It is Much Easier to Believe Christianity Than the Alternatives

This assertion is completely counter intuitive to secularists, and unfortunately hard for many Christians to believe. But the more you know about the claims for the truth of Christianity, and those of the alternatives, the more you can’t help but believe that Christianity is true. Some explanation of reality has to be true, has to be the way things actually are. Contrary to the silly COEXIST bumper stickers on cars of people signaling how tolerant they are, every religion can’t be true. They all make contradictory claims, so the most basic law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, holds: a thing cannot both be A and not-A at the same time and in the same sense. Aristotle said “that without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know.” Put another way, religion and worldviews are not like ice cream, simply a personal preference. If we don’t believe in Christianity, we have to believe in something else.

The suffocating secularism of Western culture deludes people into thinking they don’t have to believe in anything, that they can just skate through life and ignore the bigger questions, like why we exist, why we die, is there a God, is there life after death, are good and evil real, etc. The delusion, and the lie well sold by the devil, is that only those religious folks need faith. We secular, we stout of realistic heart, can get along without it. No they can’t. Belief and faith are an inescapable part of human existence, so Christians are not the only ones who doubt. We might suggest to non-Christians that they have reason, very good ones, to doubt what they believe.

Since belief and faith can’t be escaped, doubt is part and parcel of life, and absolute certainty doesn’t exist. There is only one absolutely certain being, and I’ll let you guess who that is. No, I have certainty, as can you or anyone else, only beyond a reasonable doubt. Every day people are sent to prison, and sometimes death, on such certainty, and it’s the best we’ve got. So how do we get beyond this reasonable doubt? Three ways: evidence, philosophy, and presuppositions. These three ways correspond to schools of apologetics, evidential, classical, and presuppositional. Many of those engaged in apologetics, defending the Christian faith, think there is one right way do do apologetics. There is not! The right way is all ways because they all in their way affirm my contention that the alternatives to Christianity are much harder to believe than Christianity itself.

So let’s briefly look at these three ways.

1. Evidential: Reading Scripture it is abundantly clear that our God is a God of evidence. He never expects us to believe just because he says so. To some Christians that may appear almost blasphemous, but I didn’t make it up. Christians are not fideists, meaning we believe apart from reason. Far from it! God gives us abundant reasons, in Scripture, in nature, in reason itself. Read the Bible with an eye to this sometime, and you’ll see how true it is.
2. Classical: The focus here is on the philosophical, or rational reasons for the veracity of the Christian faith. It starts with Aquinas’ Five Ways, or the five logical arguments regarding the existence of God. Then from there we move to the historical reliability of the Bible, and then to it’s content. It too deals with evidence and presuppositions, but not initially.
3. Presuppositional: Here the focus is on assumptions, or what people pre-suppose, and if these provide a coherent, consistent view of reality. Just as all people live by faith, they must assume certain things about existence without the ability to prove them. The question is, are their presuppositions consistent with the conclusions that logically follow from them. Presuppositionalists insist we start by assuming the Bible and Christianity are true because without God in Christ nothing makes ultimate sense. Otherwise we are placing reason above God.

Since I am 600 plus words into this post, I will need another one to give a brief account in each of these ways why the alternatives to Christianity are much more difficult to believe. It’s amazing when you seriously take each religion/worldview apart in these three ways how incredibly weak they are. Only Christianity fulfills C.S. Lewis’ confession: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” We might call this explanatory power, that Christianity has the power to explain reality in ways that the alternatives can’t get close. Stay tuned for part 2.