Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 110th episode. In this episode I want to take some time to unpack my answer to a question. The question is, Why do I believe in God? I think this is the question that most secular people are too polite to ask a Christian. I think this is the question that surfaces in the minds of family and friends when a person becomes a new believer. I think this is the question that is puzzled over when non-religious people get to know a Christian who is otherwise quite normal and similar to themselves. Why do they believe in that stuff?
There are far too many Christians who don’t know how to answer that question. They can’t articulate why they believe in God – they just know that they do. The inability to answer this question leads to a lot of speculative answers coming from outside the faith. Here are some of the most common: Christians believe in God because that was the religion they were raised with. Christians believe in God because they are afraid of going to Hell (that’s Pascal’s wager). Christians believe in God because they aren’t emotionally mature enough to tolerate cold hard reality. Christians believe in God because they are superstitious and had come kind of encounter they could not explain. Christians believe in God because they’ve screwed up their lives and need hope in a hopeless situation. Christians believe in God because they just like to hang out with each other in fellowship. Christians believe in God because they are conservative types who desire to live in the past. Christians believe in God because they are scientifically ignorant. I could go on and on with these speculative, straw-man answers but those will suffice for now.
It turns out that I actually don’t believe in God for any of those reasons. I wasn’t raised with religion – I was a scoffer. I rolled my eyes at Christians and I specifically stopped reading books or watching movies if I detected any moralizing or smuggling in of religion. It was a pet project of mine listen critically to religious people so that I could point out the flaws in their thinking. Bill Maher was my favorite voice of reason and I watched his movie Religilous three times – laughing and enjoying myself all the way to the end. As far as I was concerned, religion was a first century mind virus that we all needed to outgrow in order to make the world a better place. For the first 24 years of my life that was my attitude. Studies show that a person’s likelihood of religious conversion decreases dramatically once they hit adulthood. So I can’t explain my conversion by appeal to childhood religion.
I’ve never been afraid of going to Hell and to this day I’m not afraid of it. When I was a nonbeliever I didn’t fear Hell because I didn’t even believe in Hell. Today I don’t fear Hell because I love and trust God. I remember one of the first things I said to my pastor as we were talking about my potential conversion was that I wanted him to know I wasn’t doing this out of fear of Hell. I fear God in a reverent sense. It’s the same sort of fearful respect that you give to fire. We need fire to survive but if we fail to respect fire it will burn our entire lives down. I’ve never been a fan of Pascal’s Wager because it results in Christians whose faith is predicated on their own self-preservation rather than their love for God and love for neighbor. You can think of these Christians as Fire Insurance Christians. That’s to say nothing of the works of Blaise Pascal himself – he was a brilliant thinker and I highly recommend reading his masterpiece The Pensees. So I can’t explain my conversion by suggesting that I’m just afraid of going to Hell when I die.
What about cold, hard reality? Do I believe in God because I’m not emotionally mature enough to handle a world without Him? There is some truth in this but not in the way the question is proposed. Human inability to remain stable and prosperous across long periods of cultural disbelief or paganism has less to do with emotional maturity and more to do with objective reality. God is objectively real. To deny God is to thrust yourself into a subjective domain where your actions and your thinking become misaligned with reality.
Think of it this way: Imagine you walk into a jungle at night where there are tigers. The stealth of the tigers and the darkness of the jungle obscure your senses and you cannot detect them. But just because you can’t detect them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. If you take it on faith that there are tigers in the jungle then you will think and act much differently than you would if you thought there were no tigers. And you don’t even have to act fully on faith here. History is replete with societies of people who falsely assumed there were no tigers – and these people got eaten. You can compare these lost people with others who accepted the reality of the tigers on faith. These other people believed in the reality of the tigers, thus they thought and acted accordingly, causing them to survive and thrive. I’ll talk more about this concept later in the episode. But for right now, in this analogy your emotional maturity or stoicism has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the tigers eat you. Your belief in and awareness of the presence of the tigers is the only thing that saves you. So I can’t attribute my conversion to emotional immaturity or inability to tolerate cold, hard reality.
