A logical look at Christianity

Before I believed in God, my attitude towards Christianity was that it's a good philosophy, but not much more. My opinion of Christ was that He was a good man promoting a dedication to spirituality and peace, but that His claims to divinity were either a lie or dementia on His part, or something uninvitedly bestowed upon Him by overzealous followers.

I completely bought into evolution and the idea of a natural origin for our universe, finding it much more logical than the idea that the Earth was only a few thousand years old and that all species were created at roughly the same time.

Then I remember one night looking up at the stars in the sky and contemplating the universe, and really began asking myself if it was really likely that all of this happened without any sort of guidance. We keep looking at things in reverse, starting with what we have and trying to figure out how it got to be this way. But if you take the same scientific theories and look at them from a forward perspective, they don't make sense. They say the universe started with a big bang. Even putting a '?' over whether this was creating matter from nothing, or if it was transforming previously-existing matter, and just starting with the big bang itself, I asked myself if what we were seeing today could be the result of such an explosion. Did the big bang create an orderly universe, or did the universe become orderly out of chaos all on its own? Either idea is illogical from a scientific viewpoint, violating a law of thermodynamics. Explosions never create order, and non-living nature tends to move from order to chaos, not the other way around. Yet science claims that nature became so incredibly orderly that life could be created and sustained for billions of years. Looking at it in forward perspective suddenly made things seem very hard to believe.

Evolution also began making less sense. Starting with protocells about 4 billion years ago, is it logical that, without any external guiding force, they would evolve into something as incredibly complex as homo sapiens? Remember that, according to evolution, every step is driven by chance alone, but that nature favors some steps over others.  I'm not saying that evolution from protocells to humans DIDN'T happen (though I don't personally believe it did), or that there was never a big bang (I believe there was), but I'm saying that an intelligent guiding force, something not observable in nature, is a better explanation for how these things could have happened.

For more information on the idea of a created universe, click here--->

Now that I rather suddenly embraced the idea of God, did I also embrace Christianity? No, I did not. I knew Christians.  I liked Christians.  I even went to church on occasion and considered myself a pseudo-Christian.  The philosophy was good, but I just couldn't buy the idea that Jesus' resurrection was an actual historical event.  I'm the kind of person that, no matter how right something FEELS, I can't believe it if it doesn't make sense in my head.  When I finally decided to take a closer look at the evidence for the resurrection, I wasn't doing it out of a desire to find an excuse to believe - I just wanted to know.  I was quite comfortable with the idea of the resurrection being a myth, but I wasn't comfortable with the idea that it was real and I just didn't know it.  Whatever the truth was, I wanted to know.

I still had a lot of problems with Christianity, such as its apparent dependence on rituals, and I was naturally turned off by the televangelists, and I also couldn't buy the idea that Christianity is the only way to salvation, that Christians are right and everyone else is wrong. My original beliefs were that God urges us to treat our fellow man with love and respect, no matter what religion (or lack thereof) that we claim, but that any 'eternal life' we receive is only in being remembered by friends and family.

But then I got to thinking that if God made human beings capable of knowing Him, then He obviously cared about us, and wouldn't allow such widespread belief in an afterlife to flourish in His name if absolutely nothing came after. Besides, if God was a spiritual being who was eternal, and our souls are spiritual entities as well, why isn't it possible that our souls are eternal?

I took a harder look at Christianity, most specifically Jesus' claims to diety and the idea the He rose from the dead. One question I had to ask myself is why, if Christianity is based on false claims about a man being equal to God, would God allow Christianity to thrive like it has? Wouldn't God be upset at people making such a claim? It's been my experience that lies don't last very long. They tend to rust with time. One of the reasons I still can't completely reject evolution is that it has gained momentum instead of collapsing, and evolution has only been around 150 years or so. Christianity has been around for almost 2000 years, and has grown to almost 2 billion members, more than any other belief system on Earth. If it was founded on a lie, it would almost certainly not have lasted so long or grown so large.

