibility structure has been secularism. That has proved a complete failure, and now Christianity is rushing in to fill the empty space.

Death as a Key to the Meaning of Life

Death as a Key to the Meaning of Life

Sep 3, 2025 | Apologetics

I’m not a real big fan of this whole mortality thing. Apparently nobody else isn’t either given death is the ever present reality most people do everything they can to ignore. Death is like the FBI knocking on your door in the middle of the night and responding, “I don’t hear anything.” I’m the guy saying, “What? It sounds like an army! Are you nuts!” Nonetheless, most people just don’t want to deal with it until they have to, one way or the other. Even at a funeral most people are thinking, unconsciously no doubt, “I’m glad that’s not me.” All the while knowing one day it will be, sooner rather than later. Even those who make it to a hundred think it’s coming way too soon. I can imagine your average centenarian thinking as death approaches, “But, I was just born!” If you’re under 40 you won’t get that, but one day you will.

So, I am going to address the most important and least popular subject known to man, going in as Alexander Pope may have said, as a fool “where angels fear to tread.” Of course angels have never had the pleasure of experiencing death, but from the moment of our conception we are condemned to die. Something, I can attest, you do not want to bring up to your newly pregnant daughter. Way to be a buzz kill, Pops! Yes, I really did that, I confess. Me and Woody Allen aren’t so different after all. Of course we come to different conclusions in the face of the inevitable, and that’s what this little discourse into the intolerable elephant in the room is really about—hope.

Scripture and the Resurrection
Recently we had a shocking death in our extended family, and the next morning in my reading I was providentially at Iasiah 25 where I read these hopeful words:

7 On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
8     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

9 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

I’ve been on a resurrection scripture memory kick of late because as much as I believe in the resurrection and everything Paul says about in I Corinthians 15, I still find it difficult to believe it’s all true.

(A brief apologetics excursion. One of my favorite means of defending the veracity of Christianity is something I call the consideration of the alternative. If something isn’t true, then some alternative must be; there is no in between. So, whenever I wonder about our resurrection or life after death, I look outside. The creation screams of God’s existence and Romans 1:20 comes to mind:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so people are without excuse.

It’s impossible that it’s all a product of chance, which it would have to be if atheistic materialism is true. That is today by far the least plausible alternative. Pantheism, that God is everything, is almost as implausible, and that’s the only other alternative. So theism is the only explanation for the world and everything in it, and Christianity is the most plausible theistic religion, again, by far. Back to death, or our victory over it.)

Meditating on the resurrection verses in Scripture is comforting because it’s apparent the bringing of our dead physical bodies back to life eternal was God’s plan from the beginning. Let’s take a look at some of these passages.

Job 25
25 I know that my redeemerlives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
26 And after my skin has been destroyed,
yetinmy flesh I will see God;
27 I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me.

Psalm 71
20 Though you have made me see troubles,
many and bitter,
you will restore my life again;
from the depths of the earth
you will again bring me up.
21 You will increase my honor
and comfort me once more.

Isaiah 26
19 But your dead will live, Lord;
their bodies will rise—
let those who dwell in the dust
wake up and shout for joy—
your dew is like the dew of the morning;
the earth will give birth to her dead.

Daniel 12
But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered. 2 Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wisewill shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.

Hosea 6
“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
2 After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.

Revelation 21
3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

John in this passage was almost certainly thinking of Isaiah 25.

John 11
Lastly, I will comment one the most powerful passage in all of Scripture that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that our resurrection will happen and life after death in our physical bodies is a certain reality. Jesus has finally come to Bethany after allowing Lazarus to die. Before he got there he told his disciples his friend was sick, but he delayed going so Lazarus would die. He said the reason was “for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it,” and that they might believe.

When they get there the sisters of Lazarus are distraught and ask why he didn’t get there sooner—he could have healed Lazarus. Martha still believes God will do whatever Jesus asks, and he tells her, “Your brother will rise again.” She replies, yes “he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” But Jesus has isn’t talking about that. And his reply is something that if it isn’t true is not only cruel, but it would mean Jesus was a liar. As we’ll see in a moment, however, a liar doesn’t bring a dead man back to life.

