Index

Top 10 Reasons I Am a Christian

· 12 min read

I’ve been asked why I believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ: here are the top reasons! I wrote this initially about 5 years ago but never published it. Was reflecting on this topic recently and decided to make it live, so here it is.

But first, I’d like to define faith: faith is belief in light of the evidence. Many erroneously define “faith” as belief in spite of the evidence. However that’s blind faith, which is entirely different.1

Secondly, one of my core values is being relentlessly truth-seeking. That value drives everything else in my thinking and evaluation.

A few these reasons only get you to “there is a God” (deism more broadly), while the rest carry you the whole way to “there is a God and He’s the God of the Bible.”

Here’s the list, roughly in the order it convinced me. I’m heavily sourcing from Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics, as it was a huge inspiration for me to think more critically about my faith and why I believe.

1. Morality is real, not opinion (why God at all)

Almost nobody actually lives like right and wrong are preferences. We argue about ethics the way we argue about facts, because that’s what we treat them as.2

Morals are not opinions. They are not personal, private decisions, and they are not descriptions of behavior. They are prescriptions for behavior and motive that have the force of a command.

Holman QuickSource Guide

The relativist position falls apart the second you lean on it. “All truth is relative” is itself a universal claim, so it fails its own test. Paul Copan calls that the self-excepting fallacy: a rule that binds everyone except the person stating it.3 And people only hold their relativism on a good day.

Relativism is a sunny-day morality, but as soon as a person is wronged, they instantly believe in moral absolutes.

Holman QuickSource Guide

So a moral law that binds everyone, including the people who deny it, has to come from an authority beyond any of us. Authority like that belongs to a person. I call that person God.

2. Something had to start it all (why God at all)

Everything I can point to owes its existence to something before it. Follow that chain back and you either get an infinite regress that never actually begins, or a first cause that nothing else caused.

Without the unmoved mover to open the lid, the universe would become like a wound music box that remained forever closed, motionless, and silent.

Holman QuickSource Guide

To say the box needs no one to open it is to say the wood and metal assembled themselves without a craftsman. I don’t buy that. Sir William Thomson, who had more claim to the scientific high ground than most, said it plainly: “If you think strongly enough you will be forced by science to the belief in God.”4

3. The design didn’t happen by accident (why God at all)

What moved me most here is information. Complexity can happen by chance. Information can’t.

Say there is an unlimited number of monkeys with typewriters. Given an unlimited amount of time, could these monkeys ever write Hamlet? The answer is no. Even if at some point they happened upon the exact same sequence of letters as Hamlet, it still would not be Hamlet. It would be a string of letters that resembled Hamlet, but it would be void of any information.

Holman QuickSource Guide

Information is communication between minds. DNA is a language, and its code had to exist before any DNA could use it.5

Information did not emerge from DNA itself any more than a bowl of alphabet soup can say “I LOVE YOU.” The best explanation for the information found in DNA is that it was imposed on the DNA by a mind.

Holman QuickSource Guide

4. The gospel is a free gift, and that’s backwards from every other religion (why Christianity)

Nearly every other belief system runs on merit: you earn your standing with God by being good enough. Christianity says you can’t earn it and you don’t have to. That reversal is the whole point of the gospel, and it’s still what trips people up the first time they really hear it.

The founders of the world’s great religions made no claims as extravagant as Jesus of Nazareth did: to forgive sins, to be the judge of all, to always be present with his followers throughout the ages, to hear their prayers.

Paul Copan, quoted in the Holman QuickSource Guide

Ravi Zacharias said treating all religions as the same betrays an ignorance of all of them.6 They make contradictory claims about the biggest questions a person can ask, so they can’t all be true, and Christianity’s central claim is stranger and more generous than the rest.

5. Christianity cares whether it’s true (why Christianity)

I have no patience for “whatever you believe is true for you.” Truth doesn’t need my belief to be true, and even my deepest sincerity doesn’t make a false thing true.

Many people sincerely believe false things, but that does not change the truthfulness of what they believe. The object of faith, the content, is what determines whether a religion is true or false, not the sincerity of its adherents.

Holman QuickSource Guide

An epistemology that’s comfortable with you checking the record is a belief system that expects the record to hold true. Christianity invites investigation and criticism instead of hiding from it.

6. Restraint is the road to freedom (the case for living morally at all)

This one isn’t uniquely Christian, but it’s true, and it guts the idea that freedom means the absence of rules.

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke7

The less discipline a person carries inside, the more some outside force has to impose from without. Freedom and self-control aren’t actually opposites: one enables the other.

7. A Christian life pays off in practice (why Christianity)

Set the theology aside for a second and just observe the merits of its instructions. Restraint around sex spares you a whole category of consequences. Not being gluttonous keeps your body working longer. “Don’t kill, don’t steal” builds a society you’d actually want to live in - just some examples.

Additionally, you get a meaningful life by spending it on something bigger than yourself. Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. People who live that way tend to end up with lives worth having.8

Even when pursuing happiness itself isn’t the goal, you find happiness along the way by pursuing purpose instead. The most unhappy people I know set “happiness” as their #1 priority9, because mere happiness isn’t enough. Chasing a feeling is a fleeting enterprise by definition.

