A Christian Apology

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Apology - “A reasoned argument or writing in justification of something, typically a theory or religious doctrine.”

For the spiritual seeker, the dissatisfied atheist, for posterity and for my own self-examination, I’ve systematically outlined some of what I believe and how I came to believe it. For more details on the aim of this apology and the blog, visit the About page. Note that it’s written in reverse chronological order so you can more easily follow the progression of ideas by scrolling from top to bottom or from newer to older posts. Or you can use the links below and the back button of your browser to read the entries that are most interesting to you.

"I believe in Science"

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You’ve probably heard that sentence used to dismiss everything from QAnon-type conspiracy theories to belief in a higher power, but what is the speaker really saying? After all, science is really just a method of gaining knowledge, and one that isn’t accessible to everyone for every question. Science is the practice of proposing a theory, then systematically testing that theory by changing variables. That’s it. And while it works well for my toddler son to figure out how gravity works in his daily life, neither you nor I have personally applied it to determine that the gravitational pull of the sun keeps the Earth rotating around it every 365 days…

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We're all right, alright?

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Science has a huge blind spot: It can never be fully objective due to the influence of the society that produces it. But what if there is no “objective” and universal truth that’s accessible to science? If you’ve already come to this conclusion feel free to skip to the next (previous) post. If you haven’t, maybe this will blow your mind: The “scientific consensus” is that two observers can have a completely different understanding of the universe, and yet still both be perfectly correct. And that an observer (read: consciousness) can affect the outcome of an event simply by observing it. Or said another way, we influence reality by “seeing” it. Warning! I’m about to come down pretty hard on one side of the “if a tree falls in the forest, etc. etc.” debate…

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We will NEVER know it all, smartypants.

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There’s a compelling argument to make that we can never know everything about the universe. There are physical laws preventing anything travelling faster than light (the aforementioned Theory of Relativity) and therefore limits to observing the far-reaches / origins of the universe (they’re actually the same, see Cosmic Inflation below), and limits to the amount of energy that’s required to observe the microscopic (the aforementioned quantum world). The best theories we have for each are Cosmic Inflation and String Theory respectively, which will (arguably) never be able to be empirically tested…

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Why are we leaving ourselves out of the equation anyway?

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Seriously, what’s the point of learning about an observer-free, external-to-the-mind, reality? I get it, the scientific method demands that we avoid letting our biases taint our investigation, but shouldn’t the outcome of that investigation consider what it means for us? In other words, the aim of rational enquiry should be to make humanity better: More fulfilled, healthier, happier, and to increase the human conception of reality; not some abstract thought experiment on what the universe would be like without us in it. That being said, maybe even reason isn’t a complete way of understanding the world…

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Why the W.E.I.R.D. have it wrong

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If you’re unfamiliar with the acronym, WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. The term was coined as part of a psychology meta-study (a study of studies) that concluded that we in the West have a pretty different relationship with the world and with each other than pretty much every other society on the planet. Turns out we’re also a lot less religious than the rest of the world too. As a matter-of-fact, the more prosperous a nation is, and the less its citizens contend with “existential threats to their lives and their culture”, the less likely that population is to be religious. In other words, spiritual practices and religion are negatively correlated with a high standard of living (more on that term later too)…

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What is Faith? I'm not sure...

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Here’s where we make the leap to the metaphysical, so please bear with me because a “proof” (for lack of a better word) doesn’t come until the end.

Faith is the unqualified belief in a benevolent reality outside of reason, and beyond human intellectual conception… but a reality that is still accessible to each one of us (more on that later). It’s the possibility that there is one “truth” that unites us all. It is the hope for hope, goodness for goodness sake… a divine virtuous cycle of love…

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Have you been living in a cave your whole life or something?!

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I don’t remember exactly who wrote it, but an academic I read in university termed Plato “A Christian before Christ”. That didn’t make any sense to me. How could someone that died three and half centuries before Jesus be called a Christian? And then I read the Cave Allegory in Plato’s Republic and it all made sense.

The cave allegory goes something like this: Plato imagines a group of people that have been imprisoned from birth in a cave, and confined in such a way that they can’t see themselves. All they can see are the shadows of themselves and other objects that are cast upon the back wall of the cave by torchlight. Plato poses the question, “What would this group of people’s conception of reality be?” Without ever having seen themselves, they would simply think they were a shadow. They’d have no conception of three dimensional space, let alone the whole, great big wide world outside of the cave.

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The Christian Message

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For someone questioning Christianity that needs to experience what it is to be Christian, I prefer Mark 12:30 and 31, which in summary is, Love God… and love the other. These two seemingly separate clauses, are actually the same thing: Every one of us can experience a mystical union with the divine by loving other people without constraint. How do we love without constraint? By loving and forgiving those that don’t even merit our love and forgiveness. That’s it. That’s the Christian message in a few sentences. That’s the theory underpinning Grace, which is God’s unmerited love for us, the divine union of God and Man in a person, which is Christ, and the core message running through all of the Gospels, exemplified by Christ’s own actions, and his penultimate act of dying brutally while asking for forgiveness for us.

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Religion as a language

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Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism are all describing something, probably exactly the same thing (more on that later), but differently. And given my post earlier on the relativity of truth, why am I favouring one truth? An atheist friend of mine was fond of saying, “What are the chances that the religion in which you were raised is the right one?” In answer, it might not be the right one, but it’s right. Said another way; the chances are 100% that my religion is right if they all are. As a wise many once said (sorry I can’t recall who), “There are many paths up the mountain of truth”.

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Christian Universalism

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…But that’s exactly what the Church decided, contrary to some early Christian theologians that thought the idea of eternal damnation was incompatible with the idea of a super-reality that is growth, creation, and love. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Isaac of Nineveh were all early Christian Universalists who believed that all humanity, every single one of us, will be restored to God’s presence… eventually (more on that)…

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An Anglo-Catholic Apology

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This is an Anglo-Catholic blog. “I’ve heard of Roman Catholic. What the heck is Anglo-Catholic?!” you ask? Anglo-Catholic is an Anglican that cherishes the liturgy, rituals, and (to a certain extent) the theology of our Catholic heritage, while rejecting the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome (a.k.a. the Pope). You might be thinking, “Didn’t Henry VIII just create your church because he wanted a divorce?” One could say that’s a common perspective but also a gross simplification…

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