(Note: this is part 3 in a 3 part series. Part 1, Part 2)

Three strategies

In this series of posts, I’ve argued that we should not shelter our kids from ideas. Now I’m a big fan of sheltering our kids in a variety of ways (including literally with a roof), but I think we should, in age-appropriate ways, expose them to ideas while they are in our care. Or you can just shelter them and hope for the best…but I don’t recommend it!

There are three strategies offered here to appropriately expose our kids to ideas. The first is to teach our kids how to think and not just what to think. The second is to present alternative ideas fairly and charitably. I recommend presenting these alternative ideas first without evaluation so that your child accurately understands them. Only then do we earn the right to evaluate these alternative views and evaluate we should.

3rd Strategy: Make a case for Christianity’s truth, goodness, beauty

The third strategy is to make a case for Christianity. It always catches me off guard how many people grow up in the church and have no clue about the rich case for Christianity. I often hear people say (often, in this moment, as caught off guard as I am) that they have never been given or challenged with the reasons to believe. They genuinely believed, but they have nothing to say about why they believe, at least nothing that a nonchristian will find compelling.

So I think we need to make the case for Christianity to our kids. However, I’d like to suggest we make a mistake if we only present the case for the truth of Christianity. We ought to also show the goodness and beauty of the Christian worldview.

To be clear, we do have to present the case for the truth of Christianity. This is not at the end of the day just a good story. But the case for the truth of Christianity can sometimes be met with a yawn or even repugnance if it is not also shown to be desirable.

Take, for example, the common objection of the injustices of the church. This sort of objection, I think, is best seen not as evidence against the truth of Christianity, but as evidence against its goodness. It is typically showing how bad Christians have been at times and there is nothing morally superior about this religious approach. But notice that it doesn’t follow from this that Christianity is, therefore, false.

As I sit here today, it is definitely not just the case for the truth of Christianity that compels me to believe. Don’t get me wrong. I think the case is very good. I find the cumulative evidence, including the arguments for God’s existence, reasons to think that Scripture is reliable, and that Jesus said and did what the New Testament claims he did (and etc.), to be quite good. I also find no objection that defeats the justification for my belief. There are good and interesting objections (such as the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and certain textual issues), but there are what I find to be satisfying Christian responses. But this isn’t where it ends for me. I also think that Christianity has and does produce large amounts of good in the world. I also think it is the ultimate love story, the ultimate rescue mission, the ultimate self-sacrificing hero story all wrapped up into one. In short, it’s beautiful.

Now given the bigness of the claim here, I’m only going to be able to hint at what would be involved in a full explication of these ideas (also I have talked about the goodness of Christianity here).

Darwinism as ugly

Let’s first consider a view I do not think is beautiful or good. When it comes to biological life, a naturalist version of Darwinian evolution may be true. I don’t think it is true. I find the thesis that there is a God who has creatively worked to bring about a radically diverse cosmos (including biological life) superior. But let’s imagine Darwinist naturalism is true. If it is true, it seems it is neither beautiful nor good. The diversity of life including all human life is mere accident. We are merely, in the words of Bertrand Russell, the “accidental collocation of atoms.” Life has no grandness or purpose. There is no enchantment. We live, we die, and that’s it. Most of us try to be good and yet we fall so very short. We can try harder, but we’ll still fail. And that’s it. That’s the end of the story. We don’t find in this narrative anything but no news or bad news for our lives. We are also set in a world where survival would be the highest virtue, except there is no such thing as genuine virtue in this world. We may do well at surviving for a time, but then we die. And that’s it.

This notion, it seems to me and with all due respect, is ugly. Again, it may be true, but we should all be rather depressed if it is. It also seems difficult to see how this idea is good. It’s difficult to see how anything like love and the desire to be good follows from this view. In fact, love and moral goodness are often denied as actual objective things on this view. There’s no doubt one can live lovingly and doing good, but it doesn’t follow from the worldview. It seems one has equal justification to steal and oppress.

A beautiful and good Christ

Now if Christianity is true, then there is a God who will bring judgment on evil doers. He will right ALL wrongs! There is, on this view, great hope. There is purpose for one’s life. Our fallenness and our brokenness are not the end of our story. We may be redeemed! We may be made new. In fact, the whole cosmos will be made new. We will know God as we are fully known. There is a distinct beauty to these ideas.

To be sure, there are beautiful ideas that are nevertheless false. And I’m not saying that Christianity’s beauty straightaway defeats Darwinian naturalism. We of course need to weigh the evidence. But where I am deeply compelled to believe is that, in addition to the intellectual case, I find the Christian thesis so very attractive.

So as we make a case for Christianity to our kids, I think they need to know that it is the greatest story ever told. And the story of Christianity provides us with a story and a purpose. It should also profoundly motivate us to live as Jesus lived, full of grace and truth. He loved the unlovely and the humble, but called out arrogance and religiosity.

I want my children think well. I also want them to understand genuine versions of alternative worldviews. But I’m also desperate for them to see this rich, full-bodied view of Christianity. I want my children to see a view that is intellectually robust, but also beautiful and good.

If you like this content, sign up to get new posts in your email inbox:

(Note: this is part 2 in a 3 part series. Part 1, Part 3)

In my previous post, I argued that one reason that many of our youth walk away from the faith is that they haven’t been properly exposed to alternative ideas. My concern is that we tend to send our kids to a college campus with a superficial confidence and this creates a crisis. In this series, I am offering 3 strategies that I think would help prepare our kids for this inevitable moment of exposure. The first strategy was to teach our kids how to think well. The second strategy is to teach alternative worldviews.

