I had a dream recently, like I do every night, but this one was inspiration for a blog post. Most of my dreams are way too bizarre for the word bizarre, but this one was very specific. I made a friend when I got out of college and was involved in the Navigator ministry at USC, and had some part in leading him to Christ. We stayed friends after that, and he even attended Westminster Seminary with my wife and I for a time, but we lost connection with him somewhere in the mid-90s. The dream was simple. He showed up in the dream, and let me know he was no longer a Christian. I asked what he was, and he said nothing. I told him that wasn’t possible, that he had to believe in something! Then it was over. When I woke up I said to myself, I have to write something about this!
Most people are under the impression when they don’t believe in Christianity, or reject it, they are in some neutral place where belief or faith or religion isn’t required; they’ll just sit this one out for now. That, of course, is impossible, as I’ve argued here before. There is no metaphysical neutrality. As Dylan sang in his Jesus phase, you gotta serve somebody, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.
It’s amazing to me that our secular culture has so successfully sold the idea faith is just for religion, and most people buy it. Hard core atheists are convinced that of all the people on earth, a tiny minority, they are the only ones who don’t require faith. They just know that naturalism or materialism (no God) is the true nature of reality, and the burden of proof is on anyone who disagrees with them. In fact, the burden of proof is on everyone! It should be obvious, but obviously it isn’t to some, that human beings are finite creatures, and absolute knowledge and certainty is not available to us. At some point we are required to trust, to have faith, in things we cannot prove beyond doubt. This brings me to the purpose of this post: The consideration of the alternative.
This idea is a most powerful apologetic for the Christian faith, and one I learned from Tim Keller’s The Reason for God as I was writing The Persuasive Christian Parent. It’s so simple and obvious I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think of it before Tim Keller! In his introduction he states:
[E]ven 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. . . . The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.
Some leaps are greater than others, but every human being must leap because we cannot know exhaustively. I would argue that Christianity requires the shortest leap of all religions and worldviews ever known to man. You would not suspect this is the case because of the grand secular narrative that’s been developing in the West for several hundred years. At the heights of the most powerful reality generators of culture influence (those painting reality a certain way people come to accept without question, media, education, entertainment, etc.) it is Christianity that is uniquely in a position of having to defend its credibility. Everybody else gets off the hook. In one way that’s not totally unreasonable given Christianity alone claims to be the one, absolute truth about the nature of reality, and the only way to know it is through Christ.
Fortunately for we who claim the name of Christ, the alternatives are weak explanations of reality, and are much more difficult to believe. I don’t think a lot of Christians get this, and the confidence that comes with understanding that. Whenever we might doubt, for who doesn’t, or whenever we are challenged and may not have the answer ready at hand, we must consider the alternative. Try becoming a Muslim, or Mormon, or Buddhist, or atheist, or Hindu, or any any religion or worldview other than Christianity, then try to defend that! You will find that nothing comes close to meeting the burden of proof like the faith with a resurrected Lord as its foundation. God’s revelation to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ is like a Niagara Falls of evidence, as mighty and majestic and breathtaking as that wonder of his own engineering.
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