Why I Am a Christian

I want to talk about the two main reasons why I am a Christian.

So often when people are thinking philosophically or theologically, or just reflecting on life, they assume there are really two main things we have to provide an explanation for: the origin of the universe and ethics. At least, that has been my common experience. But what I always find is that this framing is far too atrophied. The things that require an explanation are, frankly, almost everything. There is such a diversity, such a panoply and cornucopia of phenomena—of stuff in the world that is distinctive and real—that requires a sufficient explanation.

What am I talking about? I once jotted down a quick list on my phone: music, sex, babies, math, hiddenness, the fact that reality is organized into levels or strata, morality, beauty, narrative, riddles, pain, judgment, guilt, shame, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, consciousness. Or even basic questions like: Why are there really big things and really, really tiny things? There is such a wide range of phenomena that requires explanation. It is not just one or two massive categories, and I think there is a real problem when we reduce reality to merely those two.

Now, an explanation needs to have a certain character: it needs to sufficiently explain the phenomena. What I mean by that comes down to two main criteria. First, an explanation cannot reduce the phenomena; second, it cannot deny the phenomena.

What Makes an Explanation Sufficient

When you are giving an explanation for something, whether it is music or mathematics, you cannot simply provide an account that says, “Therefore, this appears to be this way, but in reality it is not.”

Sometimes, of course, that kind of debunking explanation is true for certain illusions in the world. But the whole purpose of human thinking—of philosophy, theology, or just normal everyday human reflection—is that we are thrown into the givenness of this world. You receive all this stuff around you, and you have to provide an account for it. An explanation cannot simply consist of saying, “Actually, that does not exist,” or “Actually, this thing is not meaningful.” That is the exact opposite of an explanation; it is simply denying the thing itself.

Now, someone might object: “Well, what if it really doesn’t exist?” Maybe. But an explanation that denies the phenomenon should require tons of extraordinarily strong evidence, and it should always be an explanation of last resort. Why? Because we have the positive existence of the thing right before us—like the beauty of babies, or the transforming power of narrative. You have to provide an account that neither denies the phenomenon nor reduces it.

What does a reductive explanation look like in practice? I used to teach high school seniors in a worldview class. One of the assignments I gave them was this: I told them to take any phenomenon—sports, music, consciousness, whatever—and search Google for “evolution and [that phenomenon].” So they would search for “evolution and consciousness” or “evolution and music.” And inevitably, an article would turn up with a story about how playing a tin whistle on the plains of the Sahara helped our ancestors survive.

The point of the exercise was to observe that today’s dominant framework for explaining phenomena is the evolutionary framework. Now, evolution as a basic biological theory of speciation—mutation and selection, whatever survives—is fairly straightforward. But it has taken on a much greater philosophical role.

Do not miss this: this is very strange. This is the only scientific theory that has achieved this kind of overarching cultural status. And it has not done so because of overwhelming philosophical explanatory power. Nobody takes Newton’s laws of motion and tries to explain sports or music with them.

Yet today, many people feel that you have sufficiently explained the phenomenon of music the moment you have given it a fitness explanation—an evolutionary explanation describing how it helped our ancestors survive. Once you describe how it helped us survive, people treat it as sufficiently explained.

That is crazy. Does music or sports help human beings live and survive? Well, yes, obviously. Any human practice of note encourages and assists human life. But that is hardly a full explanation of the phenomenon.

That kind of explanation is like treating the alphabet as the explanation for a great work of poetry. It is like saying, “I know the ABCs, therefore I have fully explained this poem.” Are you denying the alphabet? No, of course not. Survival is an important feature of things in the world. But it is an utterly insufficient explanation for our actual experience of these phenomena.

When we experience these things, our experience has rich, qualitative content. It carries meaningfulness. Take sex, for instance. Sex is certainly for the generation of life; it is not less than that. But as Pope John Paul II pointed out, sex is also unitive. That unitive dimension is an intrinsic part of our experience of the phenomenon. It is not merely a crass means of propagating your genes, but a way to unite yourself to your spouse—husband to wife and wife to husband. That belongs to the core experience of the phenomenon, so your explanation must account for it. You cannot simply dismiss it as an accidental byproduct.

Imagine you are walking through the park and you see a Great Dane. You say, “Look at that Great Dane! Isn’t that amazing?” And someone replies, “Actually, that is not a Great Dane; it is actually a hamster.” If someone provides that kind of explanation often enough, you begin to see the problem. That was the whole purpose of the exercise with my students: to see the epistemological space that philosophical evolutionism has come to occupy. It has swallowed up everything.

People feel they can rest philosophically the moment they find a fitness explanation. But if you apply that single, thin explanation to sports, consciousness, cooking, and everything else, at some point you realize it simply is not convincing. If an account constantly denies the surface of things—reducing everything to survival and fitness so that altruism is not really altruism, love is not really love, and beauty is not really beauty—it ceases to be a good explanation. It is constantly denying the most obvious reality.

A good explanation should buttress what you see on the surface. It should deepen your love and understanding of the surface of things, making sense of them rather than offering a kind of gnostic claim to the secret reason why things exist.

That is the first reason I am a Christian: because of Christianity’s explanatory power. I find that the biblical narrative—God, creation, the fall, redemption, the triune God, consciousness—provides far better explanatory power for this entire range of phenomena.

Surface and Depth

The second main reason has to do with the difference between shallowness and depth.

Our experience of the world is fundamentally an experience of depth. The world feels like a deep, meaningful, layered place. You stand before the ocean, you fall in love, you hold a newborn baby—all of these experiences feel infused with layers of meaning and significance.

This marks a crucial difference between the ancients and the moderns. The ancients shared this intuition about the world. You see it in Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and throughout the Bible. But many modern thinkers are aggressively reductive, flattening the entire range of phenomena into a very thin account. Our natural experience of the world tells us that reality is a profound beauty suffused with depth throughout the whole. The biblical worldview validates that intuition. It makes sense of our experience that the world is, in fact, deep.

Whenever we encounter that depth, the reductive modern thinker tries to deny or flatten it: “You only feel that way because it helped your ancestors survive.” But our experience of the world far exceeds that thin explanation.

When comparing worldviews, people usually evaluate ethics, politics, or economics. But another crucial test is how a worldview understands the relationship between surface and depth. A theologian once coined the wonderful phrase that the Christian faith “saves the surfaces.” It does not dismiss everyday human experience; it provides an account that preserves the reality of the surface rather than reducing it away.

Everyone inevitably believes in some relationship between surface and depth. It is built into reality—connected to the fact that we have interiors and exteriors, public and private life. Even the staunch philosophical evolutionist appeals to depth when arguing: “You think you believe X, Y, and Z, but what is actually going on beneath the surface is this evolutionary mechanism.” So while the modern materialist flattens the world, he still posits a depth—it is just an exceptionally thin, impoverished depth.

Consider the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5. Quoting Genesis 2, he writes:

“A man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

Then Paul says something extraordinary:

“This is a profound mystery—and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.”

What is a mystery? A mystery is something hidden, a secret that must be disclosed. Paul looks at marriage—instituted with Adam and Eve and repeated through every human generation—and says that within this surface reality, something was hidden all along.

Marriage contains another level of meaning within itself. We might call this symbolism or typology, but the core point is that reality has two connected layers: a surface and a depth. Within creation itself, inside this universal human reality of marriage, God placed a mystery that communicates what lies at the very heart of reality: Christ’s relationship to His church.

Is marriage the only thing in the world that possesses that kind of depth? I do not think so. The world is full of things that possess depth, and the beauty of the Christian faith is that it opens that deep world up to us.

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