Epistemology

When engaging with the question of whether the Bible is true and the Christian God is real, it is essential to understand that according to the Bible, belief in God is not morally neutral. In other words, there are moral implications to believing in God, which alters the behavior of those engaging with arguments around the truth of the Bible.

This can be very easily demonstrated with the following thought experiment: Let’s say that the general consensus amongst scientists and archaeologists settled on the belief that the universe is 6 trillion years old. Most atheists and agnostics would have no issue with that.

Now let’s say there were paradigm shifts in both scientific and historical scholarship, such that the new consensus became that the universe is 6 billion years old. Once again, most non-Christians wouldn’t be concerned.

But what if scientifically valid changes to the methods used to date the universe and the earth resulted in an age of 6 million years old? Then what if it kept changing, such that it became 600,000 years? Would those who deny the existence of God and the truth of the Bible still feel good about that? What if it went down to 60,000 years? Or, finally, what if it shrunk to 6,000 years, using the most up-to-date scientific and archaeological methods available?

There is no doubt that many believers in naturalistic methods for dating the earth and the universe would be alarmed and up in arms about both the universe and the earth being assigned an age of 6,000 years, even if it were done with no reference to the Bible whatsoever. Why? Because that would provide strong confirmation that the Bible’s literal narrative is true.

Why would this be alarming? Because if the Bible’s literal narrative is true, then the moral claims of the Bible are also true: God is real, Hell is real, and there are consequences in both this life and the next for violations of God’s laws. Therefore, simple assessments of the scientific nature of reality would condemn the actions of the scientists who assess it, calling them to repentance and a change of heart and behavior.

According to the Bible, the truth about God and the Bible is not carefully hidden and hard to find. It is literally everywhere, so overwhelmingly obvious that no one with open eyes could miss it. However, in order to protect the patterns of sin in their lives (“sin” meaning spiritual crimes against God and other humans), people construct false views of reality and insulate them against reasoned assessment:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. (Romans 1:18-23)

This “suppression” process is subconscious. After all, humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), and God is a God of truth, whose Spirit is truth (John 14:17; 1 John 5:6). Therefore, a human being cannot knowingly believe something false. Rather, he will first adopt intellectual arguments that seem plausible on the surface but would not hold up under careful scrutiny, then will find a way to avoid such scrutiny. This traces all the way back to the first sin: in the garden of Eden, the serpent tempted Eve by “deceiving” her with a questionable alternate interpretation of God’s command to her and Adam, and she responded by finding in his deception an intellectual justification for satisfying an unholy desire (Genesis 3:1-6).

In my case, prior to my conversion, I insulated myself against challenges to my false beliefs by convincing myself I was a champion of reason and therefore would be compromising reason by giving an audience to anyone so ignorant or irrational as to argue in favor of believing in the Bible. It wasn’t until I converted that I realized that by refusing to engage in reasoned discussion and keep an open mind, I was actually doing the exact opposite of what I claimed to believe in most. But I never saw that, because of the moral implications of questioning my beliefs.

Therefore, if you’re going to explore the possibility of believing in the Bible, you must understand that if the Bible is true, you are not approaching this topic as a dispassionate, impartial arbiter of reason, or at least, you haven’t been one most of your life, or else you would have found God long ago. You have prejudices and intellectual mechanisms sheltering sin you’re likely not even aware of that your mind is trained to protect, and you must be willing to let go of them when your cognitive dissonance reaches a breaking point.

How to Believe

Because of your history of suppressing truth, you must realize that you cannot be “reasoned by force” into faith in the Bible. After all, even if Jesus Himself materialized and spoke to you, you could simply believe you’re hallucinating. You must be willing to take a leap of faith, not by accepting the Christian faith right away, but by “trying on” the faith intellectually.

In other words, you must start with the logical axiom that the Bible is true, then attempt to reorient everything else around that axiom. For example, when thinking about abortion, you must start with the assumption that the Bible is true, then say, “OK, God is a good god who loves women and doesn’t want people to needlessly suffer. Can I make the Bible’s teachings on abortion make logical sense while still accommodating those fundamental truths about God?”

This approach is reflected in a quote by C.S. Lewis: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” In the Bible, this is expressed most precisely in Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.”

The point of this website is to show you how you can find a reasoned way to approach many difficult questions about the Bible without abandoning reason or logic. In return, I would simply ask that if you can find that “fit” between the Bible and logic using this method for all the disconnects you currently see between them, then once you’ve had all those disconnects resolved, you would accept that the Bible makes sense and attempt to live your life as if it is true.

Note: If you have a disconnect not discussed on the website, feel free to use the Contact form to reach out and ask me to help address it.

