Tag Archives: christianity

Sep 28 2025

Kelvin’s Clouds and Pascal’s Wager

A recent comment on my latest post got me thinking about how Pascal’s Wager compares with the perspective I’ve been developing here.

Pascal’s Wager argues that it is more rational to believe in God than not. The reasoning is that if God exists and you do not believe, the loss is infinitely negative (eternal death). But if you do believe and God exists, the gain is infinitely positive (eternal life). The wager assumes that, since we cannot know the truth with certainty, we must make a choice within that uncertainty.

At first glance, this sounds very similar to the perspective that I’ve been developing here: the recognition that ultimate truth is beyond our reach, and so the real question becomes—where do we place our hope?

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Aug 30 2025

The Neglected Core of Christianity

Critics of Christianity often seize upon specific doctrines or practices they find objectionable: the notion of Hell, theological disputes about Jesus’ death, historical mistreatment of women, young-earth creationism, or even Christian attitudes toward science. These criticisms are not trivial, and many of them point to real shortcomings in the way the faith has been articulated or practiced. Yet, there is a significant oversight in these lines of attack: none of these disputed issues represent the heart of Christianity.

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Jun 27 2025

Dawkins’ Hope

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins presents the provocative idea that, although humans are shaped by evolutionary forces that favor selfish behavior, we are also capable of choosing to rise above this inherent selfishness. He argues that we are not prisoners of our genetic programming—we can choose altruism, compassion, and cooperation. However, Dawkins offers no clear explanation for how or why humans possess this capacity to override our evolutionary instincts. Presumably, he would regard it as an unintended byproduct of other advanced cognitive traits that evolved for different reasons—an emergent property rather than a designed feature.

But this remains speculative. From a strictly naturalistic perspective, there’s little reason to assume that humans are fundamentally different from other animals when it comes to the ability to transcend self-interest. Evolution does not inherently favor such choices unless they serve a reproductive or survival advantage. Therefore, while Dawkins’ call to “rise above” our selfish genes is inspiring, it risks being dismissed as mere wishful thinking unless grounded in something more substantial—something that can account for both the origin and the power of such a choice.

One way to make sense of this idea is to think of it as a shift in focus—from self to others. This is a useful lens through which to understand a particular kind of love: not the romantic or emotional kind often labeled as “love,” but rather a self-giving, other-centered orientation. In this view, love becomes synonymous with freedom from selfishness. It is the active decision to prioritize another’s well-being above one’s own—a deliberate act of self-transcendence.

Perhaps the clearest and most developed articulation of this concept is found in Christianity. The tradition repeatedly affirms love as the highest virtue: “God is love,” “For God so loved the world,” “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love, in the Christian vision, is not merely a private feeling but a foundational force meant to permeate all human relationships. While not all expressions of Christianity have lived up to this ideal, many of the earliest Christian communities, as recorded in both scripture and history, exhibited striking examples of sacrificial love and radical generosity. Despite the faith’s many failings over time, Christianity has nevertheless served as a foundational influence on Western ethical and moral values, precisely because it cast love—understood as the defeat of selfishness—as central to human flourishing.

At the heart of this transformative vision is the idea that humans are created “in the image of God.” Though interpretations of this phrase vary widely, its core implication is that human beings are distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom in some essential way. This uniqueness may be precisely what allows for the possibility of breaking free from purely instinctual, self-centered behavior. If we bear some reflection of the divine—if we are more than just sophisticated animals—then perhaps the call to rise above our selfish genes is not merely a hopeful aspiration but a real and attainable path.

(Note, this essay used AI to polish the writing, but the ideas, content, and overall organization are mine.)

Jan 16 2025

The Paradox of Christian Criticism: A Case for Constructive Engagement

The criticism of Christianity for historical injustices such as holy wars, patriarchy, and slavery presents an intriguing paradox. While these criticisms appear valid through a modern moral lens, they overlook a crucial historical reality: the very moral framework we use to condemn these actions largely emerged from Christian teachings themselves. Taking this into account suggests different ways of engaging in these debates.

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Dec 2 2024

The Pendulum Swing of Evidence

It is often stated that there is no evidence for God. That’s an easy conclusion to draw if we limit our understanding of the world to the way it seems to operate in day-to-day life. This includes the level of science and technology that we encounter on a regular basis today – things like smart phones with GPS and instant worldwide communication, modern medicine with vaccines and transplants, and AI that has made computers conversational and seemingly creative. In all these things, most people see no clear evidence for God’s existence and in fact, see evidence for the success of modern science and technology.

Given such observations, our minds usually generalize and conclude that they represent the fundamental nature of reality. In other words, what we see is all there is.1 We construct a story that explains what we see and then believe that the story represents all reality. It is then easy to reinforce this with selective learning, confirmation bias, and so on.

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Nov 11 2024

Critical Thinking and Religion

I’ve heard it said by atheists that religion lacks critical thinking. The general idea seems to be that there’s no rational basis for being religious, so anyone who is, must not be thinking carefully about it. If they did think carefully, they would presumably realize that they were in error.