8. The historical record holds up (why Christianity)

If this were only a nice story, the evidence would be thin. But it’s not.

In the case of the New Testament, if we limit ourselves to only the original language manuscripts, we have over 5,300 copies, including fragments.

Holman QuickSource Guide

Some of those copies predate the official canon - and beyond that, it isn’t only Christians on the record. Josephus, a Jewish historian working for Rome, wrote about Jesus as a real man crucified under Pilate whose followers didn’t scatter.10 The Roman historian Tacitus mentions Jesus while recording Nero’s burning of Rome.11 Then the Dead Sea Scrolls turned up manuscripts a thousand years older than what we’d had, and they matched at around 95%, with the differences being spelling and copy errors.12 This is the best-attested set of documents in the ancient world and it isn’t close.13

9. Scripture describes human nature too well (why Christianity)

The Bible keeps naming things about people that I recognize in myself and everyone I know before I’m told to look for them. A few examples include the pull to worship something, the need for community, and the sense that I should do right, paired with the reliable failure to. It seems highly unlikely that such an old book is able to read me and the human condition more broadly this accurately.

Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.

Romans 2:14-15 (NLT)

10. I’d rather trust Someone bigger than me (why God at all)

The more I learn, the more I notice how much I don’t know.

So I put my trust in a God who is involved, who holds final authority instead of me, and who offers a future I couldn’t build on my own.

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Jeremiah 29:11 (ESV)

The arguments I don’t find compelling

Being a Christian doesn’t mean defending every argument that flies the Christian flag. A few of the popular ones don’t always resonate with the way I think.

“God spoke to me directly.” While it may happen to some people, it certainly hasn’t happened to me in any supernatural way (at least not yet). I’ve found this reality to be a painful, frustrating one - when you fall on your knees with gratitude for the gift of salvation, among other things, you want to hear the voice of your Maker.

Present-day miracles. An unexplained event isn’t proof of anything by itself. Anomalies can exist in nature without God reaching in to cause them, after all.

To be clear, I’ve changed my mind about pieces of this before, and the faith has consistently come out the other side intact. I like to adopt a Bayesian epistemology approach to thinking - sometimes you aren’t 100% sure about a belief, and you should be willing to modify your beliefs in light of new evidence.

Even talking about these things can be tricky, and I’ve tried to address strategies for respectful discourse online before. Generally speaking, I like finding common ground in a disagreement rather than win any given point. But ultimately, I’m led to make disciples and to love my neighbor, so I intend on continuing to do just that.

Footnotes

  1. J. Warner Wallace, Doesn’t the Bible Say True Faith is Blind? (Cold-Case Christianity). The cold-case detective defines biblical faith as “a reasoned trust in light of the evidence.” ↩

  2. Bourget and Chalmers, The 2020 PhilPapers Survey (summarized at Daily Nous, 2021). In the largest survey of professional philosophers, 62.1% accepted or leaned toward moral realism. ↩

  3. Paul Copan, True for You, But Not for Me (Issues, Etc. Journal, 1998). Copan names it directly: the relativist claims a statement holds true for everyone but himself. ↩

  4. Lord Kelvin, Science Affirms Creative Power (1903). His remarks at University College London as reported in The Times on May 2, 1903, with the corrected text preserved in S.P. Thompson’s 1910 biography. ↩

  5. Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009). The book-length case that the information in DNA is best explained by a mind, since minds are the only cause we know of that produces information. ↩

  6. Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods (Word Publishing, 2000). His full line: “Anyone who claims that all religions are the same betrays not only an ignorance of all religions but also a caricatured view of even the best-known ones.” ↩

  7. Edmund Burke, A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791). Full text in volume four of Burke’s collected writings at Project Gutenberg. ↩

  8. Shanshan Li et al., Association of Religious Service Attendance With Mortality Among Women (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016). Following 74,534 women over 16 years, frequent church attenders had 33% lower all-cause mortality than those who never attended. ↩

  9. Iris B. Mauss et al., Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness (Emotion, 2011). The more people explicitly value happiness, the less happy they end up, especially when life hands them every reason to be happy. ↩

  10. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.3, c. AD 93. Most scholars hold that Christian copyists embellished parts of this passage, but that its core (Jesus condemned to the cross by Pilate, followers who didn’t abandon him) is Josephus’ own. ↩

  11. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, c. AD 116. “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” ↩

  12. Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Moody, 1986) for the 95% figure. Textual scholar Anthony Ferguson reaches the same verdict in How Much Can the Most Famous Dead Sea Scroll Prove? (Text & Canon Institute, 2022): the differences are mostly spelling and scribal slips. ↩

  13. Daniel B. Wallace, interview with Justin Taylor (The Gospel Coalition, 2012). Wallace, founder of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, counts 5,800+ catalogued Greek New Testament manuscripts, roughly 1,000 times the manuscript data for the average Greco-Roman author. ↩

Index