“Christianity Is Not Credible”

Suppose someone declares, “Christianity is not credible.” What do they mean and how should we respond to that claim?

They probably mean that Christianity isn’t worthy of belief. They know there are lots of Christians, but their point is that there shouldn’t be because Christianity isn’t worthy of belief.

In claiming that Christianity isn’t worthy of belief, they usually mean that Christianity isn’t even worth considering as a way of life and belief.

How should we Christians respond to this claim?

We should start by stressing that we live and must live by stories. We are needy and ‘wanty’ creatures who are constantly on the hunt for various goods—for air, food, water, shelter, safety, health, love, and happiness. Pursuing these goods requires us to act in ways that enable us to get what we want and need. This requires us to take some particular tack on life and, since we aren’t ruled by animal instinct, we need stories that suggest what we must do to get what we want and need.

Stories locate us somewhere on an arc or trajectory that has a beginning, middle, and end. We need two kinds of stories in order for our lives to make sense. Each of us needs to have a personal or life story that tells us what our individual life means. This story orients us to the particular people, places, and things around us, describing where we have come from, where we are, and where we think we can go so that we can project ourselves into hopeful futures where we can get what we want and need. It places our life in the context of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, geographical and economic locations, past and current events, immediate and longer-term future plans, and so forth.

Yet our life stories must be localized within some general story in order to make adequate sense—and a general story that is in principle complete. General stories address what human life means. A complete general story at least implicitly says something about everything and thus answers questions like, “Where did we come from and where are we going? Does human life have some ultimate meaning or is it just a kind of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Have we been created to fulfill some specific purpose or are we the product of blind, meaningless cosmic forces? Is life just about making money and pursuing our own personal happiness? Or is it about loving and serving others and believing and obeying something (like the moral law) or Someone (that is, God) greater than ourselves?”

Every culture has a general story that is meant to represent the way the world is. A culture’s general story is meant to guide and correct its members’ personal stories by informing them of what they actually need and what they can reasonably want and hope for. In other words, our life stories always need to be localized within a general story that legitimates them, and until we decide which general story is most credible, we are flying blind and perhaps heading towards disaster, no matter how satisfactory our life stories may seem.

Now stories make sense of things either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up.’ Top-down stories make sense of things in terms of some person’s reasons, intentions, and purposes. Little Emma asks, “Why are we going to the grocery store?” and her father replies, “Because we need milk.” Bottom-up stories explain things impersonally in terms of matter, energy, and inviolable causal laws. Bobby asks, “Why did those jars fall off that shelf?” and his mother answers, “Because of the earthquake.”

Our society actually harbors two cultures right now because it includes two general stories that are vying for our allegiance.

Christianity’s top-down story claims that a personal God has created us. Everything about our world can be explained in terms of his intentions and purposes, including the fact that he created us to crown his creation and be the only earthly creatures whom he can address and thus hold accountable (see, e.g., Ps. 32:8–9). He can thereby enter into personal communion with us—that is, into friendship involving open communication and mutual understanding (see, e.g., Exod. 33:11; John 15:13–15; James 2:23). We are to be his earthly representatives, his images and echoes on earth. Our lives, then, have a supernatural dimension because everything we are and do has more than merely earthly or natural significance.

Darwin’s bottom-up story claims that we are just accidental products of impersonal natural laws. We don’t exist for any reason. As the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson put it, science (in his judgment) has established that “humanity . . . arose entirely on its own through an accumulated series of events during evolution. We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own.”

This perspective is known as causally closed naturalism, which Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines as “a theory that expands conceptions drawn from the natural sciences into a world view . . . that denies that anything in reality has a supernatural or more than natural significance; specifically: the doctrine that cause-and-effect laws (as of physics and chemistry) are adequate to account for all phenomena.” Causally closed naturalists insist that life has only one dimension. Everything we do, including eating, mating, quarreling, fighting, fleeing, and even praying and worshiping, no matter what it seems to be about, has no more than earthly significance.

Given science’s real and apparent successes over the past couple of centuries, many in our society take the bottom-up story to be credible in a way that they hold the top-down story is not. So the bottom-up story has become for many their default story; and, in fact, its one-dimensional, exclusively this-worldly perspective exerts a kind of cultural hegemony over public expressions of the general story that limits most public discourse to this-worldly concerns. The top-down Christian story, with its supernatural, more-than-earthly emphasis, isn’t generally taken seriously enough to be a regular part of public discourse. Christian faith is thus privatized. Publicly, our society tolerates Christian faith in private but frowns upon its intruding into public space.

With more time and space, it would be easy to show how causally closed naturalists have regularly oversold scientific success. Of course, it is worse than foolish to deny science’s genuine achievements: fewer than half of us would be alive today if it weren’t for the development over the last three centuries of inoculations and vaccines as well as the discovery in the 1860s–1880s of germs and the role they play in the spread of disease. Science has improved human life enormously, and so we should welcome and celebrate its achievements, even though it can never give us the last word about what human life means.

