How to be a Theist When Most Arguments for God's Existence Are Bad

In a recent video, now popular apologist Wes Huff makes an argument for the evidence for “historical reportage” in the gospels, aka that they were written by eyewitnesses and therefore bear factual accounts of history. In the introduction to the video, he plays a set of clips from various figures who are currently popular in the religious adjacent sphere but who are not themselves confessing Christians, including Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Tom Holland. In the clips, they express being compelled by the ‘truth’ of the story of Jesus, but also hesitation accepting it as really true. Douglas Murray, for example, says “many of us can walk ninety nine percent of the way there in terms of belief in the truth of the story, but as Betjeman puts it, ‘is it true? is it true?’”

Naturally, Huff is implying with this introduction that the gap can be approached by the kind of apologetics that insists on the evidence for Christianity, amassing arguments for the historical veracity of Christian claims, and so providing the answer to the ‘is it true?’ question that it seems everyone needs. Yet while there is no questioning Huff’s popularity, knowledge or ability to communicate, one might point out that this is not exactly new. Apologetics has long been populated by the “Case for Christ” or “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” type arguments, and anyone who has grown up in a church flooded not just with this apologetics but with the New Atheism type responses to these apologetics, must face the conclusion that at the very least, the idea that we can prove miraculous claims by applying the standards of historical criticism requires certain commitments that have already done most of the work.

Not to mention, if one wants to argue for the more literalist flavour that evangelicals such as Huff would argue for, there are long recognised circles that have to be squared such as the contradictions and historical questions in the birth narratives or questions over authorship and so on that anyone engaging in the topics with honesty will find no one has yet successfully refuted. This is not to say Huff isn’t presenting anything good, nor to say defending a truth at the core of the gospels is not important, that defending the historical person of Christ is not important, or that at the very least the possibility that something miraculous acts as the stone in the water from which the ripples of early Christianity come isn’t worth making a case for. It is to say that assuming we can look at what seems to be a popular pragmatic attitude to religion that cannot get itself over the line of actual belief and apply a bit more evidence to get us there is a wrong view of the problem.

This is not just true in hazy questions of scholarship; in a recent podcast with Alex O’Connor Ross Douthat claimed that religion is an “obligation” because of the strength of the arguments, yet when it came to explaining what those arguments actually were the answer was little more than fine tuning and some stuff about consciousness and the observer effect in quantum physics. Once again, one can’t help but respond that to someone not already entrenched in a position who is really asking ‘is it true? is it true?’ these are not the kind of arguments that are unshakable enough to provide certainty.

Yet that doesn’t mean that it is exactly enough to respond that faith is the leap made into uncertainty. This will not convince unbelievers to reconsider anything, and more to the point we have something of a human need for a kind of certainty that provides us with assurance. Since I have been writing on Substack, one of the things I most often get DMs about is people having what you might call existential anxiety, who want to ask me philosophical or apologetics questions ranging from how we can know materialism is false to whether Jesus really rose from the dead, usually accompanied by the confession that they are going through some form of personal crisis and feel like they need to know.

What I learn from this, besides the fact that I am not a pastor and am personally hopelessly ill-equipped and unqualified to solve such problems, let alone offer a convincing response, is that we often forget that the true place of the religious domain isn’t really abstract philosophical puzzles that we discuss out of pure interest or the consideration of evidential facts. The context of the religious questions might well be described as pastoral as much as philosophical. They are personal, our conviction about their truth has relation to our experiences in regard to them, to our disposition towards them, and to the degree to which they lay a path before us that we feel compelled or confident to take.

When I was a teenager, as many brought up in a religious home did, I went through a period of furiously reading as much apologetics as I could find somewhat under the belief that at some point I might find some piece of evidence compelling enough to believe it. One might argue that the fact that I didn’t and ended up drifting away for some considerable time is not simply a reflection that the kind of evidence I might have wished for doesn’t exist, it’s that it isn’t really what I was looking for.

It is a common refrain in religious ideas that the individual soul is in some sense inseparable from God. Augustine famously wrote that God is nearer than our inward self, Julian of Norwich that there is not “ anything at all between God and man’s soul” and that “God is nearer to us than our own soul.” Of course, that the soul exists is a claim apparently as requiring of evidence as the claim that God exists, yet whatever is referred to when we talk about the soul or the self, the assumption is that whatever we are talking about is already given. In fact, it is, whether or not you have an eternal soul, there is little more given than the fact that you exist, have an irreducible interiority and a concern about your own state in the world and perhaps in reality as a whole. If you take the view of religion in the tradition of those such as William James, this disclosure is the place from which all religion comes, from “man in his solitude” who is aware of the absurd fact that we exist, and that no explanation seems to dent the existential vertigo of that awareness.

