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18 April 2025
Bentham's Bulldog wrote a post where he explains why Christianity does not convince him. But at the end he asked for longform explanations of why Christianity is true. I have been looking for a way to explain my writing more broadly, and will take this opportunity to enter the discourse.
Generally, I consider myself a Christian. I have a complicated relationship with Christian identity, but I think from the perspective of evaluating theological positions I'm clearly more Christian than Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, and while in some ways I lean more Jewish than what seems to be mainstream Christianity, my metaphysical views are more Christian, which could be easily be interpreted as me being a kind of Christian. My Christianity is more founded in philosophy and I am not a "sola scriptura" or tradition-based person. Yet, I think I can re-approach a fairly theologically conservative Christianity anyway. So I will try to explain this here.
I would recommend reading my booklet MSL first which explains why I believe in God at all and contains a discussion of some of this. It's 24 pages long.
Here is an explanation of why I believe in something that could be called a Trinity:
Being is that something ought to be. That something ought to be, itself has to ought to be.
God is an agreement. Agreements are made of congruent wills. These congruent wills are or necessarily are parts of persons. The agreement is on what ought to be. The agreement itself has to ought to be. An agreement is made of one or more persons. It consists of persons.
What ought to be should be prioritized highest. Thus a person ought to be willing to give up everything for it. If it's possible for God (the agreement) to give up everything, including life, for what's good, it has to be done in order for the agreement to be valid. One person of God has to be conscious of everything and thus can't die. But if there is another who is finite, he can die. And he must exist so that God (the agreement, and thus all its persons) can exist.
All of the terms of the agreement, of what morality is and thus generally what is expected of all personal beings (except what are foundational aspects of the nature of personal beings, which were always inherent in the persons of God) are decided on by these two beings. But one more being is present, who is the "overlap" between the two (see the MSL booklet linked above). These are those who decided on how reality is set up, prior to the free will of their creatures, and who decide that there are creatures, and they have a unique status as creators. However, the agreement which is God can expand to include any being who is 100% in agreement with it. We are all becoming like that -- never to become the creator of the universe, but coming into tune (unless we refuse to). I don't believe in infinity (this is not a position I have completely explored, but I feel like at least finitude is clearly real, and infinity might not be). So then I think that there are only a finite number of personal beings who could ever exist, and thus the number of "agreers", large though one would hope it will be, is finite.
One advantage to believing in the Trinity (or something sufficiently like it) is that the Trinity allows it to be the case that God was a man who died (yet the universe didn't cease, as would happen if the Father died). The Father in his omniscience experiences what we experience, but the Son lived a human life without simultaneously experiencing everything else, which is our situation. A God who lives a life like ours and dies is different, I think in a better way, than a God who doesn't.
Thinking in the tradition of Anselm, who says that God is the being who is the greatest who can be conceived, I would say that this willingness to undergo what you make other people undergo is a more fundamentally "great-making" property of God than omniscience or omnipotence. In my philosophical theology, the very root of being itself is in that it ought to be, and it ought to be because God is willing to undergo a life like ours and will do what it takes to undergo that if possible. Another "great-making" property, in my estimation, is that God be trustworthy. This is more valuable than that he be omnipotent (for reasons that may be obvious). I think the ethos of God that we could assume with more confidence given the Trinity, that he really gets what it's like to be us and doesn't put himself above us (rather than the one following from something like classical theism minus the Trinity, which doesn't establish that, or not as clearly), makes God more trustworthy. Arguably a non-Trinitarian God is less likely to deserve the name "God", and instead may be simply a very powerful, knowledgeable being that may be unreliable, "insufficiently aligned".
Bentham's Bulldog thinks that the Atonement is weird and is thus probably made up. I wonder if he believes in justice as a primitive of reality, that when someone does something wrong, the "universe itself" (the ground that takes in the blood, to use a Biblical image) cries out for things to be made right. I would guess not.
When I was younger, I didn't understand such things. But I can understand them better having been the victim beyond the point of my own ability to be patient with victimhood. From that perspective, the pursuit of justice (and related, the establishment of moral truth) seem very psychologically compelling, and what is the truth other than what is psychologically compelling? It isn't necessarily the truth, but it makes sense why we might think of it as a fundamental aspect of reality.
If justice is real, and has to be paid for, who will pay for it? Too many sins to pay for, not enough perpetrators' blood. And who isn't a perpetrator? Many of us will have to be destroyed to ease the cognitive dissonance of morality itself, and maybe if there was some other way, we wouldn't have to be.
This could weigh heavily on a philosopher, and one way out might be through some kind of doctrine of the Atonement. The unlikeliness of the Atonement is weighed against the unlikeliness of God not providing a way out of justice. If our belief in God and justice together are strong enough, it could outweigh whatever unlikeliness there is in the Atonement as a doctrine.