Separating Defective Christianity from the Bible

To truly understand the Bible, you must disentangle the false version of Bible fundamentalism you were either raised with or taught about from what the Bible means to say. In other words, when interpreted according to the intention of its divine author, it has a specific way it is meant to be understood, and any deviation from that is defective theology (not heresy necessarily, but definitely a way of reading the Bible that will lead to a manner of living inconsistent with how Jesus modeled a life of faithfulness).

Unfortunately, so many people calling themselves Christians live without the power of God in effect in their lives that their children deconstruct their faith after they actually read the Bible and see that it is supposed to be an active and dominant force in someone’s life, particularly in terms of calling its adherents to let go of sinful behaviors. Furthermore, those outside the faith who see the poor witness of these weak or false Christians come away with a skewed notion of what the Bible is and feel no drive to learn more.

This kind of dead faith needs to be demolished and cleared away before you can find the one true God.

Also, be aware of the main challenge to those who believe they want to believe: homeostasis. If you’re comfortable enough with the results you’ve been getting out of life that you’re not willing to do something drastic like change your entire belief system and/or drastically alter certain patterns of behavior in your life (with God’s help, of course), then you’re not going to change your worldview, no matter the truth or benefits of a new one. As I’ve been saying, truth has moral implications. You will find yourself resistant to truth if you’re not willing to embrace its implications.

Going Through the Looking Glass

Be warned: when you start with the Bible as truth, you begin to see things from the complete opposite direction you did before. However, you also begin to realize that the new way of looking at things is more rational than your old way.

For example, a common argument against the story of Noah’s Flood is: “Lots of ancient civilizations had a Flood narrative. Obviously, the writer of that story in the Bible stole it from an older source.” When you switch to using the Bible’s truth as a starting point, however, you realize: “Wait, why was I saying that lots of ancient civilizations having a Flood narrative was an argument against its truth? Wouldn’t it make sense that if the Flood actually happened, lots of ancient mythologies would mention it? Isn’t that confirmation that the Flood is a historical event, even if it doesn’t alone prove that the Bible’s version is the correct one?”

For another example, let’s return to abortion. There is obviously a nobility in upholding the rights and dignity of pregnant women. However, when you start looking at things from the opposite direction (the Bible as true), you start asking questions like, “Wait a minute, if a fetus is alive, then doesn’t it have rights and dignity as well? Wouldn’t we need a moral system that accommodates both the mother and the child? And if the fetus isn’t alive, what is life? How do we define it? Is it based on the desire of the mother to birth it? If so, isn’t that a very dangerous idea, because it means our rights come from whether others want us to exist? Wouldn’t it make more sense to ground the definition of life in some objective reality, such as an entity’s propensity to grow and develop on its own when provided with shelter and nutrients?”

That’s literally just a start for the kind of rational questions that come up when you thoroughly assess the pro-life issue. If you keep going down that rabbit hole, you start exploring ideas such as the role of motherhood in the purpose of women in life and society. Note: I will tackle this topic in a later section of Reconstructing Faith.

For one final example, it is common to assess the God of the Old Testament as a genocidal maniac, because of the war of the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites before possessing the Promised Land. However, in Deuteronomy 18:9-14, we see that God was dispossessing the Canaanites because of their abominable practices, including burning their children to death to appease non-existent gods. Furthermore, the Israelites were warned that if they followed the practices of the Canaanites, they too would be destroyed like them (Deuteronomy 8:19-20). This means the dispossession of the Canaanites was spiritual in nature, not a racially motivated genocide.

Moreover, Rahab and the Gibeonites (both Canaanites) were allowed to live, because they feared the Lord and cooperated with the Israelites. Not only that, the Israelites came to the defense of the Gibeonites (Joshua 10:6-8), and Rahab was allowed to become a part of Jesus’ ancestral line (Matthew 1:5). Once again, this proves God was not engaged in a racist pogrom against the Canaanites. The persistence of the idea of God as a genocidal maniac is, per what I’ve discussed, a convenient intellectual artifice to keep the Bible at arm’s length, rather than a deeply reasoned attempt to understand the Bible on its own terms.

Ethics

If you have any background with American Christianity, you might be wondering if the God of the Bible would be OK with you engaging in this type of rational inquiry, instead of being incensed that you do not immediately accept Him without questioning.

As mentioned previously, the Spirit is truth, and God is full of grace and truth (John 1:14), which come to us through Jesus Christ (John 1:17). Therefore, it is illogical to declare that a God of truth would require anything except a search for truth to discern His existence and nature.

There is no reason to believe God would be angry or offended by a non-believer demanding that the Bible satisfy a test of reason. However, the attitude of the non-believer is paramount. If you are requiring God to meet some unfair standard of perfect and incontrovertible truth, refusing to entertain His existence until He does so, you will never reach salvation. However, if you are humble and simply seeking to know truth, whatever it is, He will happily work with you to satisfy your objections.

