Ep 1 | Why Should I Believe Christianity Is True?

We know that some questions don't have easy answers, but that doesn't mean we should stop asking them. This is a place to further explore your questions about church, culture, and Christianity. Welcome to Curious for More. Let's dive in. This week we're beginning our series on truth and religion, and we're starting with quite a doozy of a question, Pete. Why should I believe Christianity is true? There are a lot of religions out there. How do I know that Christianity is the one true religion? Yeah, it's a great foundational question, and was a question that I remember exploring and being animated by when I was in my early 20s and I was looking at different life philosophies and different religions as part of my academic studies, and so this was something I was exploring, and I remember then that there was a similar atmosphere then as there is today, which is a kind of nervousness about making truth claims in this area of religion, and I think partly it's because that there are some regional conflicts on that obviously we see in our new cycle that are at least based around or have religion as a factor to them, and also maybe a sense as well that truth claims can sometimes be power plays, and so in a kind of media cycle world with the propensity for people to generate fake news, how do we really know that you're really believing truth the oldest trick in the book is to say that something's true when it's actually a move for power, and so because of that I think there's been a tendency to think that in religion there isn't such a thing as truth. There's preference, there's opinion, there's kind of true for you, but there isn't such a thing as objective truth. I remember it's been around for a while, but one of the early illustrations I heard of this is an old Buddhist parable that kind of came back to prominence in the West in the 1970s, and it's the one of the blind men and the elephant, so there's an elephant and there's various blind men and they kind of represent the different world religions, and so one has got hold of the ear, and he says you know this feels to me like a giant leaf, another one's got hold of the trunk, he says no no no this isn't a giant leaf it's it's a kind of rising moving, you know kind of tube, another one's got hold of the leg and he says no no no you're both wrong this one's a pillar and it's strong and it's sturdy, another one's got the belly and he's kind of touching and say no it's a bit soft and squidgy and you can obviously see the illustration, and the point being that all different religions are all trying to understand the same elephant, the same reality of God or the spiritual, the divine or whatever you call it, but they've all got of course no one knows everything about God, that would be arrogant, so therefore the best we hope for is we've got a part of God, and if we only we could step back and see the bigger picture we see the real grasping parts of a reality of a bigger hole, and that's attractive and it sounds kind of humble and generous, yeah generous and seems to be a way of reconciling different religions, the problem is is when you actually press into a little bit more the illustration itself falls down a number of counts, the principle one being that the person telling the story is actually claiming to be the one person who sees the whole elephant, so if you think of that if we make it concrete like you got Islam claiming one thing, Christianity claiming another thing, Hinduism claiming another thing, a Buddhist claiming another thing, and then the person who tells this comparative religion parable saying oh I actually see the whole elephant right, so they're actually falling foul of the rules of their own game, they claim no one sees the whole elephant apart from them, and it makes the point that actually you can't avoid truth claims when it comes to any area, like if we're talking about God then the question is is that claim true or not, just to try and palm it off with some humility and say well it's all relative, doesn't actually help you because if you're claiming all of you and you get a part of it you're actually making a truth claim and even bigger truth claim. And wouldn't each of those world religions also make a truth claim? Right and of course the thing is is that truth is you know works according to laws of logic and so for example if someone is claiming I don't know if that Jesus Christ is merely only a prophet and Christianity is claiming no no he's not only a prophet he's the divine son of God, well those are mutually contradictory right, you can't both be true. And indeed I've done quite a lot of discussions and some even debates with leaders of other religions for example muslim iman and we had no problems we had a very cordial conversation followed up with lunch afterwards saying we don't believe the same thing and leaders to fight you know whether metaphorically or physically but it would have been very difficult and both of us it would have kind of said well peat and but omas and iman you don't really know what you're talking about in your own spheres of expertise you actually both agreeing we both say no we do know we've received a lot of training we're not agreeing on the same thing and that's okay we can still get on but we're not claiming the same truth. And we're not trying to. Right so I think we want to push back on that and therefore truth in the world of religion is valid and justifiable and needs to be explored and explored with curiosity. And that question I tend to be more of like I don't know a relationship sort of feeler and so when I hear this question I'm like what is truth I feel like my brain is going to go on the fritz a little bit. I think it also confuses the kind of the posture and the character of the conversation with the content of the claims it's possible for example for me to claim something true in lots of walks of life but do it with humility in other words to say what it doesn't rise or fall on me so for example if someone my wife is a surgeon and let's just say that someone comes to her for an opinion you know and she gives them her that it's it's kind for her to give them a definite opinion on something and it would be humble for her to recognize where that opinion is contested and we're getting a second opinion might help but it doesn't do the patient any favors if she comes and kind of goes all relative and say well no one can really tell whether it's best to operate or not and that doesn't help the patient and that confuses the content and what's called sometimes epistemic humility which is humility about what we can know with the character of the conversation and personal humility we don't really want epistemic humility about the content when it comes to things like an operation life and death you know should you take these