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 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 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.
Continue readingThreads 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
Continue readingExploring Love
The idea of “love” generally means having deep affection for others based on some sort of personal ties. For example, familial ties cause us to love our relations, and sexual attraction can move us toward deep affection. Often, however, we use the term “love” to refer to how we treat other people, such that sometimes it is used to refer to a sort of charitable behavior.
To better understand these subtleties, it’s interesting to look at this behavior from a cosmic standpoint.
Continue readingMy Belief System
A friend and I recently exchanged one-page descriptions of our respective belief systems. Here’s mine:
What is my worldview, my guiding principles for making life decisions?
A proper worldview includes elements of testing and continuing refinement since both individuals and the world are constantly changing, so is not static, but represents continual seeking to avoid dogmatism. The assumed goal of a worldview is to optimize personal and societal flourishing.
Three broad streams from which one can draw perspectives to inform a worldview are: personal experience, other human experiences across both time and space, and rational thought and related systems such as science. Although we commonly hold views in all these areas with great certainty, they are all in fact filled with fundamental unknowns. Thus, the challenge is to have a rational worldview despite the uncertainties.
My approach is to seek shared threads in these streams, to identify threads that exist across human experience and wisdom, that resonate with personal experience, and that also cohere with our best understanding of the world. My belief is that, while this can help eliminate irrational worldviews, there is too much uncertainty to define a single correct one.
One thing that exists across these is the universality of moral value systems, the recognition that there is good and evil, even though there is little agreement of what goes into each. This includes recognition of the fundamentally selfish basis of all life, the sense of this creation being broken in some sense, and the awareness that there are better possibilities. While it does seem that human society is advancing beyond this selfish bias, there is an inevitable tension with this intrinsic nature, making the only foreseeable solution a sort of mechanized, rule-driven society.
We recognize that a better way exists (love) that inverts the natural self-focused nature into one that is fundamentally self-less, in which we are agents of self-giving rather than self-getting. Imagine an existence in which everyone has this nature, perhaps all creation has shifted to this perspective. A simple model like this makes the end goal clear but is clearly not attainable without a transformation of humanity, possibly all creation.
Another thing that is consistently part of human experience through all cultures is a belief in some reality beyond the material. This often includes the existence of a transcendent agent that can interact with our physical reality, having created it, and interacts with humans who were created and reflect that transcendent nature. An implication of this is the idea of a cosmic purpose or direction, which typically shows up in the form of epic journey narratives, art and the awareness of beauty, the ideals of technological advance, and so on.
This implication links the two observations of morality and transcendence in that, while the first (recognition of brokenness) reveals the futility of achieving an ideal state in this world, the existence of something more than this world provides hope of a solution. The existence of an initial creator that is still involved in the ongoing improvement of the human condition provides hope of a re-creation into a final, unbroken state. Hope in a worldview is the best we can do because of the limits of knowledge.
This hope of a solution is best presented in the Christian narrative, in which the creator has described love as the ultimate reality but has given us the option of whether or not to recognize and accept it. The incarnation demonstrated the extended reality and has started the process of bringing this reality through changed hearts, which we see working out through human history, and the resurrection demonstrated the reality of re-creation. Our own transformation and re-creation, to participate in this hope, happens with God’s involvement. We are not alone.
Ways of Thinking
If there are limits to rational thinking, does that mean that there are limits to what we can know at all or just limits to what we can know rationally? In other words, are there ways of discovering and knowing things, perhaps even truths, other than rationally?
If so, we would need other ways of thinking that can still produce improved understanding. So then, if reasoning isn’t available, what other ways of thinking might be helpful?
Continue readingBeautiful Fading
We seem to find beauty in unlikely places. Evolution says we should be attracted to those things that benefit us, and so it seems that we should find beauty in those things that support flourishing. However, we also sometimes find beauty in things like austere mountain peaks, desolate lunar wastelands, and sometimes even in dying foliage.
For example, one of the most common pictures of the end of summer, the shortening of daylight, is fall colors, yet these represent life being pulled back from the leaves in order to prepare for the coming season of scarcity. Hardly a cheery thought, and yet it’s considered an iconically beautiful scene.
In a like manner, this scene struck me as beautiful even though it features flowers that are in decline.
This sense is sometimes explained as our evolutionarily-bequeathed aesthetics misfiring, being activated incorrectly. In this line of thought, what we perceive as something wonderful, is really just a mistake.
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Kelvin's Clouds 