Arguments and Certainty

Christian apologetics is a funny business. If you are a Christian, you necessarily think that God is the one who saves and that man, in himself, is helpless to save himself. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in orthodox Christianity. However apologetics spends a lot of time in the efforts that men control...in arguments that motivate belief in God. While this isn't inherently contradictory, I think it can be taken too far. When you think that people can be argued into the kingdom, then it's time for a reassessment. Thankfully, not many apologists live there.

There are many arguments for the existence of God. The famous atheist Alex O'Connor points out that the sheer number of arguments for God is itself a reason to believe in God. With so many arguments for God, it's natural to assume that some will be stronger than others. I belong to that camp. While I don't intend to lay out an S-tier ranking of these arguments, I do want to comment on some of the assumptions surrounding discussions of these arguments.

Many atheists will tell you that they need proof that God exists. They will say that unless you can show that God is absolutely necessary, then there is no reason why they should accept Him because by our definition, He is a necessary being. This is just another wording for "I need 100% proof."

What we have here is a failure to communicate. I don't blame atheists for this either, as the responsibility lies just as much on the shoulders of the Christian. I don't think the atheist will ever get what they are seeking for several reasons.

• Salvation is by grace through faith, and this is not from ourselves, it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9). No man will ever be in heaven who got there solely by force of argument. Arguments for God can ground belief in the same way that Jesus showing Thomas his hands was meant to steady his doubts and bring him to a fuller faith. But it was never the sole reason that Thomas believed and later died for his Savior.
• The systems that atheists and theists alike hold up as reliably truth-producing never get you 100% of the way there in terms of certainty. Being human is accepting that you may be wrong. There are two reasons to explore here
  • Even in a deductive system like mathematics, every proof relies on axioms which are not themselves proven but are accepted. You could call that faith. What's more, Godel showed that you would never have a complete formal system able to prove every truth that could expressed in that system. We have hard limits on what we can know with certainty. Everything is grounded in self-evident, unproven truths, kind of like when Romans 1 tells us that men are without excuse because God's invisible attributes are clearly seen in the world.
  • The problem of induction extends beyond everything that isn't proven deductively and introduces its own similar set of issues. Induction, predicting future behavior from past events, cannot be logically grounded as Hume showed but we still must employ it. There's simply no other option.

In every case, what is the common factor? Something from outside the system must be accepted in order for the whole game of knowing anything to happen. The atheist will never get 100% proof because without faith it is impossible to please God, and they have 100% certainty for exactly zero things in their life already, so it is unreasonable to require that for belief in God.

Still, Christianity is not a religion of blind faith. There are many reasons to believe it is true. There is an incredible mountain of evidence backing up its veracity, a sort of hall of fame of evidence like the great "cloud of witnesses" in Hebrews 12.

Reason and evidence point to God, but they never drop you off at the destination. God has personhood and has set forth requirements for knowing Him. They aren't complex. Even a child can understand them. And you must become like a child to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Until the atheist does this, no amount of logical or empirical proof will ever be strong enough to overcome their inherent hostility to God.

John 14:6 - ESV
6. Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.