For James, there is a condition in which we find ourselves divided under the weight of this condition, that of the “sick soul.” In this condition, the present compensation of life becomes dwarfed by what appear to be the existential facts of the matter, that we are, as he describes it, standing on a frozen lake, and no matter how pleasant the day we know the ice will one day thaw and give beneath us. In this state, we are not just aware of the existential fact that we are, but that we will not be, that suffering and evil cannot be permanently postponed and that our loftiest attempts at “healthy mindedness” cannot keep us from the pit beneath us.

Perhaps one of the great philosophical accounts of this state is that of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy, in which Boethius, betrayed and unfairly condemned to what would be a brutal execution, writes a text from his prison cell in which “lady philosophy” appears to him, and having heard him bemoan his state, responds that his despair is primarily a condition of forgetting, drawing on Plato’s notion that all knowledge is not learned but remembered, she argues that when “the mind forgets its inward light” the role of philosophy is to aid us to realise our identification and desire for the Good and seek to ascend towards it.

For someone like William James, we can speak of this objectively only through the approach of pragmatism, we cannot prove that such a condition exists, only that there are within the realm of our experiences the kind of landscapes that do not ignore but integrate the suffering of reality and enable us to wholly transcend it, and that these experiences are identified with a condition we must call religious. Perhaps personally, this objectivity is better thought of as example, which is another reason why we return to the fact that philosophy in the religious sense is pastoral, personal. Anyone who has spent time in religious contexts will know that while dogmatism and all the other features of ordinary religiousness might be as irksome as anywhere, there are unquestionably those from whom a holy light shines in the most ordinary and unattended of ways. Ultimately, if God exists, he is to be found in the religious person who shows concern for you when no one else does as much as in the apparent fortune of the cosmological constant being what it is.

All of this is not to argue we should shrug off apologetics and go and be better examples as Christians. I do think that, but apologetics is a space that will continue to exist either way, and public witness still matters. What is important is how easily we get lost in the arguments apologetics concerns itself with, such that we lose sight of the personal immediacy of the religious life. Often in our concern to seek popular figures for our side, we abandon the primacy of example; often in seeking to claim evidence will solve our uncertainty we abandon the primacy of the religious life as the journey of the individual soul seeking to know and transcend itself.

Yet there is another reason why this more personal or pragmatic view of religion can matter. If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. The latter assumes that we have acquired our faith through an act of reason instead of a change in our relation to facts that are the same for all of us.

Nonetheless, it remains the case that on the other side of religious belief, the facts of reality do seem different to us. That things are intrinsically connected, that a meaning beyond circumstance imbues our actions, that life is transcendently good in a way that compels us to transfigure suffering into gratefulness and compassion for others: these are the things we seem to seek when we want ‘evidence’ of religious claims, but were the evidence to be before us it would not itself manifest these things in our experience or our persons. Christians claim salvation is a thing lived not a fact known, the latter being a static trace of something never seperate from its living in our experience, confirmed not by proposition but by our becoming of it.

How then does one convince those uninclined to see its truth? Again, I don’t wish to entirely dismiss the role of rational apologetics, but one often neglected answer is the case to be made that the religious life is wholly and transcendently worth wanting, a case made through a different kind of communication than argumentation. In a strange sense, in the age of clickbait and hot takes where the regularity of church attendance is eclipsed, we have somewhat lost the role of the religious sermon as fulfilling this kind of speech. Particularly within evangelicalism, there is a blinding to this in the idea that stirring the emotion is a sort of controlled and contrivabble act, leading to worship music, alter calls and even sermons with music in the background designed to cheaply elicit the emotion of the audience and convince them that business with truth and with God has taken place.

Nonetheless, the work of religious sermons is an overlooked place where something can genuinely be transferred, and a certain kind of rhetorical, one may even say lyrical speech that arouses conviction, in which the mind is unsettled and unhoused and awakened to the sense of an other in the ordinary intercourse of our experiences can occur. This is one of the many reasons why ordinary church and ordinary pastoral diligence matters, because although such moments happen rarely and in the most uncelebrated of religious contexts, they are of great significance. In a poem by R.S. Thomas titled The Chapel, in a building “ugly and without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it” such an exchange might occur, perhaps reflecting what all apologetics are, whatever they claim about reason and evidence, ultimately trying to achieve:

Here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.