25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though he die; 26 and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Who says something like this! Either an absolute lunatic madman, or God and the Savior of the world. The latter is the only thing that makes sense.

Then we come to the part of the story that can only be explained by its being true. My contention is that nobody could make this up, let alone a first century Jew. The Messiah they were all expecting did not have this kind of power. When Jesus is taken to the tomb to see where they laid Lazarus we have the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” John also tells us, twice, that Jesus was “deeply moved.” Strong’s gives us the extended meaning of that phrase:

From en and brimaomai (to snort with anger); to have indignation on, i.e. (transitively) to blame, (intransitively) to sigh with chagrin, (specially) to sternly enjoin — straitly charge, groan, murmur against.

In other words, in the not so polite vernacular, Jesus was pissed! At what, you might ask. Death! It’s wrong, it’s ugly, it’s horrible, an aberration, the apex of his creation experiencing the most horrible humiliating form of demise and decay. But this brings us to another powerful apologetics point. Why would Jesus be angry knowing in a few minutes he would bring Lazarus back to life? That makes no sense whatsoever, unless the entire story is true. As we say, also in the vernacular, you can’t make this stuff up! The reason Jesus did it was to give them, and us living 2000 years later, evidence that they might believe it was God the Father who sent him. Our hope is solid and secure, so as Paul tells us, that when we encounter death we “may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (I Thess. 4:13).

How Do We Explain Death?
I’ve long thought of death as the great question mark. In the history of the world, religions and philosophies have arisen to answer the Big Questions of life: Why are we here? Why is there evil? Why is there death? What is our destiny? Modern secular man is unique in all of history in that he is determined to not ask such questions. Why are we here? Who cares. Eat, drink, and be merry . . . . Evil and death? Just deal with it, or try to escape it if you can. Somebody’s bound to find the fountain of youth eventually. Destiny? Dirt. What an inspiring vision for life! Yet in the 20th century secularism became the dominant worldview of the entire Western world, including much of Asia. All that matters is this life, and it is assumed we can’t know anything beyond that, so why waste your time speculating when everyone disagrees about it anyway. Yet these questions persist because of the great question mark.

I never thought I’d see the great Berlin Wall of secularism fall. Like the real wall separating free from communist Germany in the Cold War, secularism is also built on lies, and lies are ultimately unsustainable. Liars can get away with it for a short time, but eventually lies reveal themselves for what they are: not the truth. Death, it turns out, is the implacable foe is secularism. Like Jesus, every human being knows it’s wrong, ugly, and that it shouldn’t be. In fact, every animal and bug knows it too. Why do you think it is that pesky fly or mosquito does everything it can to keep you from crushing it? It doesn’t want to die! When your typical secular agnostic person goes to a funeral of someone who lived to be a hundred, death is easier to ignore; they lived a good long life, let’s celebrate it. But if they go to the funeral of a five year old? This is wrong! This shouldn’t happen! The question haunts them. But they shove it down and move on with their secular life.

Given the dominant media culture is secular, including our entertainment, programming to ignore the Big Questions is everywhere, and effective. A great example of how pernicious this is comes from your typical TV show or movie. There are no angry atheists denouncing God, but God is pretty much invisible, persona non grata. That’s much more effective. The average viewer without even thinking comes away with the impression that God is irrelevant to life. Thus secularism perpetuates itself. Yet something surprising is happening in this third decade of the 21st century—secularism is dying. Even if secular people are inclined not to ask the Big Questions, in the depths of their being everyone is looking for meaning, hope, and purpose. They will try to squeeze them out of this life, but that’s becoming increasingly difficult. The Berlin Wall of secularism is crackin’ bad

Most people don’t realize secularism is a several hundred year experiment in Western culture that isn’t working out quite like planned. Religion supposedly created all the strife in the world, if we just get rid of religion, or completely personalize it so it’s invisible in society, harmony and peace will reign. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. Not to mention that the Big Questions won’t go away, and secularism has no answers, as in zip, zero, nada, as in none. Evil? Deal with it. Death? Too bad. Why are we here? Who cares, just get all you can, and can all you get. Without God, specifically the God of the Bible, the questions are unanswerable. Death and evil are the most persistent and unanswerable of the questions. If you look at world religions, none attempt to answer why they exist. We are born into a world in which they exist, so religions developed to try to deal with all the pain and suffering of life. Only one religion has a plausible answer as to why they do.