Teaching alternative worldviews

We of course need to teach our kids the Christian worldview (this will come in strategy #3). But when this is all that we teach them, they can be blindsided by the many alternative views in the world. Sometimes we teach them alternative worldviews, but we teach a thin shadow of the real thing. Or we merely disparage the views as if there is something wrong with people who hold those views. If Christianity is true and rational, we don’t need to be afraid of alternative views. We don’t need to game the system and make Christianity look like the only rational option in the world. We can show our children that there are real people who hold these real views. We can do it fairly and we can show them the most plausible versions of these views.

This of course needs to be done in an age appropriate way. The risk here is confusing a kid with too much too soon. It is hard enough to begin to think about a worldview and even harder to begin to think about other worldviews. But the basics, it seems to me, can be understood at a rather young age. It’s common for kids to think that everyone’s home is just like theirs. But it is an important thing to help your kids to see that not everyone follows Jesus and this can be understood early on. As the child matures, there will be opportunities to fill in the details. They should be able to understand that some think that there is no God at all and that Jesus didn’t do the things that are claimed in the Bible. They should be able to understand that many people in the world follow different teachings that are completely different from the teachings of Jesus. Others still follow Jesus’s teachings but add other writings (e.g., Mormonism). As they hit the preteen years and beyond, you can fill out more specific details of these views.

It’s really important that we spend time presenting these first without evaluation. We have, as a culture, lost the art of charitably understanding an opposing view. We tend to decide whether or not we agree with a view before we have even thoughtfully considered it. We seem to be afraid of this because we know it may cause us hard intellectual work, saying you’re not sure about something, doubts, or even to change one’s mind. We tend to do this exactly backwards. We tend to only want enough of an alternative view so that we can disparage it.

But here’s the payoff. When one has fairly presented a plausible version of a view, then I think one has earned the right to fairly criticize the view as well. This is, to me, what it is to teach. A teacher is not a mere presenter of views. As parents, we are called to guide. We are called to impart knowledge. This means, among other things, we show reasons for and against.

Is this indoctrination?

Now this is not mere indoctrination or brain washing. To see why, see strategy #1. We are teaching our children, as a first priority, how to think. Then, in strategy 2, we model what it is to think well in helping them consider contrary views. That way, when we charitably present ideas, both for and against, the kid doesn’t simply adopt what we say even if she does go on to adopt the view. They own the view. They’ve made it their own.

With this sort of approach will kids tend to adopt the views of their parents? Yes, they often will. But this is not evidence of bias or indoctrination as long as they thoughtfully believe these things for good reasons. This is also no different from most teaching situations. We tend to adopt the views of the teachers we’ve come to trust. This is how it was in my household growing up, in the seminary that I attended, and my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa regarding certain philosophical views. This is also how it goes for kids who grow up in secular settings, go to public school, and attend a secular university. They tend to adopt the views of those they have come to trust. The point is that when someone is passionate about a view and presents the view and points out what they take to be mistakes of alternative views, this can be quite persuasive. And that’s precisely how it should be.

But if we’ve taught our kids to think well, then there will be disagreement. And we’re going to have to be okay with that. If you’ve taught your kids well, they will not be mere clones of you. They may go on to not embrace your version of Christianity and they may even not embrace Christianity. This can be very difficult for parents to accept. But what’s the other option? Keep our kids sheltered from other ideas and hope for the best when they encounter them? As I said in the first post, this is largely how we’ve gotten here.

A far better strategy is to teach them to think well and present the case for and against Christianity in a fair and thoughtful way. They’ll make their decisions, but the discussion, no matter what the decision is, should be lifelong.

In the final post in this series, I’ll say what sort of case needs to be made for the truth of Christianity.

If you like this content, sign up to get new posts in your email inbox:

God can sometimes seem far away. In fact, there are times when we feel like we really, really need Him and yet he is not there, or so it seems. This has caused many to struggle deeply with whether God exists at all, since, after all, he could be more obvious, or so it seems.

This is a deep area of struggle, for some, and not one that I will minimize at all. I’ve been there too. And I suspect I will be there again.

But it is also an area of scholarly interest. The scholarly discussion can often feel like it is heartless. And, well, it is heartless. In the scholarly discussion, we are asking questions of a theoretical and technical nature, asking whether there is an intellectual problem here for the intellectual belief that God exists. The scholarly discussion doesn’t turn at all on your (or my) feelings about how obvious we want God to be. It only turns on whether God’s degree of obviousness is a logical problem, broadly construed, for the belief in God.

This is not to say that the scholarly discussion is not incredibly useful and even downright pastoral for our emotional struggles. Philosophy has helped me tremendously to be more grounded as a person and especially in my faith. It can seem heartless, but it is (or, at least, can be) good for our hearts and our minds!

The problem of Divine Silence (sometimes called the problem of divine hiddenness) is that there appears to be a logical tension with the following three claims:

1. God is not completely obvious
2. If God is all powerful, he could be completely obvious
3. If God is all good, he should be completely obvious

It seems that, at most, two of these could be true, but you cannot have all three. For example, one may say that (1) is false and think that (2) and (3) are true. That is, God is as obvious as he possibly can be. There is nothing he could possibly do to be more obvious than he is. This would be consistent, but one wonders if this is plausible.

A Christian may think that this is plausible on the basis of Romans 1:20. Paul says here that God has revealed himself such that he can be “clearly seen” in what has been created. But it is one thing to say that God can be clearly seen and it is another to say he is as obvious as he can be. Even if one thinks that God is abundantly clear, the logical problem is there so long as God could be more obvious.