Maybe justice isn't a primitive of reality. If not, it's a persuasive part of reality, and seems to have been a part of the Jewish religion. I seem to remember it being a big part of the pagan religion in the Roman Empire, at least that the practice of propitiating gods was. Between Jewish and pagan culture, Jesus' death, as Atonement, may have been necessary to resolve the Jewish and pagan cultural need for an Atonement. (Likewise, many of the people who are drawn to Jesus today through the idea of the Atonement may have a similar cultural need for it.) The Bible could contain descriptions of things that don't make sense to us now, but which were necessary for ancient people (or for contemporary people unlike us), and this would count in favor of its inspiration, not against, I would guess. It was a book for them as well as for us.
(Another take on the Atonement that I wrote, that might help, here.)
Bentham's Bulldog makes a few claims. One that the Hebrew Bible has weird, horrifying content that God (or maybe Godly people) wouldn't write. Another that the Bible has factual errors. Another that Jesus endorses it despite that.
I will skip responding to those, although I have thoughts about them. Largely it is possible to endorse the Bible despite them. Assuming that in some sense accepting the Bible is necessary to be a Christian, I see a way to overall endorse the Bible, if not necessarily all its contents.
Here's my more general take on "in what sense could the Bible be inspired / reliable?"
There are a number of holy books. Are any of them in line with my philosophical theology? The story of Jesus may be uniquely the most in line with it (the trinitarian, self-sacrificing story). If so, then the Gospels get some credence to be the word of God. Also, the texts that are connected to that story get a bit less credence, but some, by association. (Maybe something other than the trinitarian story, like VMH, another theological argument I subscribe to, could also raise credence in some holy books, and it should do so with at least the 66 book Protestant canon, and the Hebrew Scriptures; possibly also the distinctively Catholic, Orthodox, and LDS canons, but I don't know that not have looked into it seriously.) Connected texts being perhaps the Old Testament, seemingly endorsed by Jesus, and the post-Gospels New Testament, seemingly written by people authorized by Jesus.
There's a lot of uncertainty here, and I would assign likely less than 50% probability to any of those texts being from God. Except to the extent that they are simply poetic, narrative, etc. outworkings of ethical and metaphysical principles already contained in the two theological ideas mentioned above (MSL or VMH) or their outworkings. My concern is what to obey, how to shape my preferences, actions, and trustings, and so to the extent that these texts line up with the theology that I think has high credence, then it's easy to obey them.
They don't have to have high credence, just be more likely than any other book, for me to prioritize obeying them above their competitors.
But in cases where it's not clear, should I obey them? From my philosophical theology, I believe evil beings exist, who have been given a certain amount of freedom in the world. So maybe they have corrupted even the Bible to some extent. I'm not too disturbed by this, because perhaps in some cases I can tell what is probably Satanic for me to obey (genocide being an example), and in grey areas, I can simply say "How do I obey this in such a way that I minimize the harm in case it's from Satan, and maximize the good that comes from it"?
One practice I have adopted from the Bible is to take one day off every week, and try to "make it holy". I don't see the harm in that, at least as far as I implement it, even if it turns out to not be from God. Someone could choose to be a vegan partially in order to keep the dietary laws in the Bible, which don't prevent eating meat, but which do make meat-eating more complicated. Keeping a law that may be God's preference, without neglecting anything more clearly God's preference, is a way to show consideration to God.
Obeying the Bible involves seeing things the way it does (that's part of the "trusting" part of "prefer, act, trust"). You have to do this with some care, deferring to what you have more warrant to believe. But I think it enables me to enter the world of the stories and the doctrinal beliefs, like installing software (particularly like a chroot in Linux), where I inhabit the worldview as though it is true. Which I think is basically what many orthodox believers do in effect, to the extent that they just "have faith" and have a background view that is sort of secular, or might be based in some apologetics that are taken to support the Bible but which are much less than the Bible in themselves. My background view is theistic, but not quite fully Christian, and then I "leap" (when I do) into the Biblical Christian identity.
I should prioritize the clearer moral claims of my philosophical theology, but in the times of my life when I can't optimize for my own consequentialism, it's good to consider the claims of the Bible, where it doesn't conflict with my natural theology. The Bible can give a kind of imaginal / narrative flesh, and spell out in a more concrete way, moral sensibilities that are inherent in my philosophical theology. Also, importantly, it may contain information about what God wants that I couldn't have derived from my philosophy or any other source.
I started a project to read through the Bible multiple times with the doctrine of God and the "uncertain obedience" of the Bible as my theme, seeing how to obey everything in it in a way that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit, from the point of view of the philosophical theology I hold, but I am not sure if it should be my highest priority right now. But maybe I'll try going back to it someday.
Bentham's Bulldog's post has a section on Jesus and a section on Christian apologetic arguments, which I won't respond to for the sake of time. Maybe if asked, I might try to respond another time.
For a more extensive, but somewhat disorganized and perhaps sometimes superseded explanation of my philosophical theology, one can read my blog Formulalessness.