The Problem of Evil and Death
Ever since the French Philosopher Voltaire blamed the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake on God, more or less, evil and death have been the problem for Christians. When it is referred to as “the problem of evil,” it is assumed to be a problem only for Christians. Which is ironic given Christianity is the only religion or explanation for existence that offers any answers that makes sense. Like I said, other religions don’t attempt to answer why they exist, but just accept that they do and try to deal with them. The atheist, secularist, irreligious have presumed since Voltaire that they don’t have to address the problem because it isn’t a problem for their worldview. But it’s a big, huge problem, and one they have no answer for. If you get rid of God, does that make evil and death any more palatable? Does a God-less universe help us make any more sense of all the senseless pain and suffering in the world? Make sense of the wickedness of man? It does not.

The only atheist response is, deal with it. In philosophical terms evil and death are just brute facts. They simply are and have no reason for their existence and no purpose beyond our trying to avoid them, and when we can’t, making our lives miserable. They are simply unfortunate and meaningless events in our unfortunate and meaningless existence. No wonder atheism in all of world history is a very tough sell. Nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, an atheist, believed religion was a way for human beings to deal with evil and death; it was merely projection. As Marx put it, religion was the “opium of the masses.” Yet he, like other atheists after him, felt the slightest need to in any way prove that we in fact do live in a God-less universe. For them it is so obvious it need not be proved. They like most secularists believed that as science and knowledge advanced, religion would lose all credibility and wither on the vine. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Another way to refer to the problem of evil is theodicy. The word has God in it, in Greek theos, so it developed as a vindication of God’s goodness and power, but every worldview must have a theodicy. Atheism on that account fails miserably. This could not be said any better than by William Shakespeare himself. In the face of a God-less universe who could argue with this:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Christianity, on the other hand, has a perfectly plausible explanation, whether someone accepts it or not. We read the story in Genesis 1-3, which, by the way, is the only explanation anywhere in all of history of why evil exists. The beauty of the story is that it is perfectly plausible, unlike other ancient pagan myths. God created man, male and female he created them, perfectly good. He gave them one command to assure their obedience and loyalty to him, to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what was his warning if they did? “For when you eat from it you will certainly die.” As we know Eve was deceived by the serpent, ate, and Adam went along for the ride. Everything went to hell in that moment. We only get one chapter in, and murder rears its ugly head as Cain kills his brother Abel. And it has been thus ever since. We can see this drama play out in the life of every human being because as Solzhenitsyn said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Everyone knows this is true. Genesis 1-3 tells us why.

Lastly, only Christianity offers a solution, as indicated by all the hopeful passages above. We find that in God’s promise immediately after Adam and Eve’s rebellion, as if God had it planned all along. He tells them,

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”

We learn in due course that this offspring, seed in Hebrew indicating one person, was Jesus Christ, who would once and for all deal with the problem of evil, of sin, suffering, and death. He rose from the dead to confirm the victory promised here, and ascended to the right hand of God to rule through his Holy Spirit to bring it all to pass.

 

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Dec 4, 2024 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

I bet you never thought cannibalism and Nietzsche would go together, but they do, quite nicely. I might never have put those two together, but I heard Gary DeMar discuss his book, Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor, on his podcast. This subtitle gives us the apologetics focus of the book: If Atheism is Right Can Anything Be Wrong?

I’ll start with my own question. What sets Christianity apart from every other religion and worldview and philosophy on earth?

The answer is as simple as it is profound: It is true, and everything else is not.

