Why I'm Christian

After an embarrassing conversation with a friend, in which I wasn't able to offer up a single halfway convincing reason why she should listen to me and take Christianity seriously, I thought it might be time to lay out why I've come to believe. Both on this blog and in real life, I've been far too vague and circumspect about my beliefs thus far - allusive and elusive, to the point where one could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing rather illusive. In part, this is because so many of my reasons for believing remain frustratingly hard to communicate. But only in part. It's not like my beliefs are based solely on faith and feelings, and I could at least share the parts that are communicable.

So I will. In this post I'll be giving a collection of anomalies and oddities, some big and some small, that I find hard to account for if Christianity isn't true. This isn't intended to be an in-depth defense of my faith, of course - I'll be proceeding in point form, and offering only a brief elaboration on each point, ignoring many potential counterarguments along the way. As a result I don't expect to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.

Instead, maybe read this post with an anthropological spirit. If you've ever been curious as to how an avowed atheist, one who at least claims to be of sound body and mind, comes to convert to (of all things) Christianity, here's your chance to find out - we do exist, and there are more of us than you might think.

So, why do I believe? Let me count the reasons.

1. In the beginning...

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." (Genesis 1:1-2, KJV)

The account of creation given in Genesis is strikingly unique. Compared to every other creation story I've ever heard, it sticks out like a sore thumb. It's abstract, to the point, and non-fantastical - no cows vomiting up the cosmos, no bickering sibling-deities warring over the fate of humanity. Just a single God, utterly devoid of personality, creating the universe from nothing - it's almost too boring to have been made up. Of course, the very nature of its simplicity means it would be silly to argue that it couldn't have been created by human authors. But it is a noteworthy fact that of all the ancient cultures (at least that I'm aware of), only one ended up with such a minimalist and austere account of how they came to be.

2. A thousand-year story

The Old Testament as a whole is similarly striking - I know of no other book like it. Despite being written by dozens of different authors over the course of more than a millennium, it is a densely interwoven text, with a cohesive feel that I find hard to account for - Peterson memorably described it as "the world's first hyperlinked text", and that seems exactly right to me. As a Christian, I look at the Old Testament and see a story: a singular, coherent narrative, where God gradually and slowly reveals himself to a chosen people, teaching them only what they're ready to hear, and giving them hints, through the prophets, as to the direction things were heading. As an atheist, I'm left wondering where on earth all this narrative continuity and unity of voice and purpose, extended over centuries, came from.

Courtesy Jordan Peterson. A map of the 63779 cross-references in the Bible.

3. A thousand-year story, concluded

Every story needs a conclusion, and part of what makes the Old Testament a story (rather than just an assorted collection of myths, histories, and wisdom) is that all throughout it is leading up to a climax: the Jews were promised, and expected, a Messiah. Under an atheistic view of the world this was simply a false hope - no such Messiah was forthcoming, and they should have ended up waiting forever (and indeed, many still wait). But someone did come along claiming to be precisely that Messiah, and whatever else you can say about him, boy did he have a big impact on the subsequent unfolding of history. To me it seems odd, to say the least, that anything like that should have happened.

Now, did Jesus look enough like the promised Messiah to count as the culmination of the Old Testament story? I suppose that's the infinity-dollar question. A lot of people would say: no, he didn't. Clearly he wasn't what the Jews expected - they were looking for a warrior-king, come to restore the Kingdom of Israel to glory, which Jesus certainly wasn't. When I look at Jesus though - what he taught, how he lived, and most importantly how he died - I think: yeah, this fits. This in fact seems exactly like how God might choose to cap off the first part of His story: in a way that no one expected (and no one, I think, could make up) but that only seems more perfect the more you look into it.

4. Prophecies (maybe) fulfilled

Next, there's the many prophecies that Jesus is said to have fulfilled. To be honest, it's hard to know what to make of these: some are vague to the point of uselessness. Others the authors of the Gospels could have simply fudged after the fact - it's easy enough to claim that someone was born in Bethlehem, after all. Still others could have been (and indeed, likely were) consciously fulfilled by Jesus (who would have been aware of them, of course). Some, however, seem quite specific, and involve things that would have been out of Jesus' control. Taken together, I personally find the prophecies to be compelling evidence, but much of that hinges on the fact that I think the gospels are accurate and honest retellings of the life of Jesus. Absent that belief, I can see why others wouldn't much be swayed.