And it seems that he could. Couldn’t he reveal himself to you and me the way he did to Moses in a burning bush? Couldn’t it be the case that every time one walks by a bush, it bursts into flames and one hears the deep voice of God? Or couldn’t we have an experience like the apostle Paul’s on the road to Damascus? Paul was literally blinded and verbally talked to. God could arrange the stars to say: “Believe in me. Sincerely, God”. It will seem to most of us that God could do these things. But if so, then (1) is true. So we have to deny one of the other claims.

What if one denied (2)? One could say that God is not completely obvious ((1) is true), and God is good and should be completely obvious ((3) is true). It’s just that he lacks the ability to be more obvious. I won’t spend much time on this option since anyone who thinks that God is all-powerful will think that God can do anything that is logically possible. So if God cannot be more obvious, then the sort of God we are interested in (i.e., an all-powerful one) does not exist.

So let’s consider denying (3). Here we ask if God is obligated to be completely obvious. The idea that God is obligated in this way is often, it seems, assumed to be true in many discussions of hiddenness.

But why think this is true? Why, we might ask, would God be obligated to make himself more obvious than he is? What would establish an obligation? Many people seem to think God has commanded us to believe in him and then he punishes us for eternity if we don’t. If God is going to justly punish us for disbelief, then God would be obligated to be more obvious to. But this is not the gospel! We are not condemned and punished for our disbelief. We are condemned and punished because we have broken the moral law and the moral law is sufficiently obvious to all.

Perhaps one could say that God is obligated to make himself more obvious out of his love for us and his desire for all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). But this again bears on the nature of the gospel. In desiring salvation for all is God merely desiring intellectual assent? Think about this for a minute. Consider James 2:

You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder (v. 19).

I want to suggest that mere intellectual assent is not what God is after. There are passages that call us to believe (e.g., John 3:16), to be sure. But in the context of these passages these are best read as being called to give our whole lives in faith. There were many erstwhile followers of Jesus that seemed to believe in him when they got to see him multiply fishes and loaves or heal people, but the moment he began describing the call of discipleship (taking up one’s cross, etc.), they departed. In fact, at times it seemed that the miracles and the healings almost worked against Jesus’s goal of true discipleship.

So if God is after whole life faith and discipleship and he is not after mere intellectual assent, then it seems God could be more obvious ((1) is true), but it wouldn’t achieve his plans and purposes for us.

Thus, God is not obligated to make himself more obvious. God need only be as obvious as it achieves genuine faith.

If you like this content, sign up to get new posts in your email:

There is one argument for the existence of God that is revered and loved by atheists and theists alike: the Ontological Argument for God’s existence. This is not to say that it is loved and revered by all. This argument has certainly had its enemies along the way. However, many, even those who don’t believe the conclusion, think it’s an exceedingly interesting argument. Ironically, it is also, by far, the least used argument in Christian apologetics. In this post, I try to show why it’s so terrific while attempting to make it (somewhat) more accessible.

The Greatest Conceivable Being

The ontological argument is an old argument. It was first developed by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11^th Century.

One thing I love about Anselm is that he couches the discussion in a devotional exercise. In reflecting on and praying to God, Anselm comes to see that his concept of God is a being “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” What he means by this is that God is perfect in every way, in every aspect. As a matter of concept, God, in all of his properties, is the greatest in every conceivable way.

Now I think that this already is an extraordinary accomplishment. What Anselm has done is clarified a proper understanding of the term God. In other words, one could call Zeus a god. But Zeus is clearly not the greatest conceivable being. Though he was very powerful, he had limits of all sorts, both in power and in moral shortcomings. Or an ancient Egyptian can think of the Pharaoh as a god. But clearly he is not God in this rich sense. I mean he’s really just some dude with a fancy headdress. When we reflect on this, we see that these limited gods are really more like super-humans than they are gods.

Anselm clarifies that something limited is quite simply not what he and many others mean by the term “God.” Anselm (and I) is not really all that interested in something finite or a God with limits. The God of interest (and our devotion) is the God who could not possibly be greater.

I actually think this is the very conception a typical (informed) Christian has in mind when the Christian affirms God’s existence. It also therefore informs Bible study, as well as theology and apologetics. For example, when an unbeliever argues that for God to wipe out whole people groups at a few points in the Old Testament as a problem, the Christian doesn’t simply concede. By contrast, if one claimed that Zeus does evil things, from time to time, a follower of Zeus would presumably simply agree and say that’s why one should make sacrifice to Zues. However, the Christian will argue that God is good even in light of these passages of extreme judgment and bloodshed (see Paul Copans excellent book for a defense of this).

Or, for an example from theology, many Christians reject open theism (the idea that, given human freedom, God does not know the future) precisely because it seems to make God limited. God doesn’t know (i.e., has a limited view of) what free creatures will do in the future. But how can God have this sort of limit, this sort of lack?[1]

The Argument

Okay, with this conception of God in hand, Anselm considers what he takes to be some logical implications. One sort of rough and ready way to interpret what Anselm claims in this argument is that God as the greatest conceivable being (the GCB for short) must have all great-making properties. That is, the GCB must be greatest in every respect. If there is a property that makes a being great, then the GCB must have it. So, for example, if it is greater to be all powerful than being limited in power, then the GGCB must be all powerful. If it is greater to be all knowing rather than limited in knowledge, then the GCB must be all knowing.

Now ask yourself this question: is it greater to exist or not exist? Is it greater to be a figment of one’s imagination or actually existing in reality? Anselm seemed to think that existence itself is a great-making property. If that’s right, then God as the GCB must have the property of existence because if he didn’t there would be something greater than the greatest conceivable being and this is a contradiction. Thus, we’ve got ourselves an argument for the existence of God on the basis of understanding him as the GCB. Here is Anselm:

Even a fool, when he hears of … a being than which nothing greater can be conceived … understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding.… And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.… Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality (Proslogium as quoted here) .

