Thursday, February 09, 2023

Apologetics: The Argument from Human Experience





- One of the greatest evidences of Christianity's truth is its unrivalled power to transform lives, an attribute of the Christian faith that is open and observable from the apostle Paul in the first century to many millions of examples in our own day.

- Christianity is also likely to be true because it works. Faithful, churchgoing Christians have been shown, in study after study, to be far happier and more content than other demographics. They exceed other demographics in nearly every measure of social stability and wellbeing. For all our scientific advances, secularism has not yet been able to produce a system of living that comes anywhere close to the personal and social wellbeing produced by Christianity.

- Christianity is likely to be true because of its propensity to produce people of exceptionally high moral character. Apologetics debates between atheists and Christians often end up pointing fingers at which side has the worst characters and events (the Inquisition as representative of Christianity; Stalin and Pol Pot as representative of atheism), but this tactic is misinformed. Christianity actually predicts such results through its doctrine of human depravity. A more illuminating question is to ask which system of belief is better at producing moral exemplars, and for that, Christianity stands head and shoulders above secularism/atheism. As a school of love and virtue, Christianity exceeds rival positions by a long shot, as can be demonstrated by many historical case studies.

- If a system of belief produced a radical, unbelievable transformation in just one person's life, you might be tempted to count it as a fluke. But what if those unbelievable transformations kept happening, over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times in every generation, over the course of two thousand years? I think any rational observer would want to take that system of belief's truth-claims seriously.