5. True-to-life accounts

Speaking of which: I think the gospels are accurate and honest retellings of the life of Jesus.

This is a big one, maybe the big one. The standard story, or at least what I used to believe, is that the gospels are as much myth and legend as they are historical accounts. They contain maybe seeds of truth - the stories were based on something - but they grew so much in subsequent retellings, and became so distorted and exaggerated, that to use them to try to figure out what actually happened 2000 years ago is a pointless endeavour. They certainly can't be taken as (ahem) gospel truth.

Personally, I no longer think this story holds up. For one, I think there's a pretty strong case that the gospels were written by the people that the church claims they were written by: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Which if true, means that two of them were written by actual apostles, who were direct eye-witnesses, and two by close companions of apostles. All of sudden that leaves a lot less room for legends to have gradually developed in some kind of organic, game-of-telephone type fashion.

For another, the gospels really don't read like legends. If they were quasi-mythical accounts, I would expect them to feel more...optimized, somehow. Tailored to soothe egos and flatter pre-existing beliefs. Instead they're strange and specific and inscrutable and challenging. They contain odd details. The apostles are constantly embarrassing themselves and misinterpreting Jesus. Jesus himself is a baffling figure, never failing to constern and confound those around him. What the gospels read like, to me, are accounts written by people whose lives were deeply and profoundly touched by something they could not explain or understand, and who were therefore committed to giving an accurate, honest and faithful description of what had happened to them. In short: they read like truth.

To quote C.S. Lewis on the Gospel of John:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read.

6. The miracles

What to make of the miracles, though? Here we have stories of Jesus turning water into wine, raising the dead, walking on water - fantastic to say the least. If ever there were some extraordinary claims that demanded extraordinary evidence, it would be these. And what do we have to support them? A few measly purported eyewitness accounts, with little in the way of independent corroboration, from 2000 years ago. How could we possibly get enough from those to pierce through the fog and veil of history and know with any kind of certainty what happened so long ago?

Well again, I probably won't change any minds, but I'll say a few things. For one, we need to stop with all this "2000 years" nonsense. That's not how writing works. As soon as the gospels were put down into words, they became time capsules: the events of Jesus' life were a handful of decades old when they were first written down, they're a handful of decades old right now, and they'll be a handful of decades old for the rest of time, as long as people are around to read about them. Words, faithfully preserved, don't age. So the question becomes: could a convincing enough set of eyewitness accounts today, in 2022, lead you to believe that something extraordinary had happened in 1980 or 1990? And to that I find myself saying: yeah, maybe actually. If the witnesses seemed trustworthy enough, and the events dramatic enough that they weren't likely to have been forgotten or distorted in the subsequent decades, I might believe them. Especially if the events helped explain otherwise puzzling and unaccounted for facts (like say the rapid growth of a persecuted religious movement, which we'll get to).

I'll also point out that the miracles in question don't really admit half-explanations. Even as an atheist I found this uncomfortable: if you want to say that Lewis was wrong, and that they're exaggerated legends, then what exactly were the seeds of truth that gave rise to the legend of Jesus the water-walker, or Jesus the raiser of the dead? He hopped on some rocks? Lazarus was just sleeping? They're kind of all or nothing stories. It seems to me that if you want to deny them, you really do have to assume they were made up whole cloth. And these days I find that harder and harder to do.

Finally, I'll note that while some people loved and revered him, and others hated him, everyone appears to have taken Jesus seriously. In the gospels we see plenty of people trying to explain the wonders he worked as sorcery, or the doings of demons, but not many people claiming he worked no wonders at all. And course of whatever happened, we know that he stirred up enough trouble, and was viewed as enough of a danger, to get himself crucified. If all he were was a fraud and a charlatan, I'd have expected to see much less in the way of denouncement, and much more in the way of dismissal.

