Believe It or Not

Towards the end of 2012 I was reading an article online about the interrelation between faith in God and scientific knowledge on a particular issue. It was an interesting enough piece. I didn’t agree with all of it but I appreciated that the journalist did a decent job of representing different shades of opinion. Let’s say it was fair. I saw that the article was open to comments so my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to read on. Oh dear.

The litany of patronising, insulting and often ill-informed comments was just wearisome to read. And not only from the majority of contributors who were vocally antagonistic towards God. The discussion also excited some grammatically challenged interest from some honorary representatives from the Flat Earth Society and the League of Angry Fundamentalists as well. There was descent into caricature from both sides. It was Richard Dawkins meets the leader of Westboro Baptist Church. In short, a troll’s playground.

This was not a one-off though. It seems that every time I scrolled through the Have Your Say or Comment is Free section on any Christianity-related BBC or Guardian web posting, whether it be about a new space probe or the Archbishop of Canterbury taking on payday lenders, I seemed to find the same angry tones and shocking prejudices. 

New York City based church leader Tim Keller recently summed up well the increasingly strident intolerance of Christian faith in civic society: “What we are being told is that you are beyond the pale, not just that we’re wrong, but that respect for us is wrong... it’s not just that you’re going to disagree with us, but basically you are saying we really don’t even have a right to be in the public square.”

The duplication of certain insults (I kept coming across flying spaghetti monsters, sky fairies and imaginary friends) shows that there is a herd phenomenon in which people are taking to throwing someone else’s rocks. It makes me sad.

It sometimes feels like certain corners of our culture reserve their deepest loathing and greatest ridicule for people like me who believe in the existence of God and the uniqueness of Christ, and who sometimes want to express or commend those views. 

There are so many poisonous ideologies in our world. At the same time, I see so much good done in society in the name of Christ. I understand of course that not everyone is going to agree with Christians about a whole range of issues, but it’s the strength of feeling, the message board spite, the anger, and the outrage against Christian belief that bewilders me.

Anyway it made me stop and think. Why do I believe in God? Specifically, why am I a Christian? What if Christianity is like The Truman Show – an organised fantasy in which I am an oblivious victim? What if the force for good I see and the spiritual feelings I have are just a clever mirage? What if I do only follow the Bible’s teaching because I am a weak person who is too lazy to think for himself? What if I am just clinging to an infantile myth about eternal life because I am scared of death or something? What if I, like a compliant child being good for Santa, simply never really grew up?

I decided it might be a useful exercise to jot down the reasons why I have found Christianity to be believable, to be true. I came up with 26. I then tried to arrange the different reasons in some kind of order. 

Firstly, I thought about the origins of the universe, its incredible fine tuning, the improbably life-favouring properties of our planet and the appearance of life from non-living matter. Each gives me some encouragement that my working hunch about the existence of a creator might just be correct. 

Then there are things to do with the human condition and why there is so much unhappiness and suffering in the world. Philosophers and theologians like Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Pascal have mused about these things for centuries. What people like them have said helps me to appreciate the reasonableness and coherence of the Judeo-Christian world view. 

The heart of the book is about Jesus. For some, he was an enigmatic and non-violent mystic who said some quotable things; a cross between Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln. For others, he was one of many visionary revolutionaries who pushed his luck too far and ended up in an early grave; a hybrid of John Lennon and Che Guevara maybe. There are many other ideas out there about who he was. I think he is totally in a class of his own, deserving of not just admiration but devotion as well.

Then I thought about why the Bible gives shape to Christian faith. I know some people hate the Bible, many find it boring and others even reject it as immoral and repugnant. Some of it puzzles me and, honestly, parts of it disturb me. But most of it challenges me and shapes me. I treasure it above every other book. The Bible’s remarkable unity, its unparalleled resilience and its amazing potency are among the reasons I believe in its divine inspiration.

Then I explored other ideas, some of which I have gleaned from personal experience. These are not just things I’ve mused about. They are mostly things I or others have personally seen and felt.

And finally I tried to explain why I came to reject the three biggest alternatives to being a Christian in today’s world (being an agnostic, an atheist or belonging to some other religion).

In Part 1, I talk about why I believe Christianity is true. Part 2 shows some of the ways that Christianity works. I am very aware that most people in the Postmodern era don’t care if it’s true or not. As has been said, most people will only start to become interested in Christianity if they think it might help them have better sex. Otherwise, forget it.

Typically we’re told, outside the Church, people don’t know much about Christianity, don’t care to find out, have little or no religious vocabulary, are more interested in spirituality than religion, relate better to dialogue and conversation than presentation, favour experience over knowledge and prefer visual not textual communication.

Frankly that makes this book a non-starter for a lot of people, I know that. Maybe I’ll write another book someday looking at questions like ‘who am I?’, ‘how can I be happy?’, ‘what is the spiritual realm?’, ‘how does the spiritual realm impact my life?’ And maybe even ‘how can I have better sex?’ That might be a first for a Church of England vicar…

There are some things I say which touch on this kind of theme but finding answers to these questions were not why I became a Christian.

It occurred to me that probably none of my 26 ideas on its own would absolutely convince me that Christianity must be true. But together they build a case which satisfies my curious mind and makes sense of my felt spiritual experience. Each chapter is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle; it’s only when it’s put together that you can see the full picture and appreciate how all the pieces interlock with the others.

The book first appeared in a series of blog posts on this site, one every two weeks, throughout 2013. Several people encouraged me to publish the series in book form which I was reluctant to do for three reasons. Firstly, what’s the point? If you can access the content for free online why pay for a printed version? 

Secondly, the blog carried important links to books, articles, and videos which due to the length of the URLs would be cumbersome and unworkable in written form. 

Thirdly, there are many, many books on all this sort of thing available from people more learned and eloquent than I am. In what I imagine to be a saturated (and pretty small) market, I imagined I would labour in vain to find anyone interested in publishing it.

But some of my friends insisted that a physical book in the hand reaches some parts that new media cannot reach. And extended footnotes or supplementary chapters can do the work that web links do. And self-publishing avoids sending dozens of manuscripts to publishers who take one look at the title and file a wad of A4 in the wastepaper bin.

I had to adapt the content for book format and I made many minor revisions to the original posts. If you are basically sympathetic from the start I hope it will help you see that the faith you instinctively feel has much to commend it. No, you’re not strange. It really does make sense and hold together.

And if, as seems unlikely, anyone reads it having decided already that faith is the preserve of village idiots and dangerous sociopaths, I hope they will find evidence there that, despite what you may read on social media, Christians do not believe in fairies and unicorns or denounce as infidels those who do. Well, not many of us anyway.

Believe It or Not is available from Amazon in paper or as a kindle version.