Let’s try to formalize this:

1. Everyone can understand God as the greatest conceivable being
2. If God exists as only a figment of the imagination, then I can conceive of something greater than the greatest conceivable being, namely, things that exist in reality.
3. But it is a contradiction to think I can conceive of something greater than the greatest conceivable being.
4. Therefore, God cannot be simply a figment of the imagination.
5. Therefore, God exists in reality.

Here’s another formulation that’s a bit simpler:

6. God is the greatest conceivable being (by definition)
7. The greatest conceivable being must have all great-making properties (by definition)
8. Existence is a great-making property. (premise)
9. Therefore, God has existence.

Gaunilo’s Objection

The immediate push back for Anselm was a Benedictine monk named Gaunilo. He was a contemporary of Anselm. Gaunilo argued that if this works for God, it can work for anything so long as we understand it as the greatest conceivable x. But it is absurd to think that we can argue the existence of anything so long as we prefix it with the greatest conceivable x. And therefore, by parody, the argument for God must be flawed as well. He gives an argument for the greatest conceivable Island. If we map it onto the argument above it might go something like:

10. Atlantis (a hypothetical island conceived in our minds) is the greatest conceivable island.
11. The greatest conceivable island must have all great-making properties.
12. Existence is a great-making property.
13. Therefore, Atlantis exists.

Now the problem with this argument is that premise 5 looks to be logically incoherent. More specifically, the notion of a greatest conceivable island seems to be incoherent. Plantinga has said:

…it’s impossible that there be such an island. The idea of an island than which it’s not possible that there be a greater is like the idea of a natural number than which it’s not possible that there be a greater, or the idea of a line than which none more crooked is possible. And the same goes for islands. No matter how great an island is, no matter how many Nubian maidens and dancing girls adorn it, there could always be a greater—one with twice as many, for example. The qualities that make for greatness in islands—number of palm trees, amount and quality of coconuts, for example—most of these qualities have no intrinsic maximum…So the idea of a greatest possible island is an inconsistent or incoherent idea; it’s not possible that there be such a thing.[2]

But what about the notion of a greatest conceivable being? Here it looks as if, unlike an island, a being can be genuinely the greatest—especially in the sense of being maximal. So a being can be maximal in knowledge. That is, the being can know all truths. A being can be maximally powerful. That is, the being can have the power to realize all logical possibilities. A being can be maximally good where all of the being’s actions are morally righteous.

So when it comes to things like islands, there is no maximal properties that constitute great making properties. But not so, when it comes to beings whose properties can be had maximally.

Kant’s Objection

The second historical and much more persuasive (at least for many) objection that is often brought up in connection with Anselm’s argument comes from Immanuel Kant. Kant says:

“Being” is obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing…Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposition “God is omnipotent” contains two concepts, each of which has its object—God and omnipotence. The small word “is” adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. If, now, we take the subject (God) with all its predicates (among which is omnipotence), and say “God is,” or “There is a God,” we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit it as an object that stand in relation to my concept (Critique of Pure Reason).

Kant’s push back then is that existence is not a predicate or a property. Why? Kant thinks that saying that something exists doesn’t further fill out a concept of something (i.e., doesn’t provide a genuine property of that thing). Imagine conceptually what it is to be a unicorn. If I know my unicorns, it is for a thing to be a horse with a single horn (and perhaps rainbow colored and whatever else). Though I believe that unicorns do not exist, it doesn’t seem the concept includes nonexistence as a property. If you were to be in the woods and a unicorn ran by you, you wouldn’t think that you now have to change the concept you previously had in mind. There’s the concept of a unicorn, on one hand, and then the question of existence, on the other. Or let’s say squirrels suddenly went extinct (i.e., squirrels no longer exist). You wouldn’t think that the concept of a squirrel has now changed. Rather we would simply believe that there are no instances of the squirrel concept (or something less nerdy).

If existence is not a property, then it can’t be a great-making property. That is, premise 7 of Anselm’s argument is false.

The Modal Version

Now this does seem to be a problem for the way the argument is stated above.[3] But contemporary defenders of the argument have given a fuller expression to thinking of God as maximal. That is, so far all we have talked about is God’s being maximal in properties. But there is, in a way, a richer sense of God as the greatest conceivable being. This is where we turn to a modal version of the argument (i.e., one that talks in terms of possibility and necessity). The crucial piece, it seems, of the modal version is to say that maximal greatness would be to exist as maximally great in all possible worlds. That is truly the greatest conceivable being. If this notion of a maximally great being that exists in all possible worlds is possible, then it follows that the maximally great being exists in the actual world (if that just blew your circuits, take the formal version slowly).

Here is one formalized version of the modal argument:

1. A being is maximally great in any possible world only if it is maximally great in every possible world.
2. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
3. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world. (Given 1, 2 and 3)
5. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.

Notice that this is formulated without making existence a property. So Kant’s objection is, in a way, sidestepped.

The most controversial premise here (at least in my mind) is premise 1. But when I ask myself what it would mean for a being to be perfectly maximal, then I find it very plausible that this being must be maximal in all possible worlds, not just some possible world or the actual world.

There’s of course a lot more that needs to be said but, at minimum, this makes an interesting case for the existence of the maximally great being.

If you like this content, sign up to receive my posts via email:

[1] Open theists have of course answered this sort of objection and the discussion is far more sophisticated than what I’m presenting here. However, I’m suggesting that OT has, for many, this intuitive drawback.

[2] Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom and Evil), 90-91.

