My friend Gavin Ortlund has a new book out called Why Christianity Makes Sense, with the subtitle: A Book About Jesus, the Mysteries of the World, and the Longings in Your Heart. He was generous enough to send me an advance copy of the book, which I planned to review—I read it, enjoyed it, then sort of forgot about it for a while before I wrote the review. So here, after much embarrassing delay, is my review.
The book is pretty standard fare for Gavin. A major theme that he likes to emphasize is that Christianity isn’t just true but makes for an awesome story. Everyone should hope that it’s true, even those who think it isn’t. Christianity possesses the three chief transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness—showing the goodness and the beauty of Christianity can help a person be receptive to its truth.
The book is good at drawing out the awesomeness of the Christian story. More than once when reading the book, I found myself thinking “what an awesome worldview.” But I’m not a Christian—while I found Gavin’s arguments for Christianity being good and beautiful persuasive, I was not ultimately moved by the arguments for it being true.
There’s a lot to like about the book. If you’re a Christian, I recommend it—if only because, when reading the book, you will more than once be struck with the awesomeness of Christianity. It is also very well written, both clear and engaging. I sailed through it quite quickly. And it provides a good explanation of the central arguments for thinking Christianity is true. The book is a very good encapsulation of the injunction in 1 Peter 3:15 “Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you.”
My view, however, is that the arguments for Christianity in the book are unsound.
Gavin’s first chapter opens with extensive commentary on the existentialists. He treats it as a serious possibility, given naturalism, that the world would be devoid of objective meaning. I’ve never found this persuasive. I don’t quite know what the phrase “objective meaning,” is supposed to mean or why it’s a problem that there isn’t any of it. So long as there’s objective value—objective reasons to perform actions or refrain from them—who cares whether there’s objective meaning? Actions being good or bad is meaning enough.
Chapter 2 discusses how awesome it would be if Christianity is true. Gavin compares belief in Christianity to the experience of Lucy, in the Chronicles of Narnia, going through the wardrobe and discovering a new magical land of wondrous things. This is a good comparison. If Christianity, or theism more broadly, is true, the world is enchanted. You will see your loved ones again, everything dreadful in the world will be undone, “everything sad is going to come untrue” (setting aside thorny issues about hell).
If Christianity is true, then one day, you will meet God himself in an indestructible body. Those who are “in Christ,” at the very least, will then live forever in paradise with the infinite being who made the world, counts every hair on your head, and loves you. That’s pretty cool!
Whether you think Christianity is true or not, it is important enough if true—big iff true—that it makes sense to investigate it carefully. So let’s do that.
Answer: yes.
Unsurprisingly, Gavin agrees. He dedicates several chapters to defending the existence of God. These chapters were interesting, but because they were for a relatively popular audience, he couldn’t explore the arguments in as much detail as I would have liked (note: this isn’t a criticism—I’m not the typical reader).
The first argument he presents is the contingency argument. The basic idea goes: there are lots of contingent things, which could have been otherwise. Something that’s contingent needs explaining. You need an explanation for why it exists instead of not existing. Even if the chain of contingent things is infinite, the infinite chain itself would still cry out for explanation. As an analogy, if there is an infinite chain of cars, each pulled by the one in front of it, and they start suddenly moving, even if every one is pulled by the one in front of it, you still need an explanation of why they started moving. Thus, we should think there’s some necessary being.
Gavin suggests that God is the best candidate for what could end the regress. God, as classically conceived, is the very same thing as his existence. Once you know what kind of thing God is, there isn’t a further question about whether God exists. It doesn’t make sense to ask for an explanation for God, because God is definitionally uncaused. And God is a better candidate for existing than the universe, because the universe is contingent. It could have been otherwise. It’s conceivable that the universe not exist at all.
I’m a bit dubious about these kinds of arguments. For one, I’m pretty okay admitting brute facts into my ontology. Sure, it’s a bit weird that there’s a contingent thing without an explanation, but it doesn’t seem much more mysterious than God existing without explanation. In fact, it seems to make a lot more sense for contingent things to exist without an explanation than for necessary things to exist without an explanation.
