Arguments for Christian Belief

The arguments below are for Christian belief in particular, over and above belief in theism.  It should be kept in mind that each of these arguments can be given either a Bayesian or deductive form.  Even if one of them is singularly weak (providing a credence of, say, 15%) it can still be used to build a cumulative case when paired with the others.

I'm currently not interested in providing arguments defending the coherence of Christianity.  I'll do that later.  I merely want to provide a brief glimpse of the arguments that can be taken to provide evidential weight to the Christian religion.  

1. Fulfillment of Prophecy: 

This method of argument was more prominent among the old guard of Christian scholars.  It is enjoying something of a resurgence among the Bayesian-inclined apologists of late (think McGrew).  Two prominent examples can be quickly adduced, Jesus's predictions of the destruction of Temple in 70 A.D. and of his own death (which was strongly predicted during the Last Supper, one of the earliest and most well-attested Christian traditions and certainly placing the prediction prior to its fulfillment.)  

There are other examples, but they quickly devolve into complicated historical arguments and disputes about the dating of the Old Testament.  They're worth the time, but I won't be relating them.

2.  Martyrdoms, Sincerity, and Trials of the Eyewitnesses 

This is the most popular and the strongest argument for the truth of Christianity.  It proceeds using two commonly granted points (a) Many eyewitnesses (over 500, according to Paul) claimed to see the risen Jesus and the empty tomb, and (b) many of these same eyewitnesses died for this belief.  

Now, people will die for things that are untrue.  Many Muslims die for their beliefs.  But people do not die for things that they believe to be false.  This shows that the apostles truly believed that they had seen the physically resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb.  

3.  Christian Experience

This is a neglected evidence for Christianity, but an important one.  The reality of the pull and tug of the Christian walk, the prayer life, answered prayers, our growth in moral character, the dependence on Jesus, and the community of believers all provide evidence of a reality that is external to us and real.

We, in the ordinary course of life, take experience of an external object or reality as evidence that that object or reality exists.  We should do the same here.  

4. Congruity of Christian Doctrines with Natural Theology [see note]

If we can argue for theism on the basis of natural theology and separately from Christianity, and if we can see that particular Christian doctrines cohere well with what we learn from natural theology, then this congruence may provide some justification for Christian belief.  I'll give two examples that I think illustrate this congruence: the peculiar Christian doctrines of penal substitutionary atonement and the Trinity.  It may seem odd to use these doctrines, usually believed to be handicaps for Christian apologists, as evidences--but hear me out.  

Penal substitutionary atonement holds that God forgave humanity but in such a way that he upheld the integrity of the moral law.  The law demanded punishment, and God satisfied that demand himself in the crucifixion.  Why can God not merely forgive us?  Here's an answer from Anselm: “There is nothing more intolerable in the universal order than that a creature should take away honor from the creator and not repay what he takes away.”  There is, according to Anselm, a moral government, and this government should not be violated. Merely forgiving sin is not respectful to this moral order, and thus, in order to forgive us while upholding and displaying the law, God must find a way to forgive us that satisfies the moral order.  

We learn from natural theology about the perfections of God, either in the form of the Ontological argument in which he's described as the maximally great being, or in a more inductive fashion using the varieties of the Cosmological and Moral arguments.  The atonement doctrine strives to uphold the perfections of God's love in his desire to forgive us while not violating his perfection of justice.  A doctrine that uniquely satisfies these perfections coheres well with what we've learned prior from natural theology, and this congruence can count as evidence for Christianity. 

The same perfect-being considerations apply in the case of the Trinity's congruence with natural theology.  God being the maximally great being implies that he possesses all perfections.  Love is plausibly a perfection.  Yet love is essentially other-focused.  God existed without creation, yet he's always possessed all perfections.  The only means for God to have possessed the full perfection of love is if there are a plenitude of divine persons in God, allowing him to love another.  Christianity teaches this view with its doctrine of the Trinity.  God the Son is perfectly loved by God the Father.  We thus have another congruence.  

5. Miracles

Another often neglected evidence for the Christian religion.  Christians oftentimes claim to experience miracles that convince of the Faith.  Paul the Apostle claimed that his ministry included miracles.  Augustine relates miracles.  The skeptic and mathematician Blaise Pascal was largely convinced by a miracle.  These miracles do not occur in a vacuum, but in a specifically Christian religious context and are meant as a validation of the Christian message.

6.  Lewis's Trilemma

This trilemma carries at least a little weight.  It's derived from C.S. Lewis.  It's meant for those skeptics that just want to give Jesus a pat on the back and claim that they respect him as a moral teacher.  As Lewis points out, this is something we can not do in light of Jesus's teaching.  He claimed to be a person worthy of our worship, worthy of the title Lord.  Either he was deluded and insane, he was a malevolent liar, or he was telling the truth.  Jesus won't allow us to claim him as a mere moral teacher.  

Now, from the character of his life it's hard to say that he was a liar.  His concern for the poor, for moral uprightness, and calls of repentance argue against that.  He certainly didn't seem mad, either.   This leaves us with taking Jesus at his word and accepting him as Lord.

The Trilemma has some force, but any scholarly treatment of it is going to quickly get messy.  We need to show that Jesus really did aggrandize himself in the way that this trilemma alleges.  If he didn't, then the trilemma is a false one and another horn must be added to it--that Jesus really didn't claim to be Lord and that this claim is just based on myth.  We need to (and can) defend against this horn and show it to be false. William Lane Craig discusses this aspect of the trilemma in his book Reasonable Faith, p. 327-329.  

All of these arguments deserve fuller treatment.  This post is merely meant to provide a taste.

N.B. I am not an evidentialist.  I do not think that these evidences are required for a Christian to believe the faith rationally. I do not think that these evidences are the main way that Christians arrive at the faith.  But I do think evidences have their proper role and should be developed. 

I will discuss in a later post the view that Christians can justifiably believe the faith on the basis of the testimony of the Holy Spirit and how this testimony can confer knowledge on believers.

Note: In this section,  I'm drawing on the epistemological position known as Coherentism and its account of justification.  I don't think Coherentism provides the whole picture of justification, but a hybrid theory similar to Susan Haack's is useful.