Maybe I’m a superstitious person who has had phenomenological encounters that I can’t explain thus I posited the theory of God? Well I can tell you that I’ve never heard a voice. God has never spoken to me literally or audibly. I don’t have some kind of antenna or special connection to God that was given to me upon conversion. The closest thing I’ve experienced to a message from God is a feeling or the still small voice that tells you not to go down that dark alley. I’ve also had strangely ironic things occur in my daily life that Occam’s razor suggests could not be the product of coincidence. For those unfamiliar, Occam’s razor is a philosophical principle that claims the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one. I’ve never had any kind of literal, metaphysical encounter that was any different from the literal experiences I had as an unbeliever. I experience the musical high that attends worship, but I’ve also experienced this high at secular concerts. That’s led me to believe that while worshiping in the presence of God produces a high – the high is not God Himself – the high is simply an effect of being in the presence of God. I can’t explain my conversion by appeal to superstition because quite honestly nothing that qualifies as superstitious has ever really happened to me.
Did I screw up my life so badly that I’m now in a hopeless situation so I turn to belief in God to keep me going? I’ll never deny that life is tragic and full of suffering. I also believe it’s true that many people find God when they hit rock bottom. I experience a lot of suffering today and I have some major league challenges to overcome. But not nearly as much as some others do. I’m a young, attractive, intelligent person who has the privilege of living in the wealthiest, most advanced society on earth. I have a beautiful wife. I have loving parents. I love the work that I do. I’m active in my community and my daily existence is imbued with a strong sense of meaning and purpose. Before my conversion I suffered some heartbreak from a failed relationship but I also had the opportunity of living to please myself each and every day. I had enough money to do many of the things I wanted to do. I had plenty of attractive women to talk to. I was able to live in a pleasant city and enjoy all the fruits of worldly endeavor. I readily acknowledge that looking into the void of nihilism left me anxious, immoral, blase about life. But as far as my existential condition is concerned, I’m an extremely lucky person who hasn’t had to deal with some of the horrific realities others have. So I can’t say that my conversion was a consequence of an irreparably screwed up life or of hopelessness.
Am I simply a cultural Christian? Do I espouse the Christian religion because I enjoy hanging out with people who are like me? It’s common for people who were raised in the church to feel comfortable and at home in the church. There are many churches in the United States that function more like Christian clubs than actual churches. These are places where new faces are accepted with trepidation. Rough individuals or rehabilitated criminals are unwelcome in churches like these. I’ve spent a fair amount of time developing arguments against this kind of behavior. You can hear more about those arguments in MHB 84 and MHB 97. As of this moment, my entire ministry is this podcast – which is a project I work on in solitude. I’ve reduced my involvement in local churches to make time for this work, so I don’t spend nearly as many hours in fellowship with other Christians as I used to. I still enjoy spending time with the friends I was close to before my conversion. I still go to parties, bars, and secular events. In other words, my Christian transformation has had less to do with my environment and more to do with my soul.
All of that is not to say that you’re wrong if you prefer to remain in Christian circles. You need to know your limitations and where you can go without compromising your integrity. But for myself I don’t particularly aim to spend time in Christian circles. I spend most of my time alone or in the company of scholars while reading their work or listening to their podcasts. I spend a lot of time with my family as well. I think the amount of time I spend in social environments has actually decreased since my conversion. And definitely since the podcast became a ministry. So my conversion was not primarily motivated by some desire to create social networks among Christians.
Maybe I’m a conservative type who wants things to go back to the way they were in the 1950s. I don’t think this is true of me either. For a long time I was a registered Democrat and I voted for former President Obama. But then I voted for President Trump in 2016. Why the change? Mostly due to the fact that Democrats have abandoned classic liberalism in favor of the far-left radical cult of wokeness. They’re traveling down a road that leads to an historical outcome I want to stay far away from. But I’m not a theocrat either. I think it’s usually an extraordinarily bad idea to legislate my belief system onto others. If you have to force the population to abide by your set of values – you’ve already lost the battle. Prayer, public influence, and proper education are far more effective at shifting the culture than policy will ever be.