Every other necessary truth can be deduced a priori. If you’re clever enough, you can figure out all of mathematics, everything about morality, and so on. This thesis is called modal rationalism, and I accept it. But God’s existence doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you could figure out a priori, the way you can derive the right answer to a math problem. I also find the idea that God is identical to his existence to be totally incomprehensible!
The theist’s best reply, in my view, is to suggest that God’s existence really can be deduced a priori—we’re just not smart enough to do it. Perhaps, as Aquinas suggested, if we could see more deeply, we’d be able to see that God simply must exist. But I don’t know how this would work and to me it doesn’t seem like any concrete entity has to exist. Anytime some entity’s existence is mysterious, it’s always an option to say that its existence can be derived a priori—we’re just not equipped to do this derivation.
If there is something necessary, must it be God? I think God is a pretty good guess for what the necessary thing would be. A *limitless *necessary thing is a lot more plausible than a *limited *necessary thing, just like it seems way more plausible that it would be necessary that empty space is infinite in size than that it’s 8 trillion meters across. So this would raise the probability that God exists, without guaranteeing God’s existence. For example, I could imagine it being necessary that, say, every mathematical structure is concretely instantiated.
So by my reckoning, the contingency argument has some force, but it’s not decisive. If there’s a necessary element of causal reality, it’s probably God. But it’s not clear that there is such an element.
The next section is on the fine-tuning argument. Unsurprisingly, I agreed with most of it. The one bit that I disagreed with concerns the multiverse. Gavin suggests that the multiverse hypothesis is defective because it’s complicated. He says “the multiverse hypothesis seems almost the pinnacle instance of violating Ockham’s razor.”
But simplicity is a matter of the complexity of fundamental entities—those entities that aren’t explained by anything further. For example, suppose that God resolves to flip a coin and create a giant chorus of angels of different kinds if it comes up heads. Should we think, on grounds of simplicity, that it will come up tails? No. Theism posits one fundamental thing: God. All the rest of the complexity falls out of that one simple posit.
Similarly, multiverse theories posit one fundamental thing: some mechanism that generates many universes. This leads to a lot of universes, but it’s not complex, because they all follow from one fundamental entity. If you want to see my preferred reply to the multiverse hypothesis, see here and here.
The next chapter is on the moral argument. I’ve already written a piece about my thoughts on this argument, largely in response to Gavin, so I’ll just link my piece for those interested.
After Gavin finishes arguing for God’s existence, he turns to Christ, arguing that Jesus is God and rose from the dead. Unsurprisingly, this is the part that I buy less.
He begins by presenting the liar, lord, lunatic argument. Now, I agree that this argument has some force. Jesus seems to be less obviously scandal-plagued than, say, Muhammad and Joseph Smith—and he also has a kind of unique compellingness. Similarly, I don’t think the legend option will do completely. Sure, maybe Jesus didn’t claim to be God (I think probably he didn’t claim to be God) but all the first three Gospels attest that Jesus told people to eat bread and drink wine which he said were his flesh and his blood. This is one of the more widely settled facts in the New Testament. A person who suggests that is either depraved, a madman, or God.
The Gospels are littered with instances of Jesus making quite grand pronouncements that would be absurd for anyone other than God to claim. Matthew 16:27 declares “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.” If someone at the local Wallgreens claimed that he was going to reward each person according to what they’ve done when he comes with the Father’s glory and his angels, you wouldn’t think that they were a sincerely mistaken man of sound mind.
In my view, the best option is a mixture of lunatic and legend.
Jesus must have been at least moderately out to lunch. Of course, lunacy comes in degrees—and people in those days were a lot more willing to make mad-sounding religious claims—but given that Jesus told people to eat bread and drink wine as his flesh and blood, if he was not God, he cannot have been wholly sane. Gavin argues against this on grounds that Jesus is compelling—but many people are both compelling and more than a bit crazy.
