Introduction

Take your pick: it’s a target-rich environment. Creation of the entire universe in a week. A talking serpent and a death-dealing fruit. A worldwide flood. A fugitive nation hurrying on dry ground across the floor of the Red Sea. A city’s walls falling flat at the sound of trumpets. The sun standing still. Any one of a hundred implausibilities that would make a reasonable person say, “Come on. Get serious.”...

Why Does Anyone Believe?

To believe Christianity’s surprising story would require considerable convincing. Not surprisingly, lots of different Christians believe for lots of different reasons. This chapter rounds up under a handful of headings the main reasons why Christianity has attracted and retained the adherence of two billion people across the globe. And not every believer relies on every one of these arguments, of course. This chapter surveys the chief grounds of Christian faith—from historical evidence to philosophical argumentation, and from moral beauty to mystical experience.

Why Not Believe?

This chapter sets out responses to the two most popular obstacles to Christian belief: (1) the Christian insistence on the unique and supreme importance of Jesus Christ vis-à-vis any other religious or philosophical figure, and (2) the problem of evil. While other religions and philosophies are acknowledged as contributing, sometimes greatly, to the benefit of humankind, Christianity identifies a problem that needs a solving, a debt that needs paying, a hole that needs filling—and then asserts that Jesus Christ is the one who makes things right. Once he has done so, of course, there is no need for someone else to do likewise. But if he has done so, then he deserves supreme gratitude and worship. As for the problem of evil, this chapter sympathizes with skeptics and mourners, and offers the main answer Christianity has to offer to every problem: not clever philosophy or dogmatic theology, but the person of Jesus.

How to Decide

This chapter sets out a basic epistemology of religious choice. It presents a set of guidelines for how to think about making a decision about religion in a responsible way. It surveys how faith depends upon knowledge, since no one believes anything on no grounds whatsoever. But it also shows how knowledge depends upon faith: upon trusting a wide range of sources (senses, memories, other people, and more) and the ability to understand and infer reasonable conclusions from all that input. The chapter concludes with commonsense recommendations for dealing with the unavoidable uncertainty that attends all big choices in life.

What Now?

This chapter offers a brief challenge to the reader to undertake due diligence and to come to a prompt decision in the matter of religious choice. One must do one’s homework, yes, but without undue delay. For why not enjoy a better life as soon as one can?

What Is Christianity?

This chapter begins by offering a fourfold scheme for analyzing the essentials of any religion by which the rest of the book’s argument will proceed. What’s real? What’s best? What’s wrong? And what can be done? It then clears away many half-remembered, half-understood, and half-correct conceptualizations that most educated people have about Christianity in our time. Proceeding to the basic teachings of Christianity, it zeroes in on the key plotline of the Bible, setting out a Christian Story that is at once familiar and yet very strange, a Story that seems to defy common sense even as it makes sense on its own terms.