7. The uncanny Rabbi

At this point I've read several books on the life and teachings of Jesus (along with the gospels themselves, of course), and from them a picture emerges that makes one thing abundantly clear: there was something very, very strange about this man. No one knew quite what to make of him - he seemed to glide through life, at times severe and commanding, at times impossibly gentle, forever confounding expectations, and always with an aura of complete authority and unflappability that nothing seemed able to penetrate. I know of no other way to put it than to say that he was deeply and thoroughly uncanny.

His teachings, too, were odd and enigmatic. Some were straightforward enough: love thy neighbour, do as you would be done by. But then he would go on to talk adamantly about how we needed to eat of his flesh, or be born again of water and Spirit, or how he himself was the only way to salvation. And yet, for all of their strangeness and inscrutability, taken together his teachings don't seem random or arbitrary - on the contrary, to me they come across as having a deep and abiding logic to them, a cohesiveness and harmony that only comes out more and more strongly the more you study them.

Now, are his teachings so perfect, his actions so strange, that they could only have come directly from God? If they are, it's at least possible to miss that fact: I read the gospels as an atheist and certainly didn't fall down on the spot and start to pray. In that sense, at least, the evidence given in the bible doesn't immediately compel one to believe in the divinity of Jesus. But I will say that when I look at his life and teachings, and try to come up with anything in them that actually contradicts the notion that he was God - something that makes me say "nah, God definitely wouldn't do that" - I find myself hard-pressed to do it. And with every other human being I've ever met or read about, that's a pretty easy exercise.

8. The trilemma

This is a famous argument, most commonly associated with C.S. Lewis, who popularized it. I'll just quote him directly:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

The argument is often summarized as "liar, lunatic, or Lord": either Jesus knew he wasn't God (liar), he mistakenly thought he was God (lunatic), or he was what he claimed to be (Lord). Pick one.

What to make of this? Well, of the three, liar seems the least tenable to me: it's hard to imagine someone going through one of the most painful deaths it's possible to endure for the sake of something they knew to be a lie - Jesus was nothing if not sincere. Most people, I think, settle on a kind of compartmentalized lunacy: it's overly simplistic, they say, to talk about someone being "completely sane" or "completely insane". In reality, it's perfectly possible for a person to have delusion beliefs in one domain, while appearing quite normal (even brilliant) in other domains. So yes, Jesus did indeed have some kind of mental illness, leading to a pathological belief that he was God, but there's no "mystery" we need to account for in the fact that he taught lucidly and wisely on a wide range of subjects - that's just how delusions work.

This is more or less what I used to believe, but I no longer find it convincing. I just don't think the compartmentalization idea works at all: you simply cannot separate out the moral teachings of Jesus from his claims to be divine - they are so deeply and thoroughly intertwined as to be essentially one and the same. If Jesus was truly deluded about being the Son of God, then that delusion suffused his entire life, to the point of informing and underlying every single thing that he said and did. And if that's true, then I have a hard time explaining why his teachings made so much sense, and why he seemed so consistently and utterly sane.

I'm with Lewis: I think you do have to either fully accept Jesus as the Son of God, or fully reject him as a delusional and self-aggrandizing (though oddly humble) cult leader - a mad but meek megalomaniac. And since I can't do the latter, I find myself having to go with Lord.

(I should also note that there's a fourth option: many scholars today argue that Jesus himself never actually claimed to be God during his lifetime. They say that he was indeed just a moral teacher, and that the claims to divinity he supposedly made were fabricated and inserted into the gospels later, after his death. Personally I don't find these arguments at all convincing, but it is a commonly held scholarly opinion, so it deserves mention)

9. A tense saying

This one seems almost too trivial to bring up, but I find it oddly hard to ignore. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking to some people about how he knew Abraham, who lived more than a thousand years before that time. When they ask how this could be, he says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." (John 8:58, KJV).

To my mind this is just an odd thing for a human being to think of to say. It is of course exactly how God might talk, being timeless and eternal. But otherwise it's borderline ungrammatical nonsense. Apparently it's not just a translation issue either: from what I understand, the same clash of tenses is present in the original Greek as well.

Now again, is this sentence so strange that no human being could possibly have come up with it? No, of course not. Clearly Jesus at least thought he was God, and maybe that belief so pervaded all his thinking that he would talk in such a timeless fashion. Or maybe he never said it, and the line was inserted later for the purposes of verisimilitude. Or maybe he was simply referencing the Old Testament, where as I understand it we see similar odd usages of the present tense (but that one just pushes the problem back, of course - then we have to account for those usages).

