The essence of Christianity should be obvious. Love as its foundation isn’t some obscure theological discovery requiring centuries of scholarly debate—it’s there in Scripture, clear as day. The early Christians understood this. Yet somehow, between then and now, we’ve managed to obscure something that should be self-evident.
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Seeing Truth Beyond the Letter in Christianity
From time to time, I refer to love as central to Christianity. That this might be the case is often not evident from the behavior of Christians both through history and today, nor is it always clear from simple interpretations of Scripture. The goal of this essay is to introduce the perspective that love does underlie the faith.
Aesop’s fables present us with a curious paradox. If we approach them as literal accounts, they are demonstrably false—foxes do not engage in philosophical musings about unreachable grapes, nor do tortoises and hares arrange footraces to settle questions of persistence versus natural ability. Yet dismissing these ancient stories as mere falsehoods would be to miss their essence entirely. The truths they convey transcend their fictional narratives so profoundly that, millennia after their composition, we still invoke “sour grapes” to describe the all-too-human tendency to disparage what we cannot obtain. The fables are false in letter but true in spirit, false in detail but true in wisdom.
This same framework offers a fruitful way to approach Biblical interpretation—to read Scripture not merely as a chronicle of historical events, but as a collection of narratives that point toward deeper, enduring truths. This is not to argue for a wholesale rejection of historicity. Few Christians would embrace a purely allegorical reading of pivotal events like the resurrection of Jesus. Rather, it is to suggest that the primary value of Scripture lies not in its narratives as such, but in the profound truths those narratives illuminate and embody.
This naturally raises a critical question: what are these fundamental, basic truths that Scripture seeks to convey?
Continue readingFrom Nihilism to Love: Searching for a Life of Purpose
Although compelling arguments exist on both sides of the debate between atheism and Christianity, each worldview is often associated with a central philosophical difficulty. For atheism, the most intractable challenge is nihilism. For Christianity, it is the problem of evil.
Nihilism, in this context, is the claim that if reality is purely physical and devoid of any transcendent source of purpose, then life ultimately has no intrinsic meaning. This conclusion seems to stand at odds with our lived experience, which instinctively points toward purpose, value, and significance.
The problem of evil—or suffering—presents an equally serious challenge for Christianity. It asks how a benevolent, omnipotent God could permit profound suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent. The emotional and philosophical weight of this question has made it one of the most enduring objections to Christian belief.
Yet both worldviews have developed thoughtful responses to their respective challenges.
Continue readingOpening Our Minds: Why Science Shouldn’t Reject Ideas That Sound Religious
When Christian apologists point to unsolved mysteries in science as potential evidence for their faith, they often overreach. These mysteries don’t specifically validate Christianity—but dismissing them entirely may be equally problematic. The scientific community risks making a critical error: rejecting entire classes of explanations not because they lack merit, but simply because they bear a superficial resemblance to religious concepts.
Continue readingKelvin’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?
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingCritical 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.
Pretending Expertise
During the Covid pandemic, there were strongly differing opinions about things like social distancing, vaccinations, masks, and so on. Although experts gave recommendations, in most cases with good alignment between them, it was common for people to say that “I did my own research”, and claim a different, generally “better” understanding of any given topic. This phrase was so common that it became a catchphrase that’s still used to highlight people’s tendency to distrust experts.
However, it has also taken on the connotation of bad decision making because experts are generally correct much more often than lay people, and it’s not hard to find examples where someone’s “own research” was wrong. This aspect of the phrase was captured by a popular meme that circulated for a while in which the phrase was on a headstone.
Although this quote was mainly about people investigating Covid-related topics, the principle can be applied elsewhere. And perhaps it illustrates a general tendency for us to approach matters with a level of overconfidence.1
Continue readingA 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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Kelvin's Clouds 