[3] Plantinga doesn’t think it is a problem for the way he formulates Anselm’s argument. This is because Plantinga does not construe it in terms of great-making properties.

You’ve probably noticed along the way that there is a wee bit of disagreement when it comes to religious issues. Christians disagree with nonchristians on a host of fundamental issues, and (I know this will come as a shock) but Christians disagree with other Christians too. In fact, we disagree with great variety, creativity, and regularity!

What are we to make of this disagreement?

This can be seen as a challenge to religious belief. The rough idea is that religious belief is unjustified given the wide, varied, and regular disagreement amongst people who are all equally competent in forming their views.

Let’s unpack this. The first point is, no matter how smart and educated I am, there seem to be adherents of other faiths who are equally smart and educated. These are, what are called, my epistemic peers. According to Thomas Kelly, epistemic peers, as it relates to some specific question, are “equals with respect to their familiarity with the evidence and arguments which bear on that question.”^[1] It is also often added that peers are, on the whole, equals in terms of intellectual ability. So the epistemic peer in view here is one who has considered all the same evidence as us, is equally intelligent, and yet rejects the truth of Christianity.

The objection is that, given the radical disagreement among epistemic peers, the evidence for Christianity cannot be  compelling. If epistemic peers are looking at the same evidence and coming to radically different views, then the evidence must not be definitive. The Christian has a broad set of defeaters then for her claims. What are the defeaters? The defeaters are all the epistemic peers across all the different religious views. That’s a lot of defeaters!

In response, it is important to point out that the diversity of opinion is not simply a phenomenon of religious inquiry. There is incredible diversity among epistemic peers in disciplines, such as philosophy, science, economics, morality and politics. Most people don’t seem to mind holding a minority position in these areas. That is, it is common for there to be epistemic peers looking at the same evidence and deciding to affirm a different position and we don’t lose sleep about this. Why should it be different for religious topics?

Moreover, one will be hard pressed to find beliefs for which there is no dissent whatsoever from someone who looks to be an epistemic peer. For example, suppose that Smith believes that white supremacy is false and a morally abhorrent view. Let’s say that Smith has arrived at this view as a matter of careful reflection and it is a matter of strong conviction. However, suppose one points out that there are white supremacists out there, some of whom are presumably epistemic peers. Should this diminish Smith’s conviction that white supremacy is false? Hardly! He might (as I am) be at a loss to understand why someone would find white supremacy plausible. But it would seem to be intellectually irresponsible of him to lesson his conviction on the mere fact that there are white supremacists.

What seems unclear is whether there are clear epistemic peers, those who are truly looking at the same evidence in the same way as I am. There are many who I encounter who have clearly not worked very hard to fully appreciate the Christian arguments. There are definitely some who have carefully and thoughtfully considered some of the evidence, but even these are few and far between. The writings of the so-called New Atheists are a good example of this. In fact, atheist philosopher Michael Ruse makes this very point:

I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, “What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery…There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.^[2]

The point here is not to return the favor and merely ridicule Dawkins and company. It is to say that there are few who take the time and care to understand the opposing view. If that’s right, then my rationally justified belief shouldn’t suffer at all from existence of someone who disagrees in an uninformed way.

But what about those who thoughtfully reject Christianity? Michael Ruse says that he has given effort to understand what Christians are claiming and why they are claiming it. And so he doesn’t simply dismiss in the way of Dawkins, but he still definitely disagrees.

Are these who carefully consider Christianity epistemic peers? I think there is reason to say no, not at least in a strict sense of being an epistemic peer. This is of course not to say that unbelievers are epistemically inferior to Christians. Rather the point is that there is so very much that goes into forming our fundamental beliefs that it is at least plausible that no two people share a strictly identical epistemic situation. To see this we should first emphasize our limitations as knowers. There is only so much one can carefully consider in a lifetime. So though Ruse has given effort to understand certain Christian claims (and this is commendable), when I have heard Ruse speak, it seems clear to me that he has hasn’t fully considered all of the nuances of the Christian position. We have a limited bandwidth and no single person can carefully consider all alternative view. This is especially true when we consider the complex but important subtleties of arguments.

There are also many non-epistemic factors that affect our belief formation. We are not mere logic machines. Our upbringing and prior experiences certainly figure in to our belief formation, as does our hopes, fears and desires. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has said:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.^[3]

Now I don’t think that Nagel is irrational in his atheism just because he wants it to be true. As a world-class philosopher, he still presumably holds to his atheism on the basis of evidence. But the point is I don’t share his desire for atheism to be true. Thus his approach to the world is very different from mine.

These kinds of factors undoubtedly affect how we form our beliefs. I grew up at a Christian addiction recovery center. I grew up seeing the gospel change the life of guys who were so thoroughly broken by their addiction that if the recovery center didn’t “work,” then suicide was the only other legitimate option. I’ve also seen the gospel affect the lives of many, many people (including my own) during the course of my life and ministry. Presumably Nagel lacks this sort of experience. But I can’t shake its effect on me. Given this, could we ever be considered epistemic peers on this issue? It seems not.

Where does this leave us? I’d like to suggest that given the subtlety of the evidence and the way that we bring our desires and background to bear on what we believe, there are no identical epistemic peers. We might be equals in our general ability to discover truth, but this need not mean that we are identical epistemic peers. Rather it seems we all have a limited but nonidentical view of the world. Does this leave us condemned to skepticism? No because skepticism, as a view, has the very same issues! The skeptic has a limited view of the world too.

The point of all of this is to say that we can do no better than doing our level best to believe in accord with our evidence. After careful inquiry and reflection, we should believe those things that are best supported by the evidence that we have. If our best evidence points to atheism, then we should be atheists. If our best evidence points to Christianity, then we should so believe. I myself have a hard time seeing how one can look at this world and not see a wide variety of evidence for God. However, presumably my atheist friends think similarly about their atheism.