If it is not true, as Paul says about the resurrection, we are to be pitied more than all people. That I believed Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is the only reason I became a Christian way back in the fall of 1978, exactly 46 years ago as I write this. At the time I couldn’t tell you why I believed it was true, but God seemed entirely too obvious to dismiss. Growing up Catholic I was, thankfully, given a Christian worldview, and the reality I experienced as a teenager for me confirmed that worldview. So, when I was presented the gospel in a college Dorm room in Best Hall at Arizona State University, I believed it immediately. It would be a couple years before I would get my introduction to apologetics, or the defense of the Christian faith.

If you’re not familiar with that term, you should be. We live in a post-Christian thoroughly secular culture that tells us in ways big and small, overtly and covertly, that Christianity is not the truth, but one spiritual option among many and all of them are valid. Well, no they are not, which I’ll get to in a moment. First the word, apologetics. We get the word from Peter in chapter 3 of his first epistle:

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect . . . .

The word for defense in Greek, apologia-ἀπολογία, means “a verbal defense (particularly in a law court).” This means Peter is commanding his readers, and by extension every Christian throughout all time, to not only know what we believe, but why we believe it. Apologetics, as the theological discipline of defending the veracity of Christianity is called, is not just for certain Christians of an intellectual bent. If you can’t tell your friends or family members why you believe Christianity is the truth, then you need to get to work and invest some time in figuring that out. The resources today online are endless, as are books and articles easily available. Before I get to Nietzsche, I came across a short clip on Twitter that is a great illustration about why apologetics is so necessary even as it is so rare among Christians.

Kid Rock was on Joe Rogan’s podcast which is viewed or listened to by 10 to 15 million people, and Rogan asks the Kid if he could go back in history where he would go, and Rock says, “Jesus.” Rogan asks him why he believes it and Rock says . . . . faith. We need to get Kid Rock some training in apologetics because he obviously he believes in Christianity for the exact same reason I did and do, it’s the truth, but all he could say is, faith, that he just believes it. There is so much evidence for the veracity of Christianity, historical, textual, philosophical, archeological, that Rock could have spent hours telling Rogan exactly why he believes Christianity is the truth.

The Nature of Faith
Which brings us to faith. Many people today in our secular world think of faith as a specifically religious word for believing in something just because you want to, but that is a shallow modern definition of faith. In fact, faith is something we use every day of our lives or we wouldn’t get out of bed. I define faith as trust based on adequate evidence, thus faith is not a specifically religious concept. Faith basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone.

Think of driving down a two‑lane road going 50 miles per hour, and another car coming toward you at the same speed. That’s a closure rate of 100 miles per hour. If the other car swerves into your lane, there will be a lot of damage. And maybe death. How do you know that car will stay on its side of the road? You don’t; you have faith that it will. What evidence do you have for such trust? You know that people generally stay on their side of the road. You trust that the person driving the vehicle has a license and got adequate training to operate several thousand pounds of metal at high speed. You trust that the state does a good job of policing its roads. And so on. Do you know any of this? Nope. How about the food you eat? Will it kill you? Do you know it won’t? Nope. How about the dentist or doctor you see? Do you know they won’t harm you? Nope.

This is a discussion about epistemology, or the study of knowing and knowledge. I challenge a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason. Rene Descartes (1596‑1650) was the philosopher who introduced the poison of equating knowledge with absolute certainty in Western thought. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know Descartes appears often, maybe too often, but he was a fulcrum point of Western culture from Christian to post-Christian secular culture. It would take several hundred years for this bacillus to infect the entire culture, but in the 21st century secularism is the default worldview. So to average Westerners, like Kid Rock and Joe Rogan, faith equals religion because it’s not something that can be known with absolute certainty, like science or the laws of nature, math, etc., things you can observe and measure.

I’ve noticed over the years many Christians are the mirror image of atheists in this regard. They tend to think absolute certainty is necessary to justify their beliefs, and thus they deny what is obvious: they are finite. It almost seems silly for me to write that sentence. Who would not admit they are finite, limited in every way imaginable? Daniel Taylor writes about the downside of demanding certainty in his book, The Myth of Certainty:

Ironically, the insistence on certainty destroys its very possibility. The demand for certainty inevitably creates its opposite—doubt. Doubt derives its greatest strength from those who fear it most. Unwisely glorified as the primary way to truth by many secularists, it is equally unwisely feared by many in Christendom as truth’s mortal enemy.

