Why Am I a Christian?

Bertrand Russell was a mathematician, logician, philosopher, and political activist; sadly, he is most widely known for his best-selling polemic, Why I am not a Christian, which amounts to a tired rehash of the Problem of Evil.  

Not that evil is not a problem, philosophically and otherwise; but the subject has been delt with exhaustively by everyone from Moses (original sin) to Leibniz (best of all possible worlds) to Rabbi Kushner (Why Bad Things Happen to Good People). Russell offers nothing new and, as we shall see later, the Problem of Evil has a simple, two-word solution.  

My own view draws on these traditions. Susceptibility to Evil is the price Universe pays for its radical independence. Genesis says, “God created the heavens and the earth.” (1: 1) God did not wish them, dream them, imagine them, construct them, or manufacture them, but created them. As a result, the World evolves freely (in a value-oriented space). 

The much more important question is, “How is it that there Good?” A medieval Irish poet, traditionally St. Dallan, summed it up, “Naught is all else to me save that Thou (God) art.” In other words, without a transcendent source and measure of Good, precisely nothing has any value.  

“God saw that it was good.” (1: 10b) God, who is Good per se, the source of Good in the world, is also the ‘concept by which we measure the good’. (Apologies to John Lennon) When we say, ‘God is good’, we are using good as a noun, not as an adjective. 

Unexpectedly, Nietzsche agrees with Dallan: “One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” (Twilight of the Idols) No God, no Good qua ‘good’! 

Atheists are fond of saying, “We don’t need God to be good,” and they are absolutely right. Some would even argue that atheists are more focused on ‘being good’ than many undeservedly smug theists…and I won’t argue with that either.  

The problem is that we need to explain how it is that there is Good in the first place. If we are part of the Whole and if nothing exists which can judge the Whole, then Good, which requires discernment and discrimination, two types of judgment, cannot exist.  

You can’t be something that doesn’t exist, and according to Nietzsche, spokesperson for atheists everywhere, because there is no God, there can be no ‘Good’, at least not in the sense of a norm or value.  

I suppose something could be good accidentally, but we wouldn’t know it if there is no objective basis for such a judgement. What makes the good thing ‘good’ and how does it differ from something that is not so good? According to Nietzsche, nothing can be more or less good than anything else…we know “too much to argue or to judge” (Dylan).   

Or perhaps someone will say, “Everything is good, the whole and all its parts.” Again, that is true, as far as it goes; to be is to participate in the Good. But again, that is a judgment. It requires something that is not strictly tied to what is, that has some distance, some perspective, and, according to Nietzsche, “There exists nothing which could judge the Whole.”   

Ancient Greeks and Hebrews alike, from Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, through John, the apostle ‘whom Jesus loved’, believed that the wellspring of all being is Love. “Greater love has no man (sic) than that he lay down his life for a friend.” (John 15: 13)  

To them, Love is not a fickle accident that occurs between two pre-existing entities: “He caught a glimpse of her across the crowded dance floor; it was love at first sight.” Rather, Love is the substructure, the logos, of everything that is.  

John says it best (as usual), “Without him (logos) nothing that came to be came to be.” (Jn. 1: 3)  

Of course, the World is full of situations where disordered elements self-organize to form more ordered structures (Jantsch). But this is always at the expense of increasing disorder in the environment (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). The price of local order is cosmic entropy. 

Even this is only possible because Order per se, the logos, pre-exists. Without Order it would be impossible to form intention or perform selection, both essential to the process of becoming. Plus, it is not at all obvious, to me anyway, that self-organizing quanta would uncover the phenomenon of Value, or generate a dimension of Virtue, in the World. Good per se must also be pre-existent. 

We appear to have wandered far from our topic; but not so. We are right where we need to be; I’ve simply been laying the groundwork: ‘Why I am a Christian’ boils down to just 15 words! 

• “I am who am” (Exodus 3: 14) 

• “In the beginning was the logos” (John 1: 1) 

• “God is Love” (1 John 4:16) 

• “Jesus wept” (John 11: 35) 

I need to add just one assumption based on personal experience: there is ‘something’ rather than nothing! YHWH introduces himself to Moses as ‘Who am’; if it turns out that nothing is, then we have turned onto a dead end.  

On the other hand, if it does turn out that there is not something but only nothing, then we’re no worse off that we were to start. We still need to account for the phenomenon and phenomena of naïve experience. So there is only one option that does not turn out to be a perpetual loop: Est!    

So we take Being for granted. But the ‘something’ we experience is not just any thing; it has some quite specific and counter-intuitive properties. For example, you might expect Being to be a uniform continuum or a smoothly graded hierarchy or a single quantum lacking any external relations and/or internal structure.  

But what I experience as being is not any of these things; it is an archipelago of entities (events) thinly networked with one another to form a whole. Furthermore, this architecture repeats on multiple scales, from atoms and molecules to cells and organisms, to societies and civilizations. Being is fractal.  

So I feel comfortable relying on ‘something is’ as a working hypothesis. To be is to be an entity (or an element of an entity). Every entity stands out from its background (‘I am’) and yet is continuous with that background (‘it is’). We have just turned Descartes on his head: Est ergo Sum. Am-ness is the substructure of Being as we know it, not a feature, and Am is who (not what) God is. 

• God is the One who am and so the sine qua non of everything that is. To be is to participate in ‘Am’, which is ‘God’: “I am who am.” Before God can be ‘the creator…of all things’ (Nicene Creed), God must be their ‘pre-condition’. 

• Order, logos, is co-incident with God. John goes on to say, “the logos was with God and the logos was God.” (John 1: 3) Being is ordered: ‘to be’ is to participate in ‘I am’ and ‘I am’ orders ‘what is’. Order (logos) is Being per se. 

• I am because you are. I become by making room for you to become. We become, together; we are, together. Ironically, ‘to be’ is ‘not to be’. (Lie quiet, Hamlet!) Something becomes when it withdraws to make room for something else. Being is reciprocity; it is rooted in self-sacrifice. “I must become less that he (the other) may become more!” (John the Baptist re Jesus, John 3: 30). 

• Being is not value free. Being is not neutral. On the contrary, God is good as well as Good. “Jesus (aka the Christ, the Son of God) wept!” Of course he did. How could he not? John 11:35 is the one, only and final answer to ‘the problem of evil’ (above).  We’re all in this together and God is in this with us.  

Being (God) is Order (Father), Love (Spirit), and Good (Son); they are all ultimately synonymous, they are God’s personae, God’s avatars, the face(s) of God in the World and so, because of just 15 words and what they signify, I am a Christian. 

Image: "The Mystic Nativity" by Sandro Botticelli, painted around 1500–1501 in oil on canvas, measures 108.5 cm by 74.9 cm (42.7 inches by 29.5 inches) and is housed in the National Gallery, London. 

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