This brings up one last point in closing, the radical diversity of the world should, it seems to me, foster an attitude of intellectual humility in the realization that we may be wrong about some of what we believe. If I’m right, we have a very limited view of the world and so our engagement with others should reflect our limitations (i.e., treating others with respect, having genuine curiosity about what they believe, etc.). However, it seems to me to be an over-correction to think we cannot rationally believe something in the face of disagreement.

^[1] Thomas Kelly. “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement” in Oxford Studies in Epistemology (New York: Oxford, 2005), p. 174.

^[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/02/atheism-dawkins-ruse

^[3] Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, pp. 130–131, Oxford University Press, 1997.

I’ve argued (here) that doubt has instrumental value  since, when handled properly, it leads to truth, knowledge, and (since I think Christianity is true) to a greater faith. Though it seems a bit ironic, confident faith is, in my view, the result of asking deep and difficult questions.

One worry here is that this all sounds a bit risky. Is it wise to tell people, people young in the Christian faith, that they should doubt their faith? Admittedly this sounds a little crazy. And you should know that the last thing in the world that I want is to find out that someone walked away from the faith given my suggestion to doubt. It feels a whole lot nicer and safer to just have them remain as they are.

But here’s the problem, kids are walking away from the faith in droves! The statistics are not good. The most conservative numbers say that 3 out of 5 (60% of) Christian kids walk away (Barna). Other studies have it up to 75-80%. One study of Southern Baptists puts it as high as 88% of kids walking away by the age of 18 (SBC Family Life Council). I have four children. And I can do math. So this stat keeps me up at night.

It may be a bit risky to encourage some doubts. But let’s just be honest, what’s riskier? Having them consider deep and difficult questions that may cause them to struggle a bit or just loading them up with all the “right” answers and never have them seriously consider opposing beliefs? The current statistics suggest that the “let’s hope for the best” strategy is far riskier.

Now we’d be fools to think that these kids walk away from the faith only for intellectual reasons. There are a lot of things going on in college, and let’s just say it’s not all studying. You put a few thousand 18-22 year olds on a campus with little moral supervision and we can all guess what’s going to happen. For some students, it is a never ending party with a few papers and exams sprinkled in from time to time. Students, of course, find this tempting and choose the party over their faith. That happens and I’m not sure more apologetics will address what’s going on here.

But there are some (and many who this is true, at least, in part) are confronted with ideas contrary to their Christian faith and, lacking any satisfying answer, walk away for intellectual reasons.

These students often feel betrayed. They grew up in church learning about Christianity week in and week out. They were given the impression by pastors and parents that there were no legitimate challenges to the belief in God, the biblical claims about Jesus, the reliability and accuracy of Scripture, etc. They thought it is only the fool who denies the existence of God, or that there’s not a shred of evidence for Darwinian evolution, and that Scripture can withstand any and all tests. And then they find themselves amongst some of the smartest individuals they’ll ever meet in their lifetimes who defend each of these ideas in compelling and thoughtful ways.

I’ve got to be honest here, I think that our kids have been betrayed if they were told only idiots believe these things. Since many adults haven’t wrestled with the deep and difficult questions, it seems they try to get their kids into the same cognitive place of making the Christian assumptions. But it’s not working. It is a different world with our kids. It is not enough to assume its truth and hope for the best. Our kids are pummeled with hostility towards a conservative Christian faith. I believe that apologetics will cease to be just some hobby discipline for only the heady few. It will be the way of intellectual survival for the next generation!

But there’s an alternative.

We can help our kids, and those to whom we minister, feel the weight of the objections to Christianity. Will it cause them to doubt? It probably will, at least, a bit. But would you rather them have doubts while in your care or when they’re surrounded by thousands of hedonists pressuring them to all things unchristian? Here’s the beautiful thing, when they are in your care, you can walk with them through their doubts.

To be clear, I’m not recommending that one should be a mere skeptic, asking “But why?” for every claim that is made no matter what it is. It is of course great to ask why, but it is not great when the person is doing this only to be stubborn and deflect from really engaging in the reasoning.

I believe that apologetics will cease to be just some hobby discipline for only the heady few. It will be the way of intellectual survival for the next generation!

What I am recommending is that, together with our kids, we seek…I mean really and genuinely seek after…the truth by asking the deep and difficult questions. We take it slow and we do it together, but we begin to allow our kids to feel the force of the hard objections to Christianity. They are going to feel it at some point and so let’s have them feel it with you in the room. We also allow our kids to ask any question and push on any claim they don’t understand or find satisfying. We are seeking the truth and so we are not afraid of any question whatsoever. We show them the best answers we can for those questions. When (not if but when) a question comes and we don’t know the answer, we look into it together. We show our kids how to resolve, as best we can, these tensions. I want my kids to experience that. I want them to feel the force of an objection but then I want them to feel what it’s like to resolve that tension with robust answers. This is the way of confident faith.

Now it may seem like I’m just assuming that everyone will find every answer to every issue and everything is going to be super great. To the contrary, I think that this is hard and messy work. This is where there is indeed a risk. But I just have to speak from my own experience. I have found that Christianity’s resources to be deep wellsprings. I have devoted most of the last 20 years to this exact pursuit and I’m continually blown away by Christianity’s ability to provide an answer to the deepest and most difficult problems. This is not to say that everything is a slam dunk. There are a variety of issues where I find myself, in a way, minimally satisfied by the Christian answer even though some tension may remain. But there are apologetic slam dunks and when I consider the cumulative force of the case for Christianity, I find myself deeply satisfied intellectually (despite having a few questions that lack, so far, a deeply satisfying answer) and I know many others who would say the same thing.

