Is Christianity Credible?

One of the challenges that non-Christians face when they consider Christianity is that the claims of Christianity sound pretty wild. Christianity tells of God becoming a human being, Jesus, who does many unusual things, including turning water into wine, healing people of all sorts of diseases, raising dead people to life, walking on water, and ultimately, after being brutally and publicly executed, resurrecting some days later.

This is an extraordinary claim. As I’ve written before, modern skeptics often repeat a sort of mantra: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. While this mantra is sometimes treated as if it were an argument, it’s a repeated-word construction that relies on the fact that “extraordinary” can refer to both the type of thing (the first usage) and the quantity of a thing (the second). Replacing “extraordinary” with its synonym, “implausible”, makes it clear that the statement is of little worth in itself: implausible claims do not require implausible evidence; quite the opposite. If there is any value to the statement, it is that claims, of whatever sort, require evidence to be believed, and if a claim is wild, perhaps people may feel that they need from the evidence a bit more persuasiveness than usual.

Whatever the value of the statement, Christianity makes some wild claims indeed. In my experience, modern skeptics generally use the wildness of the Christian claims to decide that no matter what the evidence, claims that are that wild simply cannot be true. This is understandable, I think, but on the whole, mistaken. The problem with this approach is that it is not how reality works. For something to be true, it merely needs to be real. For events, the event needs simply to have happened. It doesn’t have to be ordinary or plausible, it can be completely weird. What makes it true is not its degree of ordinariness, but the fact that it happened. The mistake that skeptics are making, I think, is that they are misapplying to reality the standards of fiction: i.e. if one is writing a novel or a screen-play, one cannot write too implausible a set of events, lest one lose one’s audience. But reality is not bound by the rules of fiction. It can be as wild as it likes. In a play, if the audience finds a man-eating hyena hiding in the willows too implausible to be believed, no real harm is done except to the reputation of the playwright. But if such happens in reality, the audience will have a rather horrifying experience, and the hyena an easy supper.

But while I do not agree, I sympathize with the skeptics a bit here. The nature of reality notwithstanding, it is hard to believe a wild claim, especially when it seems so far out of the ordinary. Christianity does not deny that the life of Jesus is wild. Christians acknowledge and even insist that it is far from the usual thing, but Christians claim that it actually happened. Christianity possesses quite a bit of evidence to back this up. This evidence includes multiple written accounts (the Gospels), displaying not the structure and content of a work of fiction, but the characteristics of multiple eyewitness reports. It includes a Church founded by Jesus and his followers that, despite extreme persecution, has grown and endured for two millennia. This Church bears witness to the ongoing continuance of unusual events (such as miraculous healings at Lourdes or the multiple miracles that are documented for the canonization of each saint) that indicate that Christianity is far more than merely a socio-cultural phenomenon. Perhaps most persuasive to me is the story itself, particularly the fact that Jesus is so unlike other religious leaders in history, such as, for example, Brigham Young, Martin Luther, Mohammad, or Confucius. Those more typical religious leaders seem to be less about having unusual miraculous powers from God than they are about spreading their message, which results in their gaining and holding all-too-human benefits: sociopolitical authority, influence, often also sex and wealth. But Jesus, despite an abundance of miraculous powers, takes no gain for himself despite the presence of opportunities to do so, but sacrifices himself completely for the sake of the truth, to the point of willingly accepting torture and a particularly shameful form of public execution. Is he then a tragic hero? No, not quite. He rises from the dead a couple of days later and shows himself to be alive and well and even more endowed with miraculous power than ever before. After his resurrection, for weeks he meets with and inspires his followers. Is he then a dramatic hero, who will now take up the mantle of wealth, power and influence that is rightfully his? No, not that either! A few weeks later, he entrusts his followers with a mission to the world, promises them God’s power, and leaves. Then a few days later, his followers are miraculously transformed from a bedraggled group of timid people to an inspired, dynamic Church that has had a transformative impact on human history, and which endures to the present day. Quite frankly, to me this is just too unusual a story not to be true: if it were a work of fiction, it would be rather too implausible to be believed. In my view, Christianity is credible, not because it is not extraordinary (it most certainly is), but because its events, however extraordinary, are true.