I also find a lack of logic behind the idea that Christ, or His immediate followers, were deceived or were liars. If Christ was a deceiver or a liar, He could not have been raised from the dead. If Christ WAS raised from the dead, then obviously He was exactly who He claimed to be. If He was not raised from the dead, then His disciples were either liars or were somehow deceived to believe that He was raised. There's a saying that 'myths do not make martyrs', yet the early apostles willingly faced persecution, and continued to spread the word of Christ's resurrection (often from prison) to people who would almost certainly face persecution as well. I can't comprehend the logic of their doing this over something they knew was a lie. If they knew that Christ wasn't resurrected, then they knew that they had no hope of eternal life, and they would not have been very willing to lay down whatever lives they had left in His name. You would think, logically, that at least ONE of them would give up a confession to Rome. They would have, at the very least, shown some sign of hesitation and regret at this point, but they show only perseverence and optimism in their writings in the New Testament.

I know most Christians haven't thought things through like I have, but I'm a skeptical person by nature. Christianity is without a doubt the most scrutinized of all faiths, and the one faith that has best withstood the scrutiny. It's based not only on faith, but on logic as well as history, archeology, and science. The key to Christianity is Christ's resurrection, something which, if a hoax, could easily be proven a hoax. If it was a hoax, you would think there would be SOME evidence to support this idea, or at the very least a reasonable theory for why early Christians would face so much persecution for something that they had to have known was a lie. Instead the theories are getting more and more ridiculous, such as the theory that Christ was actually identical twin brothers, one of whom died on the cross and the other of whom claimed to be resurrected, or my personal favorite, that Christ somehow survived His crucifixion and, despite having nails driven through his feet and a spear through His chest, was fully recovered and walking around three days later.

For a more in-depth look at the evidence for Christ's resurrection, click here--->

Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that what I am offering is absolute, irrefutable evidence for God's existence or Christ's resurrection. To believe in either one will always take a degree of faith, which is as God wants it to be. After all, faith that is dependent on proof is not faith. But I definately feel that belief in God and Christ is not illogical faith, but is, in fact, more logical than atheism or agnosticism or any other contrary belief system.

Many people have expressed difficulty buying into the stories from the book of Genesis, for example. Many Christians do not believe in them other than in the metaphorical sense. I don't know for 100% certain that Adam and Eve were real people, or that the Genesis account of the flood is accurate. These events obviously took place hundreds of years before they were written down. However, I do believe that we should not disregard these stories as having no meaning, but whether we take it as literal or metaphorical meaning is up to the reader. If the stories of Adam and Eve or Noah's ark were absolutely disproven, the result on Christianity would be minor. The only thing that could potentially destroy Christianity would be evidence that Christ's resurrection, or a great deal of information within the New Testament, was a lie. I know there are some contradictions in the NT, such as the events surrounding Peter's denial of Jesus, but any contradictions are minor and easily understandable.

For more information on the contradictions, click here--->

I know a lot of people claim there is no evidence for God, but I disagree. I say the best way to determine if something is true is the scientific method, which is to make a theory, determine what we would expect to observe if the theory is true, and then see if we are observing what we would expect to observe.

If God, as described by the Bible, is real, what would we expect to observe? We would expect a very orderly world (it is) in which most of the problems are caused by sin (they are), a world in which God, a spiritual being, is not physically visible (He is not), in which most people believe in God, but some do not (most do, some do not).

If God does not exist, what would we expect to observe? With what we know of natural laws, we would not expect much, if any, order in the universe (but we see much order), or, more likely, no universe at all (since matter cannot be created by natural means)

And how, if there is no God, would we explain the effectiveness of prayer? If we were praying to a non-existent diety, wouldn't the results be non-existent, or at least nothing that couldn't be explained by some type of placebo effect? Yet there have been scientific studies on prayer showing that praying for someone has an affect, even if that person has no way of knowing he is being prayed for. A lengthy study at the University of San Francisco Hospital, where they divided almost 400 cardiac care patients into 2 groups, one of whom was prayed for by Catholics and Protestants, and the other of whom was not prayed for, gave results so remarkable that if it had been a drug, and not prayer, that was being studied, it would have been heralded as a breakthrough. The prayed-for group had fewer deaths and far less reliance on antibiotics and other medical treatment. The study was done under the most rigorous of scientific conditions, with not even the doctors and nurses who cared for the patients knowing who was in what group. There have been similar studies done with similar results, including tests on mentally ill patients.

Hopefully I've given you some food for thought here. If you are a non-believer, please consider what I have said. You have nothing to lose, and, perhaps, everything to gain. God bless.

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