Christians stand in a long and rich tradition of considering the hardest objections and offering thoughtful responses. In fact, there are many objections to Christianity historically that were best articulated by Christians! The shame of it all is that many Christians today think that this is somehow contrary to faith. But asking these questions was done historically as an effort for the purpose of a greater faith. The thought is that if Christianity can address our hardest questions, we come out with a deeper and more abiding faith. It can be a difficult process and almost certainly will include some doubts along the way. But we come away with truth and a deep faith. And that’s a great value indeed!

(If you like this content, follow me at @travdickinson)

Let’s just get this out of the way. Yes, as a Christian, I’m biased. I put more effort into following the teachings of Jesus and conforming my life to the way he lived than anything else I do. So, of course, I think Jesus is peerless and Christianity has had an unrivaled and positive effect on the world.

But I’m of the view that biases are not all bad. It certainly doesn’t make sense to say that, given a bias towards a belief, one cannot defend that belief in a rational way. We’d only be able to defend the views that we don’t believe and this makes no sense at all. I also want, for example, my doctor to be really biased towards his medical research. I don’t want him to come in to the exam room with a completely open mind! Every once and a while a doctor can be limited by his or her bias, and that’s of course the worry with a bias. But, on the whole, to have a bias is not necessarily bad. Likewise, I have a bias towards Jesus, it doesn’t follow that I don’t take him to be peerless and the movement he started to be good in a rational way.

So here are a few of the ways I think this is true.

First, I think that Jesus is peerless in the way in which he affected the course of human history. In one sense, this point is easily established given the fact that Christianity is the largest religion on the planet and has been for some time. In terms of sheer numbers, this seems to already establish the greatness of Jesus’s impact. This is especially extraordinary given that the large majority of Christian traditions require conversion. That is, unlike Islam and other hereditary religions, one is not born into the Christian faith, but must choose, even if born to Christian parents, to convert to Christianity. I and many of my friends and colleagues pray regularly that each of our children will come to Christ. I also know many Christians whose children have never made this decision, or made this decision when they were young, but later decided otherwise. And though this is deeply disappointing and remains a matter of prayer, they are not ostracized from the family. They are loved and accepted in virtue of who they are not for their religious commitment. This isn’t to say there are not social pressures in Christian families for children to sign on, but, on the whole and unlike many other religions, Christians recognize the need for each individual to make their own decision and they may walk away if they so choose.

But this only establishes the great impact of Christianity. It doesn’t establish that Christianity is good. I’d like to suggest that when we consider the impact of the Roman Empire in its Christian phase and what gives way to Christian Europe, and Christianity in the new world, the impact is inestimably good.

Now let’s get this out of the way as well. There’s no doubt there was a lot of corruption and injustice along the way. There has been and is A LOT of darkness and immorality that has been and is done in the name of Christ. I think we, as Christians, need to own this fact. However, if I had the space, I would argue that these injustices never map on to the life of Jesus. That is, when Christians or the church have done terrible things, they were (and are) acting profoundly unchristian. When I myself don’t live up to acceptable moral standards, I also am not exemplifying the life of Christ. But that will have to be a topic for a later post.

Even though there are these stains, I wish to argue that the impact of the movement started by and grounded in the teachings of Jesus and the other biblical writers has been overwhelming positive. In fact, most of what people would laud as the virtues of our society came to be only because of the Christian worldview. I’m not saying there is no way in which these virtues of our society could have came about. But, in a wide variety of cases, these goods came from Christianity. Moreover it seems especially clear that these are easily grounded in the Christian worldview as a natural fit. This of course why many of these things came about as Christian movements.

I realize the bigness of these claims, but that’s my pitch.

Here is a sampling.

Literacy

The Christian church has made tremendous efforts towards worldwide literacy. Wherever the church has gone (especially in protestant missionary efforts), so goes literacy. It is hard to quantify the global value of literacy. Christians have of course been motivated for people to understand Scripture, but have very often seen literacy as a value per se. Indeed, there are a variety of times and places in which the Christian pastor has functioned as the primary school teacher educating the youth in all aspects of education for some town or village.

Medicine

Prior to the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, the diseased and sick were largely despised and sent away. The early church saw itself as living out the gospel by caring for, at great risks to themselves, these outcasts. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, these efforts at caring for the sick are given expression in a much wider way. The later advent of modern medicine and medical education comes out of Christian Europe and continues to this day. It is so very common that hospitals and medical clinics all over the world—including places ravaged by poverty where they can’t afford to pay anything—were started by Christians who, again, saw themselves as living out the gospel by caring for the sick.

Science

To be clear, it was the early Greeks (before Christianity comes on the scene) who began to wonder about the skies and attempt incredible feats. Aristotle systematizes many of the sciences. So it is not like Christians invent science and of course one need not be a Christian to do good science. However, there are worldviews that do not easily make sense of the scientific enterprise. Whenever a worldview comes to think of the cosmos as unintelligible, then science grinds to a halt. This happened a few times with the Greeks (e.g., the Sophists who earned the ire of Socrates and Plato) and it took Plato and Aristotle to reset the world as broadly intelligible in the Greek mind. Given the Christian view of the world as God’s intelligently designed work of art and humans as caretakers of the world, it is no wonder that the scientific revolution comes out of Christian Europe. The idea motivating many scientists was a desire for knowing the creator by discovering facts about his world.