Obviously this one is anything but conclusive, and I wouldn't go to church based on it. It just strikes me as strange, and not the kind of thing anyone would think to make up.

10. The sudden and unanimous belief in the Resurrection

This is another case where we have an event that happened thousands of years ago, it seems like it should be impossible to arrive at any definitive conclusion about what actually took place, and yet I find it difficult not to believe.

Note that the thing we have to explain isn't some particular anomaly about the events following Jesus' crucifixion. I used to think that the case for the Resurrection rested solely on a few scant details mentioned in the bible: how did the body of Jesus go missing, when there were said to be guards present? The stone in front of Jesus' tomb would have been too heavy to move once it was put in place - how did it get rolled away? These indeed seem far too tenuous to draw much in the way of conclusions from.

But those aren't the troubling things. At least to my mind, the difficult thing to explain about the events surrounding the supposed Resurrection is quite simply the belief in the Resurrection. All of a sudden, for an unknown but apparently compelling reason, every single apostle and many people around them started claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them personally. They proceeded to devote the rest of their lives to preaching this claim, in the face of persecution. They never wavered in their claims. And a significant fraction of them went to painful deaths as martyrs without recanting. I have a hard time accounting for the sheer level of unanimity and conviction that we see, if the whole thing were simply made up and based on absolutely nothing.

And again, we have those pesky stories. The accounts given in the gospels of the post-Resurrection appearances by Jesus are very specific: he appears to large numbers of people at once. He talks to them and interacts with them. He allows them to touch his wounds. He sits down to eat with them. There is no possible way of dismissing these stories as "visions", the kind of thing where you think you see your dead grandfather in the street for a second. They have the same all-or-nothing quality that we've seen a couple times already: either you have to accept them as more or less true, or write them off as complete fabrications.

Only here it's much worse. If the stories were made up, then the apostles would have to know they were made up. They would know they were preaching a falsehood. I can definitely see someone going to their death for something they knew to be true. I can maybe see someone going to their death for something they thought to be true, but didn't have any solid evidence for. But I cannot see someone going to their death for something they knew for a fact to be a lie.

11. Unexplained growth

This is one of those nagging things I was never able to account for as an atheist, but just brushed aside as one of the many mysteries of life: why did Christianity grow so quickly after Jesus' death? In fact, why did it grow at all? The following that Jesus accumulated during his lifetime is easy enough to explain: you can suppose that he was one of those rare, impossibly charismatic figures that can inspire people to follow them through the sheer force of their personality - a guru and cult leader par excellence.

But once Jesus is dead, all of that is gone. We're left with some not-particularly-impressive apostles, who barely seemed able to understand Jesus' teachings, let alone carry on his cause. They have very little to work with: if we're atheists, the Resurrection never happened, Jesus performed no miracles, and they themselves wouldn't be able to produce any miracles. And they're facing some very determined Romans who would like nothing more than to stamp out their movement, through violent executions if need be.

So given all that, why the spread? Ancient people were regular old humans beings, after all - it wasn't ancient times to them. They would have had jobs to do, families to feed, lives they would have been loathe to give up for the sake of some vague and unverifiable claims about wonders and healings and people rising from the dead. And if they were Jewish, they were being asked to make a complete split from their families and communities and turn their back on the traditions they had followed for their entire life. The possibility of ostracization and death has a way of turning people into proper skeptics: "Sure, you 'saw' your friend Jesus after he died. Right. And how many of you have been stoned to death again? No thanks, I'll pass."

12. Easily falsified claims

Another thing I find noteworthy is the rather...audacious nature of the claims that the apostles would have been making, which seem like they would have lent themselves to easy disproof. Many of the miracles that supposedly happened were public events, and would have involved large numbers of people: the wedding at Cana. The feeding of the 5000 and the 4000. The appearance of the resurrected Jesus to 500 people. The conversion of 3000 people at Pentecost. Events like this would leave a mark on the population - not just on the witnesses themselves, but on those they talked to, and on those that those people talked to. Word would spread. There'd be a buzz. If they didn't actually happen, it seems like it would be pretty darn obvious that they hadn't happened.