drugs or not well no one can really tell why am I coming to you then with the character she can be a humble person who knows her expertise in her area and I think that that's what we're wanting to do with truth claims about God is if there's truth that's noble about him then let's let's claim that that's really important but personally say that you know actually that doesn't mean that I'm the arbiter of all truth that would be arrogance right so in your journey it sounded like you looked at a lot of different religions and ultimately came to Christianity as being true so what was it for you or what would you say to someone now who's on the same journey yeah interestingly Christianity was my kind of last bus stop on the tour as it were there probably other reasons made for another podcast why that was but I actually looked a lot of the other world religions first and my friends who are Christians who were engaged with a lot of my questions eventually said me why don't you consider Christianity and when I asked them kind of why I should I remember one thing they said which is stuck with me they said well Jesus is the tallest poppy in the field and I kind of thought what you would say that right your Christians of course that's just your like selection bias but I think what they were saying now as I reflect on it is that all the other world religions will claim to be talking about God or finding the way to God or sharing truths about God but Jesus is unique because he's the only one who walks onto the stage of history and says I am God no one else says that but I would say if you asked him are you God he would say my son you're deluded if you asked Muhammad or you God he'd rent his clothes and say no that's blasphemy you know if you ask him do sages they would say the divine is everywhere and in all of us but no one can claim to be the divine but Jesus walks and talks and says I am God so I'm going to prove it by my life and my minister in my miracles my death and resurrection and therefore in one sense he's actually the because his claim is so escalated it should be the easiest one to disprove it as false it's falsifiable and equally it's the first place to start and it's also interesting to me that a lot of the other religions engage with Jesus for example islam has a thought process about Jesus Hindus were often talk about Jesus as well but Jesus doesn't go around engaging with all the other world religions so he seems to be the tallest pop in the further a great place to start at least as a starting point and you really do have to decide what you believe about Jesus based on his own claims right because if you're going to engage with them at all you have to take it fully and is he who he says he is yes exactly and I think that's really important when it comes to something like truth there are ways that we can determine something is true a lot of this we do intuitively part of my philosophy background is you make implicit explicit lot how we come to know something is true but there are ways that we can evaluate whether the truth claims about Jesus are actually true by understanding how truth works in general okay and are you willing to tell those of us who don't know that so three tests that are quite often talked about is external verifiability I'll give you the technical term external verifiability internal consistency and what's called in this, the complicated one, existential viability. Let me explain those. So external verifiability means if something is true, true things correspond to other true things. So if Jesus really existed in space-time in history, you would expect that to be a least correlative with other historical realities. For example, in the Apostles Creed, Christians recite that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Well, the great thing is, under Philo or Josephus, we can know when Pontius Pilate was the governor of that area, and we can just look, did the dates even match up, right? Jesus. And they do. He was there. He didn't exist in a vacuum. Correct. You would expect to see archaeological evidence for the New Testament accounts, the corresponds and indeed there's a ton of that, right? So true things correspond to other true things. That's external viability. Then there's internal consistency. This is the one that every parent gets or teacher gets when someone's lying. You catch them in the like as one thing they say over here doesn't correspond to this over here and so it contradicts itself. So again, looking at the New Testament accounts, claiming to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus' life, some of them, right? Do they correspond with what they say internally, right? Is one saying one thing, another one, contradicting it in another area? And again, that was a big part of reading the New Testament by self and seeing, no, they stack up. The consistency is remarkable. And therefore they're true within themselves. You're not kind of catching them in a lie. And we're pretty good at detecting that as well. And down the ages, interesting lots of kind of trial lawyers have been persuaded to become Christians because they've examined the New Testament like eyewitness accounts and they're like, wow, this has the ring of truth to it. So that's the internal consistency one. And the final one is existential viability. Can you live it? Doesn't actually improve your life. Make your life better. Live it. Stack up with reality. And there's some really wonderful things there. For example, humility wasn't considered a virtue in the first century or in any historical period previously. Jesus introduced the idea of humility as being a virtue beforehand. Humility equals humiliation. No one likes being humiliated. So why would you? But now today, all this evidence, for example, around lead is a better way than the humble. No one's saying that in the first century. It's a remarkable. It doesn't come up in any of the virtues of the Greek philosophers. So Jesus introduced this idea. What does that actually work? Yeah. Like, humility is very attractive and actually helps you learn. Helps you develop. Helps you bring better things out of a team. Where did that come from? Well, Jesus introduced it or forgiveness. On a shame society in the ancient world, Jesus introduced the idea of forgiveness as being a key thing rather than shame someone who cast them out. And again, society works better. But no one set that before him. So does it make sense of our reality as well? And Christianity does. So three tests for truth. Yeah. So Christianity wins stacked against all three of these different tests of truth. It really stands up. Yes. It stands up to a scrutiny. Yes. We will, in future episodes, get into the reliability of Scripture and things that you mentioned that will help us dig more deeply into truth and help us continue to be curious for more.