Furthermore, I don’t have a particularly rosy view of the past. I’m really thankful to be alive during this generation. My society has more access to things like luxury and medication than any civilization in history. Prosperity is relatively easy to achieve in the West and poverty is being reduced more and more each year. I grew up in a rural area but I’ve learned to love being in cities as well. I don’t feel threatened by diversity of culture although I’m comfortable calling out mistakes when I see them in any group of people. I love the advancement of technology – the ministry that I’m most passionate about is this podcast. I’m active on most social media platforms and nearly all of my life’s work is online. I see far more benefit to the internet and to technological prowess than I see downsides. So I can’t say that I’m a Christian because I yearn for the good old days – I prefer the 21st century.
Am I a Christian because I’m scientifically ignorant? I’m not going to overstate my scientific knowledge but I can tell you that I’m deeply familiar with the work of many famous scientists who are alive right now. One of my favorite speakers is a clinical psychologist who has more journal citations than many others in his field. Another one of my favorites is an atheist neuroscientist out of Stanford. I’m not an anti-vaxxer and I wholeheartedly embrace the opinion of experts in most given fields of inquiry. This means I believe climate change is a real problem caused by human activity – and it’s a very complicated problem at that. I vehemently oppose the oversimplified, ideological solutions offered by far left politicians. I’m capable of an above average articulation of Darwin’s theory of evolution – I understand its strengths and weaknesses as well as how it relates to Scripture. Like I said, I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to claim that mantle – but I think I’m more scientifically minded than most nonbelievers let alone Christians. So I can’t say that I’ve fallen into Christianity because of scientific ignorance.
Okay. So we’ve dealt with the usual straw-man explanations charged against Christians for why they believe in God. Now let’s get to the good part. I’m going to do the best I can to articulate why I believe in God. This might be a bit technical so you’ll have to bear with me. I like to think of my belief in three layers. The first is ontological. The second is normative. And the third is strategic. I’ll explain those three layers as I go through each one. I think these layers are what make up the basic anatomy of a worldview or belief system. I think much of our lives are influenced by the composition of these three layers. We have free will, yes, but our decisions and perceptions are so heavily influenced by these three layers that we aren’t nearly as free as we might first assume. I would propose to you that it is extremely important that you get these three layers sorted out in your own life. Even if you’re not religious – you need to figure out what’s driving you because you don’t want to run off of a cliff.
First let’s consider the ontological layer. This is like the context of your life. It’s the framework of your very existence. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about where you’re from, why you’re here, and where you’re going. You should never underestimate the power of framing. An example I like to use is to imagine yourself working out at the gym. Your muscles are burning and your heart is pounding. These sensations don’t scare you and you feel okay. Some athletes even learn to enjoy these sensations. But if you woke up one morning in your bed with your muscles burning and your heart pounding – you would go to the emergency room immediately. The same exact sensations wrapped in different contexts have totally different effects on you. That’s because when you’re at the gym you know why you are feeling those things.
Your life functions the same way. If the story that makes up the context of your life is pathological – then even the slightest stimulus is going to feel offensive and painful to you. I think this is in part why so many young people have become so delicate. If you accept the current scientific hypothesis that you’re just a ball of electrified meat walking around on a tiny speck of a planet in some insignificant galaxy, then it’s going to be difficult for you to stave off nihilism. In fact, I would go so far as to say that those who claim this belief but are not nihilistic are being disingenuous about what they believe. You need to have some purpose behind your daily existence or else you cannot function. Those who begin at unbelief and set out in search for purpose have a tendency to look in all the wrong places. The materialist atheists who lead rich and satisfying lives do so because they are acting out the Christian narrative while claiming to believe something else. That’s called cognitive dissonance. How do I know such a thing is possible? Well, have you ever watched a person who claimed to be a Christian do terrible things? They suffer from cognitive dissonance as well.
Okay back to the power of framing. Here’s another interesting example. Have you ever read the novel or watched the movie, Fifty Shades of Grey? In that movie a business mogul has a relationship with a young woman that includes various forms of sadomasochism. The woman and the man end up falling in love by way of this relationship. The film was lauded by the culture and sexy, exciting, and relevant. But if you were to go in and change just one detail then you would have a movie that is unbearable to watch. Imagine Fifty Shades of Grey where Anastasia is captured and being held against her will. Like I said – unbearable.