It can’t give us the last word because causally closed naturalism, strictly interpreted and rigorously applied, can’t be lived. Paradoxically, the general, bottom-up story discredits our natural understanding of what human life is all about.

We naturally understand our lives in terms of what naturalists sometimes disparagingly call ‘folk-psychology.’ Folk-psychology makes sense of human life top-down, that is, by reference to our beliefs, desires, and feelings as they shape our intentions, reasons, and purposes. According to folk-psychology, if I desire to drink some orange juice and I believe that there is some in the fridge in the kitchen, then I may decide to get up from my chair in my study, walk down to the kitchen, and open the door to the fridge. And then, if I discover that there isn’t any orange juice, I will feel disappointed. Perhaps, on my way to the kitchen, I remember that there are fresh donuts on the counter. But then I think that, as much as I’d like one, I’m trying to lose weight—and so I decide not to have one.

In other words, folk-psychology understands human life as involving the free pursuit of some things as well as the deliberate avoidance of others. This desire-driven, belief-conditioned, top-down language is the language of ordinary, everyday human life.

Bottom-up, causally closed naturalists take this to be a primitive, unscientific way of understanding life. They want to explain human life in natural-science terms such as physical brain states. By their lights, what I believe, desire, and feel is completely determined by whatever physical state my brain is in. Yet unless something has gone wrong, we explain our lives in folk-psychological terms and not in terms of physical brain states. Science has discovered that depression usually involves decreased levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine that regulate mood, motivation, and energy. But all this tells us is that our brains need adequate levels of these chemicals in order to function normally. It doesn’t establish that having enough of them explains normal human life.

In other words, while adequate levels of these neurotransmitters are necessary for us to function normally, they aren’t sufficient. Other, nonchemical factors are also required, such as having a stable life story that enables us to understand our own lives. If the personal story that you have believed all your life is suddenly discredited, this may cause these neurotransmitters to drop, but it isn’t that they drop and then you realize that your life story has been discredited. The explanatory arc runs the other way.

Yet causally closed naturalists insist that ultimately everything, including all human behavior, will be explained in neuroscientific terms. The language of folk-psychology would be, then, just a kind of crude and ultimately deeply misleading way of gesturing towards an entirely different sort of reality that describes what is really going on. For instance, from a thoroughgoing naturalistic viewpoint, to speak of love would ultimately be just an imprecise and misleading way of gesturing towards specific colorless, odorless, soundless, and value-free molecular brain states. Love, then, along with most of what we take to be most meaningful and valuable, would no longer be part of ultimate reality.

If you doubt that this would drain our lives of meaning and make them in some deep sense unlivable, then just try living as if those you love, no matter how they appear, are ultimately nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, and value-free molecular configurations.

We need top-down, folk-psychological explanations in order to make sense of human life. In fact, even convinced naturalists like Hawking and Mlodinow think in folk-psychological terms and explain what they are doing in terms of their beliefs, desires, and feelings. Even for them, their lives wouldn’t make sense without folk-psychology. And, of course, to the degree that a view of human life is unlivable it isn’t likely to be true.

So I return to the original assertion, the claim that Christianity is not credible. I started by stressing that we live and must live by stories that suggest what we must do to get what we want and need. I’ve said that we can only determine what we really want and need in terms of some general story that tells us what reality is like. For us, in our society, there are ultimately only two complete general stories between which we must choose. One is the top-down Christian story and the other is the bottom-up story of causally closed naturalism. But causally closed naturalism insists that the everyday psychological terms that we use and must use to explain human life—terms like thinking, desiring, feeling, loving, valuing, judging, choosing, and so on—are ultimately reducible to physical terms like size, shape, weight, and location, or—more technically—to terms like mass and energy, acting according to inviolable causal laws like gravity, electromagnetism, and so on. This, even on the surface, is wildly implausible: What is the mass of this thought? How much does love weigh? And choosing this view of things—the causally closed naturalistic story—entails that virtually everything that everybody, including causally closed naturalists, think and must think about human life is false.

Ultimately, in order to make adequate sense of our life stories, we each must make this choice: Do we think that reality, at its deepest level, is personal in the way that the Christian top-down general story claims, or do we think that it is impersonal, in the way that the bottom-up causally closed naturalistic story claims? The story we choose, if we are reasonable, must then shape our personal stories and guide our daily lives.

I don’t think that there is much of a contest regarding the kind of general story we should take to be most credible: it is a top-down general story that legitimates the folk-psychological world we actually live in and must live in in order for our lives to possess any real and lasting value, meaning, and purpose. Of course, much more needs to be said to show that Christianity’s top-down story is best, but I hope I have convinced you that the quick dismissal of Christianity as not credible is not itself credible. When we slow down and think carefully about it, the bottom-up alternative is the one that seems incredible. At the very least, then, this very fast tour through some very difficult and complicated terrain suggests that the Christian top-down story mustn’t be dismissed out of hand. Christianity is worth serious consideration.