Now granted, the apostles were preaching all over the place, far from where the miracles actually took place. And towns and villages were of course very isolated in those days, which would have made verifying the claims pretty difficult. Still it seems to me that word would have gotten around pretty fast that for some reason no could find anyone who had witnessed these allegedly massive and widespread miracles, and that these Christians were full of hot air.

13. Paul's conversion

This one I really have a hard time making sense of as an atheist. Paul (then Saul) started off as a committed and devout Jew, who famously persecuted Christians and condemned many of them to death. He then supposedly had a miraculous visitation by Jesus on the road to Damascus and converted to Christianity on the spot. From there he followed a path we've seen before: he devoted the rest of his life to preaching the Resurrection of Jesus, he never wavered in his belief, and he is said to have died a martyr's death.

It's easy to lose sight of just how strange this is. With the other apostles we can at least appeal to the personal charisma of Jesus: they were his disciples, after all, and they could have easily developed a deep loyalty and intense devotion to him, one that would outlast his death. But that doesn't work for Paul: he never met Jesus. He presumably hated the man. And yet his conversion was sudden, total, and permanent: he abandoned his whole life at the drop of a hat to start spreading the same message of Resurrection and salvation that the other apostles preached, writing passionately and eloquently and prolifically in their defense, and he showed the same level of devotion and unshakeable conviction in the face of persecution that the others showed as well. Where on earth did all of this come from?

When I look at the proposed naturalistic explanations for what happened, they seem not even close to being up to the task of accounting for something like this. A seizure? Heat stroke? Really? If you can show me other cases of those things producing anything like the story of Paul, I will listen, of course. But I'm not holding my breath. Something happened to this man, something profound. And I think it was the Son, not the sun.

14. Theology out of nowhere

If the Old Testament is impressive for the length of time over which it gradually unfolded, the New Testament is impressive for the suddenness with which it appears. In it Christianity seems to spring into existence almost fully formed, with the earliest letters and books already containing intricate references to and parallels with the Old Testament, well-thought-out theology, and all the core doctrines of the faith. And far from looking like the ad-hoc result of a gradual accumulation of legends and myths, the whole thing seems...coherent. It makes sense. I look at the New Testament and I see an inexplicably rich and unified belief structure, one that really doesn't look like it was all based on nothing.

It's as if a bunch of people claimed to have seen Bigfoot. But then instead of setting up souvenir shops, they all start writing elaborate treatises about his behaviour, his physiology, how he fits into the local ecology, and how he likely evolved. They hold conferences to debate questions about his lifecycle and mating patterns, and then come to an agreement and move on. Overnight they create a whole field of Bigfootology, detailed and complex and internally consistent. And to all the world they look and act like a group of people earnestly trying to understand a real, living, breathing creature that they saw.

If I encountered something like that, I might start wondering if there wasn't something weird going on in the Pacific Northwest.

15. The martyrs

I've touched on this one a few times already, but it's a point worth belabouring: early Christianity produced a lot of martyrs.

To that you might say: so what? Big deal. Lots of religions have martyrs, that doesn't prove anything.

And I agree: lots of religions do have martyrs. On it's own it doesn't prove anything. But what it does do is go a long way towards showing the sincerity of the first believers in Christianity.

Again you might say: so what? Big deal. So they were sincere, no one doubts that.

But here we arrive at the real issue: I think you really do have to doubt their sincerity if you want to doubt Christianity. What it comes down to is that Christianity is set up in such a way as to be either entirely true or entirely false. There is no middle ground, because there was not intended to be a middle ground. Think once again about the claims we're talking about: walking on water. Thousands being fed from a few loaves. People speaking languages they didn't know. And at the center of everything, a man who claimed to be God rising from the dead in dramatic and thoroughly undeniable fashion.

The apostles and early believers couldn't possibly have been deluded about claims like this. They couldn't possibly have been mistaken about claims like this. They were there to witness the events (or not, if they didn't happen). So I really don't see any viable alternatives: they either had to have been lying, or they had to have been telling the truth.