I don’t think that Jesus really claimed to be God. So the kind of lunacy he’d have needed to possess is one that compels one to make unbelievable religious claims. Read, for example, the book of Amos. He seemed a bit out to lunch. Maybe Jesus was similarly out to lunch as Amos? Many people throughout history have done this without being visibly raving mad.
Gavin then turns to some discussion of whether Jesus claimed to be God. My best guess is that he did not, though he had some heightened self-conception. I think John believed that Jesus was God in some sense, but I don’t think that’s true of the synoptics nor of Jesus. Here are some arguments for this:
The synoptics are never clear and explicit that Jesus is God. If Jesus claimed to be God, and that was the most important theme, then probably it would be mentioned clearly and explicitly. Instead, we get ambiguous hints and whispers. Now, you might object that John is somewhat less clear than we’d expect. But I think that John is still reasonably clear, and I also think it’s plausible that the author of John wasn’t totally clear on the sense in which Jesus was divine. It doesn’t seem like the theme of Christianity—that God became man—is that clear in John.
In Mark 10:18, a man calls Jesus good. Jesus totally pwns this guy: “Why do you call me good?” “No one is good—except God alone.” The plain reading of this is that he’s denying that he’s God. Sure, it’s possible that he was subtly hinting at his being God, but this is a less natural reading. Note that Matthew 19:17 tells a conflicting version, where Jesus replies “Why do you ask me about
what is good?” The version in Matthew poses less of a problem, but is less historically reliable, as it was probably based on the version in Mark.Mark 13:32 declares “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” If Jesus is an omniscient God, then this statement is false! Now, in my view, the best reply is that Jesus was describing the limitations of knowledge in his human form. But still, if you’re an omniscient person, and there’s a third omniscient person too, it’s a bit weird to say “I don’t know X—ONLY the first omniscient person does.”
On the cross, Jesus famously laments “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How could God forsake God? Now, again, this isn’t definitive. It’s not clear historically that Jesus really said this (it might be an attempt by later writers to draw theological parallels, given the quotation of Psalm 22). And it might be that insofar as Jesus is to suffer the ultimate torment on the cross, he must suffer it, in some deep sense, alone. But I submit that if you are God, it is odd to complain about God forsaking you.
Matthew 12:32 says “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” This seems to indicate that the Holy Spirit and the Son are not divine in the same way. Note that the action—speaking against, in Greek εἴπῃ κατὰ—is the same. The only difference is who it’s applied to (and, when applied to the Son, there’s an extra word λόγον which means “a word.” But presumably that’s not relevant to its status). Now, there are ways to accommodate this: it could be that when you speak against the Son, that’s forgivable, because you don’t know that he’s God—but turning away from God is unforgivable. Still, it seems to naturally suggest a picture where Jesus and the Spirit are very different kinds of things. It also lends some credence to an anti-trinitarian picture where Jesus is a mode of God, rather than a distinct person—for if the Spirit is a distinct person, it is a bit mysterious that the Father is left out.
Mark 6:5 says, “he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” God is limitless in power, so this is puzzling if Jesus is God. Note that Matthew 13:58 changes this to “he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.” This fits well with Matthew having a somewhat higher Christology than Mark.
Jesus prays in many places. If Jesus is God, it’s a bit puzzling that he prays to God. Not so if he’s just a man.
What of Gavin’s positive case? Gavin cites Mark 2, where Jesus tells a paralytic that his sins are forgiven. The scribes accuse him of blasphemy, saying “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” In response, Jesus says:
Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?9But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—10“I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.”11And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”12
So Jesus’s reply is to say: if I can heal this guy, then surely I can forgive his sins. He then heals the guy, illustrating that he can forgive sins. Gavin provides the following analogy: suppose a boy’s Father shows up and says “My son, I love you.” The son replies “why are you calling me your son and saying you love me? Only a father can do that.” The father replies “so that you may know that I have authority to call you m…