At the end of the day, if the Bible is true, the search for truth will lead you to a proper understanding of how you are a spiritual criminal (sinner) and deserving of eternal damnation without God’s substitutionary atonement to save you from judgment and put you into a relationship with God as an adopted and beloved son or daughter. But to get to that point, you are free to raise fair objections to the Christian faith as much as you need to.

The Bible considers this noble: “Then the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. When they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. These were more fair-minded [the Greek word here literally means “noble”] than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Therefore many of them believed, and also not a few of the Greeks, prominent women as well as men.” (Acts 17:10-12)

This kind of questioning is putting God to the test. While we are not supposed to put God to the test in bad faith (Deuteronomy 6:16), we can do so if it is to strengthen our faith (Malachi 3:10).

Also, where in the Bible does it say that faith is based on blindly believing the “right things”? Don’t the demons believe and tremble (James 2:19)? To be saved, you must believe in your heart Jesus was raised from the dead and proclaim it with your mouth (Romans 10:9) and love God and keep His commandments (1 John 5:1-3). How can you believe in your heart and love with your heart if you are not convinced God is real and the Bible is true?

Even following God’s commandments without a whole heart is not good enough (2 Chronicles 25:2). God knows all our thoughts (Psalm 139:1-4). He would 100% know if you were faking a genuine faith to try to get into heaven.

I don’t understand how any Christian could believe that, if you are seeking truth, and God is a God of truth, you would go to Hell for raising reasonable questions about things such as the nature of Hell (which I will deal with at a later point) or even how we can be certain the Bible is true.

There seems to be a real issue with American Christians not being allowed to question things, because they do not have faith that there will be a deeper understanding of the literal truth of the Bible that will make sense of the disconnect between what we experience and what the Bible seems to say. Therefore, they must either believe blindly or apostatize.

This is evidence that many American Christians never go below a surface level, so they must forever be fighting their doubts to avoid such apostasy. The fact that someone can go to a “Christian” school or seminary for years and never get to that deeper level illustrates the frustrating anti-intellectualism of the institutions of modern American Christianity (an anti-intellectualism reinforced by the false ways we approach the concept of church, as I will explore later).

My wife and I homeschool our children, and I invite every doubt and question my children have. My approach is always that there is a deeper meaning in the Bible that can explain the contradiction/confusion, and it’s just a matter of finding it. Find enough deep solutions, and you start to have faith that one will always be there. I only want my children to be Christians if it is a deeply held faith for them. I would rather they be intellectually consistent atheists than “Christians” who proclaim the truth of the Bible but don’t believe everything it says.

Thinking critically about faith, rather than adopting a particular theological system and protecting it at all costs (lest you “lose your salvation”) is scary for those trained to trust the Bible blindly. It requires courage and independence to put the Bible to a fair test. I believe the Bible is true, but I have tested that belief repeatedly, even walked away from my faith for a while when I couldn’t make it make sense, and I continue to be willing to believe anything that is true. I believe you have the same right. Just don’t use this freedom of thought to keep God unnecessarily at a distance.

Evangelism

Combining the ideas I’ve laid out so far for epistemology and ethics gives a proper understanding of Christian evangelism.

If a person isn’t interested in hearing the truth, or thinks he is but in his heart loves his sin more than truth, then he cannot be reasoned into the faith. Thus, trying to win souls through “rational force” (i.e., hostile debates and arguments) is pointless, and furthermore, it tries to remove God from the equation by making it possible for a Christian to convert a person without God’s supernatural involvement.

So what is the point of apologetics? It is for three types of people:

• Non-Christians who come from a sinful background but are being drawn to the faith.
• Current Christians in a season of doubt.
• Former Christians who have deconstructed their faith but are still willing to return if they can make sense of their doubts.

For such people, difficult questions are roadblocks to faith. Providing satisfactory answers helps clear the roadblocks and open the path to faith.

This is reflected in the Bible. For example, in Acts 13:48 and Acts 17:32, we see that Paul and Barnabas simply preached the Gospel, and those who had ears to hear it heard, and those who didn’t did not. In 1 Kings 10:1, we see that the Queen of Sheba was interested in Yahweh worship, but she had difficult questions she needed answered first, so God brought her to Solomon so she could have them resolved.

On the other hand, the Bible is full of stories of those who were shown overwhelmingly that God was real but didn’t open their hearts to Him. They knew Him to be all-powerful but still fought against Him or disobeyed Him. Examples: the Canaanites who warred against the Israelites (Joshua 2:9-11); the Jews who dragged Jeremiah to Egypt (Jeremiah 42:1-43:7); Saul being willing to kill his spiritual father, the righteous prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 16:2); and Solomon trying to murder Jeroboam after Jeroboam was declared king by God’s prophet Ahijah (1 Kings 11:29-40).