Although the term “critical thinking” is not always used, I think it does capture the essence of the critique.

Obviously, I don’t agree with this viewpoint; I think that there are many religious people who think carefully about their beliefs. While it might be interesting to address this idea directly, when hearing such a statement being made recently, I started thinking about what we mean by “critical thinking” and what some of the challenges are in general with thinking carefully.

A simple place to start is with the Wikipedia entry for Critical Thinking, which lists a number of abilities that critical thinking calls for. These include things like recognizing problems, thinking clearly and logically, understanding and communicating well, and so on.

One particular group of items in the list has to do with the necessity of seeking information on a topic and testing our existing ideas. This group from Wikipedia is:

  • Gather and marshal pertinent (relevant) information
  • Put to test the conclusions and generalizations at which one arrives
  • Reconstruct one’s patterns of beliefs on the basis of wider experience

These seem to describe the need to look around and get relevant information, use it to test our beliefs, and do this on an ongoing basis as new information becomes available and perhaps as our life experiences grow. Implied in the first bullet, I think, is to make sure the information gathered covers the topic completely and is not cherry-picked such as when we fall prey to confirmation bias and echo chambers.

In a nutshell, to test our beliefs on an ongoing basis.

Whether this is a perfect list or not, I think it presents the idea that we need to be open and that doing so is a deliberate and ongoing choice.

All too often, and perhaps this is one place where religion falls short, we limit our search for information to places that are likely to have the same biases that we do, thereby reinforcing our opinions rather than testing them.

This is well-known behavior for religious people, reinforced by communities of faith, regular church activities, and so on. As a result, it can take real effort for religious people to learn about other metaphysical views and to test their own. Considering the list above, this may, indeed, be one way that religious people lack critical thinking, if they are not engaging with alternate viewpoints.

It’s less clear that secular people encounter such regular reinforcing activities other than the fact that our culture is increasingly secular. However, this is not a trivial influence, especially in today’s science and technology-dominated world. If I was a secular person interested in learning more about carefully considered religious views, I probably wouldn’t know where to start, unless I was lucky enough to know someone.

Certainly the popular presentations of religious beliefs wouldn’t work.

As a result, whether intentional or not, it seems that secular people can fall into the same trap as religious people of not really learning about different views in the variety and depth needed to test one’s own perspectives. Both groups being composed of people, the common tendency to stay in our own intellectual comfort zones likely operates both ways.

Personally, I’ve had a hard time finding places for deep, considered discussions of such metaphysical topics. If we were talking about something that had little or no practical impact on society and life, perhaps like sports, this might not be a big deal. But these issues are society-shaping questions that influence how we treat each other, and they form the basis of our systems of morals and ethics.

It seems to me that if one is going to feel strongly enough about these matters to comment on other’s beliefs and perhaps even work to silence them, then it’s incumbent upon us to think critically about these things from both sides, and this includes listening and learning carefully.

Jul 27 2024

A Set of Hopes

In an earlier post I suggested that, because of fundamental limits of what we understand, an appropriate way to think about metaphysical matters is as “hopes”. In other words, because we cannot be certain about things like the existence of God, or life after death, or the ultimate nature of reality and the destiny of the universe, we need to hope that certain things are true about these questions.

In related posts1, I describe some examples of using this way of thinking to compare Christian and atheist perspectives, describing both as specific hopes. This post will focus on describing just Christianity as a series of hopes in certain metaphysical perspectives.

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Apr 19 2024

Threads of Pointers

Throughout history, there have been stories of the supernatural. These stories were often invoked to explain mysteries such as the origin of the world, the forces behind weather, the causes of disease, and the prevalence of coincidences. However, these stories often went beyond simple explanations and were personal accounts of people encountering things beyond natural, everyday experience. The fact that these things could also have explained some mysteries may have been interesting and possibly useful at the time, but was beside the point in many cases.

More recently, and especially over the last few centuries, many other unknowns either have not been explained by science or, like consciousness, have actually become bigger mysteries.1 In addition, mathematics has shown that there are fundamental limits of our understanding in any rational system, and science has discovered what appear to be fundamental limits in our ability to explain physical reality.2

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Feb 13 2024

Science, Religion, and Uncertainty

The idea that there is a war between science and technology is very common and it’s easy to believe it from some of the very public conflicts that have occurred. Because of this perception, it’s often difficult to have relaxed, interesting conversations about science and religion. Many of us instead just assume that it’s not really that important or even worth talking about. After all, this is the realm of metaphysics, something that doesn’t really impact daily life, right?

However, it turns out that metaphysical considerations are the basis for most people’s ethics, even when we don’t think about that. In other words, our views on things typically considered religious, such as a formal code of ethics, life after death, a moral creator, and so on, really determine our moral views. The fact that most people in the west have ethics based on Judeo-Christian ideals, whether they are Christian or not, is not widely understood.

So if it’s important to have a considered opinion here, how do we deal with the issue of their apparent conflict? Perhaps we can start by looking at where some of the conflicts seem to come up.

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