Such an unhealthy fear of doubt is what happens when you base your epistemology on a false anthropology and psychology, i.e., that human reason is capable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. There is only one being who has such knowledge and certainty, and He would be the Creator of it all.

The implication of this is that there is no such thing as an unbeliever, and thus everyone lives by faith. One of my pet peeves is Christians calling people believers and unbelievers. The word “believers” is all over Acts, but Luke and those he was writing to and who read it knew exactly who he was talking about, Christians. We, on the other hand live in a post-Christian secular culture so using the phrase believer/unbeliever allows secular people, like Joe Rogan, to think faith is just a religious thing. As of yet he can’t muster up the faith to become a Christian, not realizing he’s a person of faith every bit as much as a Christian. Which brings us to . . . .

 

It’s a cookbook!!!

Since all people live by faith, the only reason cannibalism doesn’t exist anymore is faith, specifically the Christian faith. Secular people fail to realize moral values, what they consider right and wrong, come from faith, come from some belief of some people somewhere. Of course, most people never give this a second thought, it just is. As an easy example, they think obviously slavery is wrong. They think, isn’t it obvious owning another human being is evil? Well, no, it’s actually not obvious at all. In fact, for all of recorded history until very recently (the 19th century), slavery was a common fact of everyday life for people all over the earth. The reason there is nothing in the New Testament about the evils of slavery and calls for its abolition is because it was obvious to everyone at the time that slavery was a normal part of human existence. Paul implies it is good for slaves to get their freedom, but never indicates slavery is a moral wrong.

That only happened in due course because as it became apparent Jesus wasn’t returning as soon as Christians had hoped, church leaders and Christian thinkers realized they had to grapple with the implications of the Christian faith for society. These implications were profound because the competing moral system of the day was paganism. In fact, even as enlightened and brilliant as the ancient Greeks were, they were still polytheistic pagans. Aristotle, for example, believed women and slaves were inferior beings and deserved their lesser status in life. To say to any ancient person prior to the diffusion of Christianity throughout the world that all human beings were ontologically equal would have been considered absurd. Very few modern people in the West (which is most of the world at this point), have any idea their entire moral value system of liberalism is built upon Christianity and would not have existed without it. They are fed lies through their secular education and media that this value system is a result of the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment only came into being because of Christianity.

An important book for Christian apologetics in the 21st century was written by a non-Christian, British historian Tom Holland. It’s called, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. His story is a fascinating one. He always loved history, and found as he grew up and became a scholar he wanted to learn everything he could about the ancient Greeks and Romans. For various reasons the ancient world appealed to him, but as his career progressed something happened. As he studied the ancient world he realized he had nothing in common with them. In his own words:

It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. . . . Assumptions I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’ but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past.

Almost every person in the world today fails to realize we’re not cannibals, to use the most extreme example, because of Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross, was buried, and whose followers claimed rose bodily, physically from the dead. As Holland adds:

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.

As in completely invisible.

The Moral Argument Simplified
Have you ever asked yourself the question, why is anything right or wrong, good or evil? The simple answer is God. In fact, the only answer is God. If atheistic materialism is true, as absurd as that is to contemplate, there can be no right and wrong, good or evil. The reason? If the material is all there is, if all we are is lucky dirt, you can’t get moral values from dirt. Another way of saying it is, you can’t get ought from is. In other words, I cannot infer cannibalism, or slavery, or murder, or adultery, or homosexuality, or lying, or theft, etc., are wrong just from material reality. Certainly, they are unpleasant, or delude us for a time, but we only know they are wrong, and ultimately lead to disaster, because God has revealed it to us, primarily in his word, but also in the created order and our consciences.