When engaging in dialogue about the rational arguments for the faith, it’s not my place to worry about whether someone is a genuinely curious person or ultimately too invested in sin to accept truth, because that is something only God can control. Instead, I am supposed to present truth as I see it and let people decide for themselves what they want to do with it.

While conversion and sanctification require a renewal of the mind (Romans 12:2), which involves fixing broken thought processes, the desire to seek God comes from experiencing God’s goodness (as Psalm 34:8 says, we can “taste” it). Thus, the desire to either know God or reject God depends on what we taste when we think of Him. If you have not tasted His goodness, it would be as impossible for me to get you interested in seeking God as it would be to explain color to a blind man. God has to “draw you” towards Him for you to be interested (John 6:44).

That is why an essential part of my own conversion story was reading about Christians in ancient times who would sell themselves into slavery to purchase freedom for other slaves. This radical love for others represented something I had never heard of before. It clued me into the fact that there was something more to Christianity than I had previously realized.

The lack of understanding of this fundamental aspect of apologetics is why some American Christians pushes an extreme urgency to preach to and save people, claiming it’s a Christian’s fault if someone goes to Hell, because the Christian didn’t witness to them. This implies that conversion and salvation can be brought about by human effort, which ties into the idea of salvation being based on what you intellectually believe and on how evangelism is about persuading others solely through rational means.

On the contrary, people are predestined to salvation, chosen before the foundation of the world to be brought into God’s covenant at some point in their lives (Ephesians 1:4-5). Of course, we also have free will and are morally responsible for our choices, a tension that I will explore later in this series. Suffice it to say, only God can cause someone to have an insatiable urge to explore the faith and ultimately convert.

Therefore, the job of a Christian is to do what he perceives God to be calling him to do (Ephesians 5:17). This is most often putting his own sin to death (Romans 8:13) and fully embracing the responsibilities God has assigned him, such as professional duties, marital duties, and properly exercising authority over subordinates such as children, employees, a pastoral flock, etc. (Ecclesiastes 9:10). In due time, God will give a Christian opportunities to interact with and positively influence those who are on the path to finding Him.

One way we can assist others is by helping tear down strongholds, which are false beliefs and ideas that drive a wedge between man and God (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). That is the point of this website. Believe it or not, God’s first approach to resolving unbelief and rebellion is reasoned dialogue: When speaking to the backsliding and wicked nation of Judah, God said, “Come now, and let us reason together.” If the men of Judah had listened to reason, all their sins would have been forgiven them (Isaiah 1:18-19).

If you are a non-Christian, at this point you may be wondering: how can I have any agency in my path to either salvation or damnation, if I am ultimately predestined one way or the other? The good news is: if you are wanting to pursue truth and find God if He is real, you will. It is as simple as that. If God is real, but you are not predestined to salvation, you will come to reject the entire idea of seeking Him and will be disinterested in this entire process.

You will never, however, be open to finding truth but be unable to find it. God doesn’t work like that. The very act of caring about knowing the truth is evidence God is calling you. All you have to do is agree to walk down the path, and pretty soon you will know the truth.

Here’s what I recommend: As I’ve said, the faith is not about adhering to a correct set of beliefs. Rather, it is about entering into a loving relationship with a living God who has a mind and a will. Thus, you should pray what I call the “Skeptic’s Prayer” (you can pray the Sinner’s Prayer later if you decide you believe in God and want to convert).

You can put it into whatever words you want, but here is the essence of the Skeptic’s Prayer: “God, I have no idea if you’re real. I don’t know what to believe. But I’m willing to believe in you if you exist and the Bible is true. If you are there, help me to understand you sufficiently to overcome my concerns and objections and know what’s real and what isn’t.”

If you can say that prayer sincerely, with a genuine heart and open mind, God will answer you and meet you where you are. He will arrange for all the blockers in your mind to be resolved to the point where you can reasonably believe. All you have to do, the only thing you have to do, is be open-minded and make the effort to put Him to the test in good faith.

Note: if you do have your concerns met and you repent and convert, it’s OK if your set of beliefs about God, the Bible, and morality aren’t perfect at first. I came into the faith with a lot of baggage and secular beliefs I tried to make work with Christianity. I would have gone to heaven if I’d died on my first day as a Christian. But when you spend enough time praying and studying, false beliefs have a way of working themselves out.

Also, people with different personality types will have different ways of coming to a point of being confident in God’s existence. For some it may be very rational and based on logical argument, while for others it may be more based on feelings and a sense of love and connection. Thus, to the extent bad ideas and arguments are blocking you, I will attempt to help remove those to the best of my ability, and to the extent any harm may have been done to you by those practicing the Christian faith incorrectly, I will hopefully show you that you were harmed not by God, but by bad theology and Christian practice.