And the troubling thing to me is that they really didn't look like they were lying.

16. Plugging things into history

One thing I find noteworthy about secular accounts of the time of Jesus is how often they seem to be negative in nature: more about casting doubt and creating uncertainty around the events in question, than seeking to explain. Maybe X didn't happen. We can't know that Y was true for sure. Z could have been a legend. It's of course true that it's difficult to know with certainty what happened in the distant past. But that fact seems to be peculiarly emphasized when it comes to early Christian history. There seem to be at times almost deliberate attempts to muddy the waters.

Yes, the past is always a murky place to us, shrouded in confusion and mystery. But I think too many people implicitly reason as if those properties were inherent to the times themselves: as if people living back then would have found them mysterious and confusing at the time. Of course that's silly: to every person who has ever lived it has always been the modern day.

Imagine yourself living in the 1st century, being read a copy of one of the gospels. In all likelihood you'd ask what any human being would ask: where did this come from? Who wrote it? Authorship is the single most important piece of information you could have if you were trying to judge whether or not to take it seriously - you'd want to know who these people were, and if they were in a position to see what they had claimed to see. I find it hard to imagine a world where the gospels are circulating and being read without the authors being known. And try as I might, I just can't see how that kind of thing would be forgotten: we're talking about some of the most revered and influential documents in history here. Even if the wider world didn't care much about them, Christians certainly would. So yes: I think they were written by the people that everyone has always said they were written by.

As with gospel authorship, so everything else. Whatever we want to say happened back then, it has to make sense. It has to fit in with history. When we emerge from the fog and mist of the past, and encounter the much more well-documented and well-established church of the second and third and fourth centuries, our accounts have to line up with the institution that we see there. And the gospel stories, as far as I can tell, do precisely that: if they were true, they'd lead to pretty much exactly the church that we see.

But to the extent that there is a coherent secular story about what happened, I don't see how it could do the same: we have all these legends and myths and anonymous writings that are supposed to have developed gradually and in piecemeal (and you'd have to figure would develop differently in different locations). But then they all somehow coalesce into a single tradition that the church starts to claim it held all along: No, what are you talking about? Mark was always written by Mark. Jesus always claimed to be God. It's not like the church wasn't under heavy scrutiny. Wouldn't they have had trouble getting away with it? My answers to such questions as an atheist always had to rely on handwaving: Who knows! History times! Confusion reigned!

In comparison the story of Christianity seems to shine out with all the clarity of a bright summer day to me. Of course, whole populations wouldn't just collectively forget who had written famous works. Of course, you couldn't get away with suddenly inventing new claims and fantastic miracles without people noticing that you had done it. Of course, people weren't inexplicably gullible morons back then. Of course, history is supposed to make sense.

17. Fatima

Less ancient history, too, must make sense. So I can't leave without at least mentioning the story of Fatima, where in 1917 three children saw visions of Mary, and thousands of people saw the sun dance in the sky. This is not the post to tell that tale, though - hopefully I'll write that one soon. For now, just read about what happened, and decide for yourself whether you think the proposed explanations are good ones. And then maybe read this account and see if it fits with whatever explanation you settled on.

18. In the end

In the end, what can I say that hasn't already been said a thousand times before? Christians and atheists have been debating each other since the dawn of the internet - possibly even before that. I can't really expect one more post added to the pile to do much to move the needle.

But perhaps if I can't convince you that Christianity is true, I can at least convince you that Christians are truth-seeking. I was drawn to the faith by an inexplicable tug that I can't communicate, yes. But since then I have done only what I've always done: try to make sense of what I see in the world around me, and try to figure out what's true.

I'm not an expert in history. I know more than some and less than others. But I don't think you need to be an expert to look at what happened and say: I can't account for any of this unless Jesus was who he said he was. Nothing makes sense about the first century if that isn't true, and everything makes sense if it is. The bottom line is that I need Christianity the hypothesis in order to explain Christianity the phenomenon.

Lewis was right: Christianity is strange, terrifying and unlikely. He left out a few others as well: it's also beautiful, awe-inspiring, and miraculous beyond all imagination. But while it is all of those things, what it is more than anything, is simply true.

And that is the best and only answer I can give as to why I'm Christian.