Why I am a Christian (essay)

Christianity is not just a "religion" in the post-modern sense of a spiritual high. It is an outlook on life that fundamentally changes the way one thinks. It is a "worldview." Let us quickly define some terms.

Religion: Karl Marx cleverly summarized the post-modern view of religion as "The opiate of the masses." As that this definition is so ingrained into Marx's colegues minds, let's leave this definition stand as it is not worth challenging. As with all good lies, there is more truth to it than falsehood.

Worldview: A network or web of presuppositions that all individuals have. It gives answers to three questions:
1. How do we know what we know? (epistemology)
2. What is the nature of reality? (metaphysics)
3. What is the definition of right and wrong? (ethics)

Presupposition: A fundamental assumption that a person holds which cannot be challenged. This is why debaters who have been forced into a corner often beg the question to escape, their presupposition is exposed and is all that is left, so they beg the question and use the presupposition to prove itself.

I am going to start with a big, shocking, statement: All worldviews involuntarily and unconsciously borrow from the Christian worldview to answer the three worldview questions. (Transcendental assumption)

This sounds like an outright stupid assumption, but if you think about it, it really isn't that crazy. If there is an absolute truth about reality, it would make sense that one must, on some level, be aware of that truth to participate in reality, even if this is purely unconscious. So if there is only one truth, scientific, natural, or religious, it stands to reason that everyone is in some way familiar with it.

Now everyone has answers to all three of the worldview questions. Skeptics, who say we cannot know anything definitively answers the first question just as well as the scientist's reliance on empirical observation. The Hindu saying all is one answers the second question just as well as the agnostic saying we cannot know. The Relativist saying that there is no universal ethic answers the third question just as well as the Christian applying God's law to everything.

All worldviews borrow from the truth to bolster their own position. This can be hard to illustrate, but it is a real phenomenon.

Let us take the matter of ethics for the evolutionist. Evolution itself indicates that the moral code should be anarchy to promote survival of the fittest, but, thankfully, very few evolutionists hold to this position. Instead, most say that each individual should serve the whole of humanity, clinging to the Christian concept of charity, in spite of the fact that, according to their own position of origins, helping the whole species is actually retarding the evolution of the species.

As Paul said “The work of the law is written on the unbeliever’s heart.” This is a clear example.

Such borrowing is not restricted to just ethics. Let us also take the source of reason, again from the evolutionist.

Evolution says that the laws of logic are nothing more than our own minds attempting to properly interpret the physical interactions we see during infant development. According to this view, the laws of logic ought to be different for each person because the stimuli we see during development is different. If this were so, the scientific method could not apply to anything.

This is why the scientific method was invented by a Christian, Sir Francis Bacon. No other worldview gives a position that both gives a proper understanding of reason and uniformity of nature. Oriental knowledge, with Hindu transcending mysticism belief structures, directly undermines reason. Arabic science, while providing a useful continuation of Greek thought during the medieval period, also lacked a proper view of reason because, with the advent of Muslim thought, Allah’s transcending human reason gives no reason to trust reason, contrasting sharply with the western understanding of God’s reason surpassing our own.

The scientific method, far from being born from Deistic beliefs of the enlightenment, was the direct result of the reformation and it’s emphasis on man’s ability to worship God with his reason as presented by such men as Calvin, Luther, and Knox.

No other worldview can legitimately use the materials created by Christianity because they cannot provide proper justification. Borrowed capital will be reclaimed, whether the tenants want it to or not.

I actually thought that evolution was a remote possibility before I took AP Biology. Before AP Bio, I thought of science as equations that, even if they were combined into immense complexity and difficult trappings of the problems, still broke down into simple concepts, like inverse square laws or algebra. AP Biology changed that for me. The micro-biological systems I was presented with were more immensely complicated than anything I had ever dealt with. Evolution seemed to be the only possible explanation because no rational God would create something so incomprehensibly intricate, the blind laws of nature might.

Then came the chapter on punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium asserts that small groups are the seat of evolution because of a small gene pool and fast influences all over the population. This was then proved by the lack of several transition forms as well as some lengthy equations on mutation and gene frequency.

This led me to question evolution extensively. Not only was punctuated equilibrium treated as fact in my text book, but it was also proven by the lack of something.

Small populations tend to die out, not evolve. Small populations absorb fewer mutations because mutations are a mix of environment and chance. The environment is about the same for both a large population and the small population, but the large population has more members to chance a mutation, so in short, the only way mutation could combine with punctuated equilibrium to cause speciation was if the population went from small to large many times in a relatively short evolutionary period.

Then, I happened across the “Privileged Planet” hypothesis. Despite the name, it actually is less of a creationist argument than you might think. All it asserts is that the best places for life are also the best places to observe the universe from.

A long string of cosmic coincidences made evolution no longer a viable solution for me. Between the “goldilocks zone” of our solar system being less than 2% of the space in the solar system, our own sun having the right (abnormal) size to keep the planet from entering orbital locking with the sun in the goldilocks zone, the portion of the milky way that we are in being just right for having enough heavy elements to create life and just far enough away from the center to keep from being bombarded with radiation from the center of the galaxy, the immense complexity of microscopic organisms…the list goes on and on.

So, following Occam’s razor, which is the more simple solution: That we are incredibly lucky, or incredibly blessed?

Unfortunately, I cannot win someone over with eloquent arguments. This essay is far more likely to solidify the unbeliever into unbelief rather than convert him.

Worldviews also contain a thing called “self-deception.” The worldview’s presuppositions often must rely on lies. The lies, when forced to the surface by difficult questions, often are involuntarily covered up by begging the question, rather than be corrected.

Therefore, it is not my objective to convert you. My objective is to get you to think and to ask your presuppositions some tough questions in hopes that you convert yourself, because every time you bring up your arguments, you will think of my arguments, and eventually the question, if you keep asking yourself, will win out over the lie.