In the same way, if you get the details wrong at the ontological level of your belief system the world is going to look and feel unbearable to you. This is in part how Post Traumatic Stress Disorder works. Naive people are at a higher risk for developing PTSD than non-naive people. That’s because naive people are missing a major piece of the puzzle when it comes to their view of existence. Most naive people don’t believe in the reality of evil. So when a naive person is touched by someone who is evil – or if they watch themselves do something that is evil – it fractures their view of the world and of themselves all the way down to the ontological level. If the trauma survivor is not carefully debriefed and taught to properly rebuild their worldview – they will develop pathological fears of reality.
Differences in the ontological layer of belief account for why certain people can experience trauma without developing PTSD and others cannot. Elite soldiers are given psychological training so that they can experience trauma without telling themselves the wrong story about that trauma. Children are more susceptible to PTSD than adults because they are just beginning the process of building their ontological layer of belief about the world. That’s why child abuse so frequently manifests itself as other problems in adulthood. So what I’m trying to say is that your ontological layer of belief is so incredibly important that it determines the way you perceive reality.
If your perception of reality is pathological, then you will be stuck with the disadvantage of reacting to that pathological perception rather than to reality proper. It would be like you watching a magician saw someone in half and actually believing that he really did it – rather than having the necessary information to understand that it’s just a trick and he’s only an entertainer. Since your perception is feeding you inaccurate information about reality, your decisions will backfire and destabilize your life without you realizing why. It will feel like the whole world is against you. I believe the Bible is a narrative that helps you build an ontological layer of perception that most closely matches actual reality. If you allow the biblical story to provide the context of your life: where you come from, why you’re here, and where you’re going – then your brain will be running the operating system that is designed to succeed in ultimate reality. To prove that we move into the next layer, which is the normative layer.
The normative layer of your belief structure is dependent on the ontological layer. If your ontological layer is screwed up then those errors are going to manifest themselves in your normative layer. The normative layer is made up of what we call morality. It says this: given that I come from A, and the reason I’m here is B, and where I’m going is C, then I ought to do D and E. I ought not to do F and G. The most relevant examples for us today are the value of human life and the necessity for not lying. If the scientists drum into our ontological layer that we are nothing but rearranged pond scum, then our normative layer is going to be warped by that belief. If I really believe that, then the only reason not to hurt or kill another person is the fear of being caught by the authorities.
You might say, that’s crazy! I would never hurt or kill another person even if I knew I could get away with it. And you’re right, you wouldn’t do that because you don’t want to do that – the thought disgusts you. But the only reason the thought disgusts you is because you associate human life with value and you empathize with the other person’s experience. But those characteristics were taught to you in the form of stories – they are not endemic to your condition.
To illustrate the point let’s play a little thought experiment. How easy is it for you to eat bacon? It’s pretty easy when you can just go to the store and pick it up in the bacon section where the bacon has always been just bacon. But let’s imagine instead that you adopted a little piglet named Mortimer. You and Mortimer go everywhere together and he cuddles up next to you at night. He greets you at the door every day when you come home and makes all manner of pig noises in his excitement to see you. Mortimer is there for you when no one else is. After about 5 years I tell you to slaughter Mortimer so that we can sit down to a nice plate of bacon.
I don’t care how tough you think you are, Mortimer is definitely going to be harder for you to get bacon from than the bacon section at the grocery store. The only difference between Mortimer and the pig who died for the bacon section is that you have a history with Mortimer. You have a story with him. The story that you have about the closest people in your life is the only thing that differentiates them from complete strangers. Someone who suffers dementia has lost the cognitive ability to tap into the story of you which is why they sometimes fail to recognize you.
So if you allow yourself to fall victim to a story in which human beings have no intrinsic value – you’re a lot closer to homicide and genocide than you might imagine. This is why regimes like the Soviet Union and the Third Reich (which was the Nazis) had ministries of propaganda. In order to gain popular approval for the mass murder of millions of Jews and others, these dictatorships needed to convince their followers that these people were subhuman. If you couple this perception of worthlessness with more propaganda that said these subhuman beings were hurting you and your family and they were the source of your struggles, then not only does it become acceptable to persecute them – it actually becomes virtuous. You can be so badly confused that you perceive mortal sins as acts of virtue. That’s what happens when your normative layer of belief has been terribly led astray. Abortion is another good example. Proponents of abortion manipulate language to alter your normative perception. It’s not a baby it’s a fetus. You’re not murdering, you’re exercising your right to health care.
