Why I Believe

If someone were to ask me why I am a believer—which, by the way, no one ever has, since most people seem to have their own presumptions about why someone might be—I would give three reasons.

The first is that I was born and raised among Christians who believed the scriptures, pointed me to Christ, and lived as Christians ought. The lack of any of these would have nullified the virtues of my upbringing. Had my father and mother (my father in particular) been Sunday Christians, or believed only as much scripture as suited them, commended religion to me for practical or sanitary reasons, or demanded allegiance to the God invented by their sect, any advantages of my upbringing for faith would have died with the awakening of my critical faculties. 

The second is that I cannot believe the world came into existence by unintelligent causes. That the order and beauty here, and the existence of minds to perceive it, could have been brought into being by anything less than a divine mind seems madness to me, a kind of madness I have never been able to pretend was sane, or imagine that I could believe myself except by means of the same kind of  sacrificium intellectus that allows a man to think cows can fly. This does not, of course, settle the question of whether this mind is benevolent, infinite, or any number of other things--but it must be a Mind, and it is reasonable to call that Mind God. School-evolutionism of the sort that simply will not consider the existence of God points to a perverse resolve of the will that goes far—to be precise, infinitely--beyond science.  We have need of this hypothesis. 

The third is that I find in myself a longing that Lewis called Sweet Desire.  It cannot be fulfilled upon this earth; indeed, it is constantly disappointed here, and finally thwarted by death. (Being-toward-death cannot be authentic if death is dissolution, for dissolute existence has no meaning, the concepts of meaninglessness and authenticity having no commonality except in the  absurdity where one can no longer speak at all, so must remain silent.)  It is the answer to Pascal’s wager, and what Puddleglum spoke of in the witch’s subterranean chamber. It is what we must break through to, and if there is a God it most certainly has to do with him, and must involve life beyond death. This is reason to "diligently seek” the face and favor of God.

These are the principal reasons why the Gospel is good news to me, answering as it does to my understanding and desires, for it tells me like no other story does that there is a God, he is our beginning and our end, that he has through his divine Son by whom he created the worlds, and all of us with them, overcame the death that is the ruin of our hopes, so that partaking of his resurrected life, whatever irritations and incentives to unbelief "religion" might cast up in my path, is what I desire. That I have been given ears to hear—that I was not born, or allowed to become, blind or deaf (Lord, have mercy!)--is beyond any reason I can give. Omnia exeunt in mysterium, which is to say, vita nostra absconditum est cum Christo in Deo.