Universal Human Rights

It is very common today to believe that all humans have rights—indeed even unalienable rights. It doesn’t matter their station in life or what they look like. Each and every human deserves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness/property ownership. But why think this is true? Though this seems obvious to us, it is kind of a radical thought when you think about it. Why should all humans deserve life on, say, naturalism? The mosquito doesn’t have this right. Not even the higher animals have this right for most of us. But this is today taken as absolutely fundamental to a society. And if we trace this belief back to its roots, we will find the biblical teaching that all humans are created in the image of God and therefore have a kind of dignity and sanctity. What other worldview (other than a Judeo-Christian view) has held to this idea without being inspired by the Judeo-Christian view?

Again, Christians have at times lived in a radically inconsistent way with this idea. Christians in America owned slaves and even used the Bible to argue for this position. In fact, my own denominational tradition (Southern Baptist) was on the wrong side of that issue at the time. Again, it can be shown that these Christians were acting profoundly unchristian (and had terrible exegesis in their use of Scripture on this point) in treating other humans as no more significant than farm equipment. But what is often missed in this discussion is that the drive for the abolition of slavery was also one grounded in Christian values and led mostly by Christians. In other words, it is not the case that the Christian position in the era was pro-American slavery. It was a battle of Christian values and the infinitely more Christian position of treating everyone equally (thankfully) won the day no matter their skin color, position in life, and country of origin.

Culture

Christians have also made colossal contributions in art, literature, philosophy, music, etc. There is no way to be a specialist in any of these areas and not run into a robust Christian contribution. This contribution has waned significantly in the last century or so. But a life of expressing aesthetically can be driven in large part by a God of aesthetic beauty. This is a very natural fit. A life of creating beauty and artful expression is at home in Christianity and this can be seen as demonstrable in history of the arts.

Now this isn’t meant as bragging and I’m really trying to not overstate here. My point is simply that these massively important aspects of our world come naturally (both historically and conceptually) out of a Christian worldview.

It is the life and teaching of a Jewish rabbi from Nazareth who started a worldwide movement that has impacted the world in immeasurable ways.

Many Christians think that doubting is a bad thing. Is this right? Does finding ourselves in a place of doubt have value? Now no one thinks that doubting is altogether enjoyable and no one thinks one’s goal in life should be to be a big doubter! But as the name of the blog should suggest I think there is benefit when it comes to doubt and I think that having faith and having doubts are perfectly consistent states. And I have been known to encourage folks to embrace and investigate their doubts. So why do many Christians think doubting is a bad thing? One reason is there are a few passages of Scripture that seem to take, let’s call it, a low view of doubt and the suggestion is that doubting is contrary to faith.

The go to passage on this is in the first chapter of James. James tells us that if we lack wisdom, we should ask God. He goes on:

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways (James 1:6-8).

The first point to make is James has a particular context here. He is not talking about all situations of doubt. It doesn’t seem like he has in mind the perhaps more typical experience of doubt where the doubts just creep in beyond our control. People don’t typically set out to doubt their worldviews, but simply find themselves with questions they can’t fully answer.

But notice for James to say that we shouldn’t doubt, suggests that the doubt in view is under our control. As a general matter of principle, if it makes sense to say “don’t x,” then x is something we can do or can refrain from doing. It makes no sense to go to my one of my kids and say “don’t be human” or “stop thinking…about anything.” These are things that are beyond their control and I’ll likely only get strange looks from them. By contrast, it makes a lot of sense to say “stop taking your brother’s toy without asking” or “don’t light the house on fire” since it is entirely possible for them to refrain from doing this.

If James has in view a person who shouldn’t doubt, then it seems that James has in view a Christian who is already completely confident in his or her faith. That is, it is in the ideal, a Christian person should not doubt God’s willingness to provide wisdom. His point is it is very inconsistent for a person who has every reason in the world to trust God to provide wisdom to simultaneously doubt that God will provide it when needed. This is being double-minded and those who are fully mature should, well, knock it off.

What James is not addressing is how one comes to a place of full confidence. It is here, I’d like to suggest, that doubting is (or at least can be) a good thing. Again, it is not good in the sense that we want to remain at a place of doubt (see James 1:6-8). But it is beneficial for a greater good—growing in our confidence. The good of doubting, I’d like to suggest, is instrumental. That is, doubt when handled properly leads to truth and knowledge (and, since I think Christianity is true, it can and should lead to a more confident Christian faith!).

Tim Keller has said that doubts function for faith in a way similar to antibodies in the human body. When we ignore our doubts or just simply try to stop doubting, this doesn’t typically go well for us. Faith without some doubts is not a healthy faith. The doubts may go away for a time but they tend to come back, and they often come with friends! By investigating our doubts, we press in more deeply to our faith. We are forced to ask deep and difficult questions we have been too afraid to ask. This can of course be a bit scary and intimidating. But if the Christian faith is true and reasonable (as I think it is), then we will find answers to these questions. This isn’t to say that we will resolve all issues and we often have to live with some tensions. There are quite a few deep and difficult questions for which I have overall satisfying answers but not knock down drag out answers. There are many things that I still think about and consider whether there are perhaps better answers. This can also take a significant amount of time. This is hard work, but it is very satisfying work since we are coming to a place of truth and knowledge about the deepest and most important issues.

And here is the beautiful thing. It is because of the doubt that we come to a place of confidence and greater faith in these truths upon which we settle. Once one can see one’s way clear of some doubt, one comes to a place of confidence. We not only find truth and confidence for ourselves, but we are now equipped to help others walk through similar quandaries or thoughtfully answer the objection from a hostile inquisitor. We do this with confidence.

And here comes the teaching in James. If you need wisdom confident Christian, ask God without being double-minded since it would be silly to doubt God when we are rationally confident that God has the ability and promises to provide wisdom and guidance when we ask.