If, on the other hand, there is no God, right and wrong, good and evil, are mere preferences, like my preference in ice cream, or which sports teams I support. I once asked my brother-in-law if what we consider good or evil are mere preferences, and he said yes, like almost all modern secular would. So I asked him if Hitler butchering six million Jews was a preference, like whether he liked vanilla or chocolate ice cream. He got kind of a sick look on his face. He immediately intuited that no, choosing to commit genocide on a race of people isn’t like preferring one flavor of ice cream over another. We all know it is morally repugnant, pure evil, because God said so. He declared in the Ten Commandments, “You shall not murder.” Prior to the entire world being Christianized, killing was the preference of the powerful over the weak, and might made right.

And that is the final implication of the moral argument. If there is no God, we cannot escape might makes right, the one with the biggest stick or the biggest gun, or whoever is the strongest, determines what is right and what is wrong. If dirt is all we got, there can be no other appeal. This is why over time Tom Holland became repulsed by the ancient world. If there was no Jesus of Nazareth, nothing would have changed. In fact, as you study the rise of Christianity and the West, you see clearly through the development of the rule of law in England, that the political liberty enjoyed by much of the world today developed only because of Christianity. Because there is a transcendent moral standard, the king and the government were eventually forced into submitting to God through the law. It began with Magna Carta in 1215, eventually reaching fulfillment in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and developed fully in the founding of America in 1776.

It’s an incredible story, and the moral argument providentially developed in history through the almighty power of the Sovereign God of the Bible turning it into reality. We must build on what God has provided as we battle God-less secularism and raise up Christendom 2.0. from the ashes of the Enlightenment. I’ll finish with the C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time because it says it all:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not just because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

 

 

Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

Rebuilding Christendom and the Consideration of the Alternative

Oct 30, 2024 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

As we slowly, but I trust surely, rebuild Christendom, i.e., push back and defeat secularism, Christians and the church in general need to rebuild the Christian plausibility structures of Western society. I recently wrote about the role Jordan Peterson is playing in doing just that. Few of us have the kind of platform Peterson does and can make such a sizable contribution, but each one of us has our own sphere of influence, and every piece of the plausibility puzzle matters, even the smallest piece. What exactly, you may ask, is a plausibility structure, and why is it so important? Good questions.

The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming. A simple example is that for many of our neighbors, God seems no more real than Santa Clause  Whether God is real is not the point; what seems real is.

Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God and Christianity being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. In the West, God is persona non‑grata, unwelcome; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. We call this secularism, and our job is to discredit the secular plausibility structures, and put Christian ones in their place. God has been providentially ordering this to happen since, as I argue in my latest book, Trump came down the escalator in 2015, but this started happening before Trump. One could date it to the election of Barack Obama and the takeover of the Democrat Party by the woke left. With him, the media went all in with Fake News, and the security apparatus of the deep state, and its bureaucratic minions became tools in the hands of the party. The reactions of the Tea Party were the rumblings of the awakening, but they were stillborn because those patriots were a threat to Uniparty globalist establishment in power, Democrat and Republican.

As I also argue in the book, secularism is an experiment in society without God in Western culture, and it has failed, miserably. It has nowhere to go. And as nature abhors a vacuum, something must fill the plausibility hole left in its wake. That would be Christianity. What Trump, or the reaction to Trump, exposed was how brittle a veneer secularism is to hold a society together  in a post-Christian world. Thus the opportunity and need to re-Christianize the culture.

This rebuilding and tearing down of plausibility structures must first, of course, start with us, then our families, then out from there (my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, is how I did that with my children) . This means we have to know not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is what we call apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith. The word and the charge to do this comes from I Peter 3:15:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

The word for “answer” in Greek is apologia, which means a reasoned argument or defense that presents evidence supplied as compelling proof. Ancient Greek lawyers used apologia when defending a client in court. I wonder how many Christians are actually “prepared” to give an answer as to why they believe Christianity is the truth. I’m afraid it is not very many, but that is why we ourselves need to become prepared, and to encourage others to as well. You are now officially encouraged!

