The Logic

A part of the current Christian culture is having a “testimony”; and for want of a better term, this is mine. Often peoples’ testimonies follow a standard progression of rebelliousness, living for the self, finding the hollowness and destruction that follows that, and having a spiritual experience with God either directly, through the spirit, or through the Bible, or through the love of another Christian. These elements: love, grace, and forgiveness, are fundamental to life in Christ, but less common in conversion stories are the three elements of my conversion story: logic, reason, and doubt. And especially doubt. There’s no right, or “better” way to come to Christ, but this was mine.

In short, it was actually the arguments against Christianity that most drove me to it. It was being at school and learning about the material world, learning to reason through logically about the world around me, and doubting what was told to me in class just as much as I doubted what I was taught in Sunday school.

The thing about the materialist point of view, and by that I mean the people who preach that you can only believe in what you can see and quantify, is that the things that you can’t see or quantify are so massively important. You only have to step a short ways into the scientific community, say, to see the two faces of it. On the outside is this adamant front that says that all answers are within, science explains everything. But pick up any popular science magazine and you’ll see all the glee and exuberance at what is still unknown and left to find out in the “scientific world”: gravity, dark matter, anti-matter, just plain regular matter. And there are wonderful theories: Theories of Everything, String-Theories, Grand Unified Theories, and then the apparently anything-goes mirrorland of Quantum Electro-Dynamics. I found all of that exciting and thrilling, and yet there is this scientific hypocrisy persisted: science answers all questions/isn’t it wonderful how many questions we still have?

What materialist and theologist both agree on completely is that we are both here, and that there is a “here” to be on. There is a created world, and it was created by a creative force. Something is here and so something made it, and for myself (and many Christians) I see no reason why we can’t call that something God. Materialists suddenly balk at that, because God implies a consciousness, but I don’t see why that should immediately be taken off the table. There certainly is a mental world, a conscious world, why should that not have been created also, and have a point of origin? And why would that also not be a part of the original creative force that made everything? And then there are the abstracts which, unlike the mental world, leave no physical trace: love, hate, ambition, kindness, lust, what we could call the moral world — why would these not also be aspects of the original creative force, especially when you can plainly divide those moral aspects into creative (or generative) and destructive (degenerative)? And as all these elements of material, psyche, and spirit met together in each person, why would they not also meet in that original creative force?

So why not call this first creative, mental, and moral force God? The scientists and materialists said the universe was bigger than we could imagine and I agreed. I went further, in fact, in believing that it is even bigger than they imagine, since they are determined to still put limits on it and deny that there is an emotional or moral aspect to it (or at least that those aspects have meaning*).

And if there was such a three-in-one entity (which also encompassed all that we still have yet to find out about the universe, see par. 3), would it not want to reach out and make itself known to us, in those three (or more) aspects? And if it did, at some point in human history, would it not look almost exactly as was reported in the four eyewitness accounts of the gospels?

Everyone will have to follow their own logic and heart in that, but I answered yes. And of course, once I did, and once I had created this new logical framework to what I believed, I found that people had been inventing exactly the same framework, very calmly and routinely for millennia. Literally for thousands of years people have been reasoning themselves into the Christian church. Thomas Aquinas is one whom I am fond of, one of the first of the rigorous logicians. So to, C. S. Lewis, although he always seemed rather condescending, in the natural way of an Oxford don. But G. K. Chesterton was the most profound reasoner, for me. Here was someone who had already followed the same paths that I had, but quicker, easier, and with more awareness and clarity than I had the capacity. His Introduction to Job, for instance, already says what I am trying to say here with almost effortless efficiency:

In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting , to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

And the conclusion of Job itself is summed up “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man,” which is exactly what I have found to be the case.

And of course, the Bible itself was consistently uncompromising in saying that God is not something that can ever be explained, reduced, or limited, even though He can be known — in fact there is little point to anything else if you do not know Him, which is only to say that there is no point in living in this world if you do not fully engage in all aspects of it, to love, live, and feed not on yourself, but on the things that are greater than yourself, the mysteries of the seen and unseen universe.

So I had no choice to be a believer. In fact, none of us have a choice in what we believe — but some people prefer the lie to the reality. But in doubting and testing the truths that I was told from every quarter, I found that the Truth always stood standing when I had finished, and that everything that fell away was meaningless obfuscation, the effect of which was to make my world smaller.

What I was forced to believe was this: that there is a God, that He loves us, and that He sent His son Jesus Christ in order that we might be closer to Him. And understanding that truth is freedom.

 

*Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion was a small revelation in itself. A man who claims complete rationality in all of his beliefs has presented us with a book full of subjective, emotional speculation. For a cold rationalist who claims to put reason above emotion, he sure does seem to hate a lot.

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