So we know that it’s possible to buy into a story in which certain groups of human beings become worthless and therefore expendable. But what about lying? This is another one that is highly relevant today. The left and the right regularly provide totally divergent commentary on the same exact events. They are looking at the same screen but seeing a different movie. But how often does one side or the other realize that their version of the movie is inconsistent with the truth? I think more often than either of them would admit. If deep down in your ontological layer there is no such thing as absolute or objective truth, then it becomes permissible to say literally anything that gains you power.
If you’re just a ball of meat who has 80 short years to live before everything goes black – why on earth would you not do everything you could to manipulate the world in your favor? And that’s what happens. The deception becomes so commonplace that our ability to have conversations is lost. Everyone just assumes the other is lying. If there is no such thing as truth, then my motive to talk with you can’t be that I want to get a better understanding of the truth. So all that’s left is power. My only motive for speaking to you is to make moves on power and I’ll make you believe whatever it takes to get there. The loss of belief in absolute truth is why discourse is dying in the West. We need to get away from the primordial soup, random mutation, one-and-done story of our lives and get back to a narrative where truth matters.
Let me recap what we’ve learned so far about the three layers of belief. The deepest layer is ontological – this is the story you tell yourself about where you’re from, why you’re here, and where you’re going. The second layer is normative. The normative layer says, given that I come from A, and my purpose is B, and I’m going to C, I ought to do D and E while I ought not to do F and G. The third and final layer is the strategic layer. This is where the rubber meets the road. If my ontological layer gives me an accurate understanding of the reality that surrounds me, and my normative layer gives me a proper aim, then my strategic layer tells me what actions would be appropriate to achieve that aim. The strategic layer is the most fluid layer because the correct actions can sometimes change with new information.
A good example is to imagine that your neighbor is sick with an infection. My ontological layer tells me that God exists. My normative layer tells me that because God exists, I ought to love my neighbor as myself. 200 years ago loving my neighbor as myself would have meant bloodletting and applying leeches to try and remove the infFection. With the advent of modern medicine, this is no longer the appropriate action. Now that I know about doctors, hospitals, and medicine, it would be a failure at the strategic layer for me to forego taking my neighbor to the hospital and instead attempting to bleed him.
So you can see how the ontological and normative layers function as permanent guideposts that allow me use whatever information is at my disposal to make an appropriate decision. The ontological and normative layers give me the value system that I need to interpret the facts that are in front of me. That’s why science can’t give you a full picture of reality. Science is simply the interpretation of facts, but you need the value system in place before you can even begin to interpret the facts. This is why many on the far-left are simply dismissing science that doesn’t accommodate the ideology that’s wreaking havoc on their ontological and normative layers. A basic example is how so many people no longer believe their is a difference between biological males and biological females. In order for their pathological ideology to function, they have to depend on these differences being socially constructed and not rooted in science.
Why does all of this convince me of the veracity of Scripture and the truth of Jesus Christ? Because I think Jesus Christ is the embodiment of all three layers perfectly tuned to reality. This is what Christians mean when they say they don’t believe in Jesus because of the Bible, they believe in the Bible because of Jesus. Christ’s expression of love is what makes me think the Bible is true. Love must be a choice that is self-sacrificial. To love any other way causes the whole system to destabilize and collapse in on itself. It’s no accident that as individuals in a society become more self-absorbed, the worse off the society becomes.
It’s fun to have nice things and live comfortably. But history teaches us over and over that the one ingredient that is not optional for survival is meaning. If you have no meaning then no amount of prosperity or self-love will suffice. It’s not uncommon for people’s lives to totally change when they have kids. That’s because kids are excellent repositories for self-sacrificial love. This self-sacrificial love carries with it the power to re-calibrate everything else down to the ontological layer. It gives you meaning and purpose. The highest form of meaning and purpose is to love God and to love your neighbor. This meaning and this purpose transcends temporal reality and grafts you into eternity. Why do I believe in God? I suppose it’s because I had an idea of what love is and what love should be. And I saw that love embodied when I looked at Jesus Christ.
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