The Consideration of the Alternative
Thus we come to the purpose for this piece, the consideration of the alternative, probably my favorite apologetics tool. I realized how powerful it is using it on myself over the years as I dealt with the inevitable doubt that comes from faith. I’ll get more into faith later as I flesh out that concept, but there were times in my four plus decade Christian journey when Christianity didn’t seem so plausible to me. Over time I began to realize an inevitable conclusion that comes from doubt: if one thing isn’t true, something else has to be. First for the concept. Tim Keller in The Reason for God points out something so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it myself:

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B.

As I began to understand the inevitability of having to choose one belief or another in life, it slowly dawned on me how important it is for defending the veracity of Christianity. This comes down to an issue of epistemology, of knowing, which we’ll discuss, but think about it. I have a choice to believe or trust in almost every encounter in life. I can choose to either trust the doctor, or not. When I go to the store and buy food or go to a restaurant, I can choose to believe the food is safe and won’t harm me, or not. When I drive, I can choose to believe the other drivers will abide by the rules of the rode or not. In any case, we can never be absolutely certain, the importance of which we’ll get into shortly.

But before we get there, prior to understanding all this this, I went through a period of what I call plausibility insanity in my Christian journey when I could almost see why not believing in God was plausible to some people. By this time I’d been a Christian for over 30 years, and you would think I would have a solid grasp on why I believed in it, but I hadn’t studied apologetics since my seminary days when I was in my 20s, and at that time I’m around the half-century mark. In 2009 after a pathetic apologetics experience with a co-worker, and I was really bad, I decided I had to get back into it, and started listening and reading everything I could get my hands on. But a plausibility structure isn’t built overnight, thus the insanity.

For example, I would be in church seeing people praying and singing hymns and wonder if they were just doing that to the air. Mind you, intellectually I absolutely believed Christianity was truth, and materialistic atheism was not, but we’re talking about plausibility here and what seems real, not what we believe is real. The question is, of course, is it real. Does God exist, and is Christianity the truth, or not. There is no in between. The choice is binary as we say nowadays, either/or. Another question logically, inevitably follows from this, one very few have considered: If Christianity isn’t true, then what is? Something has to be true about the nature of reality, so we are forced to deal with “the consideration of the alternative.” What exactly would that be. Ther are, as we know, many alternatives, but not as many as we think.

Let’s Consider the Alternatives
I’ve come across skeptics who will trot out the well-worn line that there are thousands of religions so who are you to say yours is the only absolute truth. Well, I didn’t say is it. Jesus, the foundation upon which Christianity is built, said it. And the Bible from beginning to end means to be taken as the ultimate truth about the nature of things. So, what are the alternatives to Christianity? Starting with the big picture, there are only three: theism, atheism, and pantheism. Every religion falls under one of these three. I will share how I deal with each one.

Atheism, which simply means the material is all that exists, is the least plausible of the three. Whenever I wonder if it’s all real, I simply look outside and think to myself, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is a product of chance. Impossible!” Is it really plausible that everything we see and experience is the result of a mindless, purposeless, cosmic accident, matter in motion crashing into itself to create . . . . all of it? Really? The human heart, the human brain, the human nervous and immune system, all merely a product of chance, a cosmic accident. I know instantly that is absurd, which is why there are so very few atheists in the world. It takes far more faith, a Grand Canyon sized leap of faith, to believe the atheist worldview than to believe in the all-powerful Creator God of the Bible.

Pantheism, from a definition in Britannica, is

the doctrine that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe.

Thus the universe, as in atheism, is impersonal. Which is odd when you think about it because how could a universe have a world filled with persons itself be impersonal? This would mean that everything is God, the rat, the tree, the spider, the sun, the moon, the stars, you, me, the dirt, all of it. Animism is a form of pantheism in that all things are imbued with some kind of spiritual essence, although impersonal. African and native American religions, for example, were animistic, but Africa is now becoming maybe the most Christian continent on earth. Pantheism is the least credible of alternatives to modern westerners.

