Letter to a Friend (Part 2)

 

Christianity is holistic

When, in an earlier dialogue _____,  you told me that you agreed that empiricism is bankrupt when it comes to developing a workable ethic (that’s my way of stating it, not yours), I felt that this was an important point to touch upon. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable with a view of life that compartmentalizes my life, drawing hard and fast divisions between aspects of my inner life and the external world that I experience daily as a singularity, a unity. Whatever worldview I find myself committing to must take all of my experience, all of human experience, and make sense of it in a way that’s not radically counter-intuitive (though, it indeed may shock me at time and challenge me) and that doesn’t make nonsense of life.

Ultimately, I’ve concluded that Christianity is just that worldview. First, it validates and indeed gives grounding to my subject world, my hopes, fears, desires. It makes sense of my desire for justice, my sense of beauty, and the human longing for a world that “lives up to it’s potential.” But, on the other hand, I’ve found that my intellectual cravings are satisfied with the worldview presented in the Bible. No matter what objections I’ve throw at it, it stands up, none the worse for wear. It gives me a metaphysic that makes sense, and naturally flows into it’s own epistemology, and an ethic as well. Of course, it’s not an exhaustive list of how to run my life, but that’s exactly because the Bible doesn’t present us human as automatons. We apply the implications of scripture to aspects of life not directly addressed in its pages.

Here I’ll address a couple of lines of reasoning that I find compelling in favor of the Christian worldview. Now, here’s something important to keep in mind as you read this. If by “evidence” you only seek data that’s falls into an empiricist epistemology, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. I can’t be held to a standard that I reject. But, on the other hand, if by “evidence” you mean reasons for why I believe what I do, then I plan to give you that here. Hopefully I’ll communicate what I mean clearly in what follows. Here are the reasons I believe that Christianity is the only worldview that makes sense of human experience: 1) It gives philosophical grounding to assumptions, crucial assumptions, that we take for granted and live by everyday. 2) Without the overall structure of the Christian worldview, the entire enterprise of explanation is made into nonsense. And lastly, 3) it makes sense of who I am as a person, and the struggles of humanity that we see every day.

I realize that’s a lot to say, let alone defend in an email. Scores of books have addressed at least some of these points, and the ones that defend all three tend to be big books, so please excuse the brevity with which I’ll address them [which will begin in the next post] .