Christians... why do you identify as Christian?

[RINO Tom]

I have come to the conclusion that the most likely explanation for the Universe as we know it is that it was created/designed by a higher entity/consciousness of some kind that exists beyond the four dimensions we can perceive, and Christianity offers the most believable and unique description of such a being, IMO.  I also give the Bible the benefit of the doubt as a somewhat accurate historical text just like any other (certainly not all of it, especially many Old Testament stories), and I have a hard time believing that the disciples would have behaved in the way they did under persecution if they hadn't truly witnessed something miraculous (the Resurrection).  Beyond that, the obvious answers of it was what I grew up with, it makes me feel fulfilled inside and I just have an odd gut feeling/spiritual attraction that I don't expect or necessarily want anyone else to understand.

Happy Easter!

[RINO Tom]

I came to belief in God, to put it pretentiously, through philosophy, not through ethics. I'm not convinced this is a particularly good thing, and I think that this type of belief is, like the  old joke about Mathematician's answers "completely true and utterly useless". It doesn't, in an of itself, really motivate you to change anything and it certainly doesn't prove any particular religion.

Simply put, the hypothesis of God as the Ground of all Being, the uncaused cause, is, to my mind, far and away the most logical, rational, intellectually appealing, way of looking at the universe. Nevertheless, the idea that has been drummed into me repeatedly throughout my course, that you can prove anything if you make the right assumptions and choose the correct definitions has stayed with me. I recognise that if you make different assumptions you can just as easily show that God does not exist. I happen to think those assumptions are less parsimonious, I don't think they comport as well with the world around us, but there is no way of arguing that logical. Every philosophical argument comes down to a set of first principles at which debate must stop. You pay your money and you make your choice.

The reasons I think that the God idea has better first principles are long and boring, but just to give you a flavour, they concern the question of existence (Why there is something rather than nothing), the consistency of scientific laws (why they exist in the first place), the elegance and beauty of mathematics and the ability of the human mind to understand the universe, albeit dimly, through a glass.

As mentioned above though, this gets you no further to Christianity than the idea that 4 is greater than 2 gets you to 2+2=4. So why do I make that leap?

In one sense the answer is obvious, because I'm born to Christian parents in a (nominally) Christian country. Therefore, at the very least I'm more familiar with Christianity than other religions. This is true, but kind of trivial. Greater knowledge of Christianity is just as likely to lead to rejection as it is to acceptance. Ultimately there are two main steps that took me to where I am today.

The first was, again, a sort of intellectual exercise. Christianity, more than most religions, stands and falls with a historical event, if the body of Jesus was discovered tomorrow than we may as well all go home. Anyway I'm not going to claim that I'm even a dilettante in the history of the New Testament era, but I did discover that the consensus among historians is that Jesus definitely existed and was crucified. The documentation is too limited to show anything else and it certainly can't prove the resurrection, but it can't disprove it either. Similarily, regarding the doctrines of the Church I found that I did not have to accept the things I could not accept (Universalism and homosexuality). Obviously in both cases the church has largely to almost unanimously been against them but I think it' (although particularly universalism was fairly common among the church fathers, gregory of nyssa, for example) possible to be a christian and affirm those things coherently without becoming the type of liberal christian who may as well not believe at all. When it comes to things that a Christian must affirm I've found gradually that they're things that I can intellectually accept, or at least not feel I have to reject. For instance with the trinity, while I can not comprehend it I'm willing to accept it.  If you're able to get around the fact that there are the same number of fractions as there are prime numbers the idea of 3 in 1 is no longer quite so hard.

Admittedly at the moment I've just sketched out that I could say the creed without contradiction, not given any reasons why I do say it without contradiction, which is where the second step comes in. I take the view that reasons for Christianity are like hardcore pornography they are known in being seen, they are not obvious to define. And I have spent, over the last few years, many hours with a group of nuns who by their lives and by their service have given a more convincing demonstration of the central truths of the Gospel than any apologetics. Similarly reading the gospels I've found Jesus to be an utterly captivating figure, who I am unable to see as anything other than Lord and God. This may not satisfy hardcore rationalists (As a maths student I've always been something of an incorrigible mystic) but I am OK with that. Ultimately, once I've convinced myself that the necessary groundwork has been laid, I side with Stepan Trofimovich from Dostoevsky's Demons, after The Sermon on the Mount was read to him "Enough, enough, my child, enough........You can't think that that is not enough!".

This was a very cool post.  Thank you.