Theism is really the only game in town. Of the varieties of theism, we can cross polytheism off the list from the start. The ancient Greeks and Romans blew that up, and when Alfred the Great defeated the pagan Viking heathens from the north, paganism finally died in Western culture. It seems, however, that the Hindus didn’t quite get the message, but our discussion is specifically in the context of Western civilization, and thus Hinduism doesn’t qualify, although it is indeed as discredited as the polytheism of old. We can also cross off the list the seemingly infinite variations of religions that pilfer from Christianity. As I say in my book, Uninvented, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. Sorry, you can’t have him! Why should I trust Mohamed, the bloodthirsty raider who came 600 years after Christ, more than the Apostles? I won’t. Another of the ancient theistic religions that doesn’t steal from Christ is Zoroastrianism because it developed in Persia five centuries before Christianity, but it too has no appeal in the West, and doesn’t make claims to ultimate universal truth as does Christianity.

What is most fascinating about every other religion, and philosophy for that matter, save Christianity and Judaism, is that none gives us any kind of plausible explanation as to where evil comes from. For most of them, it just is, now we have to figure out a way to deal with it.  None of the answers are satisfying because they don’t deal with the central issue, man’s rebellion against his Creator. Man’s nature, who he is in his fundamental being, is the problem, not his circumstances or others, but himself. Every other religion or philosophy seeks to change man’s behavior or thoughts, but can’t change his being, his natural inclination to sin, to do wrong. Only God in Christ promises by His power and initiative to do that, to change our sinful rebellious hearts of stone to flesh, that we might be born anew with the ability to change what we do and think because God Himself in Christ has changed who we are. As Paul says, when we are “in Christ” we are a “new creation, the old has gone, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17)

Nothing else satisfies our deepest plausibility need, the thing we can grab on to which seems real, which makes sense of everything, like Christ. A C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time says it perfectly:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Jesus of Nazareth is the reason Judaism by itself can’t claim the mantel of ultimate truth because it’s a story without an ending, and that ending is Christ. All of Isreal’s religion and history pointed forward to him, as Jesus himself told us after he rose from the dead (Luke 24).

Epistemology, Faith and Doubt: It’s All About Trust
This is the title of a section of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, because what we know, why we know, how we know, are all important in raising our children in the faith, thus epistemology, or the study of that knowing. Rene Descartes wrote in the 17th century that absolute certainty was attainable by reason alone, but that proved as attainable to catch as Moby Dick, and as dangerous to try. When reason was exalted over revelation, knowing became the Holy Grail. Prior, philosophers had started their quest with being or ontology, and thus God and metaphysics came first. Now with the knower, man, coming first over his Creator, epistemology dominated intellectual discourse. God slowly became irrelevant because fallen man will always tend toward Babel if he doesn’t start with the God revealed to us in Scripture and creation.

Faith and doubt are an inescapable part of knowing because to know something requires faith to know it. As finite creatures absolute knowing is a chimera, an illusion which far too many think is possible. Yet how many people believe they have attained absolute certainty a la Descartes? One is too many, but alas they sprout like weeds in an untended garden. We can know things. Knowledge in Scripture, being able to know and trust what we know, is assumed throughout, but what I’m challenging is a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason.

Which brings us to faith, a concept that is not intrinsically religious. All human beings utilize faith every day, or they wouldn’t get out of bed. It basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone. Since we are finite, limited in every way, human reason is incapable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. Much of what we “know” is not the result of some kind of logical process, deduction like a syllogism, or rigorous inductive reasoning. What we “know” can’t be proved in the final analysis. Rather what we “know” must be accepted by faith, which is warranted trust based on evidence. When we get right down to it, faith, and the acceptance of its inevitability in life, is to pay homage to our finitude. But human beings are not fond of admitting they are finite.

This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in the first few chapters of Genesis. We learn that our Creator is God and that we are not (shocking to some, I know). We learn that the fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp his place as the one who defines reality, good and evil. The first temptation of man, that which caused all the suffering, misery, and death, was epistemological. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and that we can reason our way to perfect knowledge, is an indication that we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else. That pretty much covers it all, including our knowing. Thus I conclude, we ought to pray for epistemological humility, which as we learn from I Corinthians 8, is knowing exercised in love for the service of others.