I was intrigued to stumble
upon this old piece of mine from 2002, from a folder I hadn’t opened in a very
long time. I don’t recall much about its composition, but I do remember the
road analogy, and I remember that it was written just before I became a Christian.
In fact, I think this writing was a monumental point in my life - it's the
point at which I argued theoretically for the truth of Christianity for the
first time, while not quite being a Christian yet. Here it is:
“One of the long-standing roadblocks for atheists is that, before one adopts a belief in God, there needs to be some kind of reason to believe that the world we live in is created by a God, and some way of knowing which God. Unlike, say, a burglary, I have the sufficient experience to catalogue the empirical evidence it presents to me. I know the difference between a house that has been burgled and one that hasn't, and I can check for evidence of a break in and evidence that theft has occurred.
But I cannot do this in quite the same way when it comes to God’s creative dispensation, because, at first glance, I have no way of distinguishing between a part of nature that is designed by God and a part of nature that is brought about by nature's physical laws. This is compounded by the fact that if God is the Creator, He no doubt uses the physical laws to do at least some of His creating - so for human beings not privy to the Divine blueprint, there really is no easy way to look at the material substate and distinguish between designed and not-designed by God. If all of creation is designed by God, then trying to look for design from within that nature is a bit like fishes swimming deep in the ocean all their lives looking for a thing called 'wetness'. For all we know, a universe that is designed by God would look exactly as this one does, and a universe that is not designed by God might also look exactly like this one does.
And from the outside, it may also seem that when religious man A tells religious man B that his religion has the wrong beliefs about God, there is not an easy way to justify the claim of rightness. If you give me two sets of items from the empirical world, and tell me one of those items is the authentic one, and the other is a fake, we have a theoretical and a practical way of knowing which is which. A fake gold watch can be distinguished from a real gold watch; a single glazed window can be distinguished from a double glazed window; an imposter of the UK Prime Minister can be distinguished from the real UK Prime Minister. We can do all this because we have real knowledge against which to measure the genuine objects of study from the fakes.
With concepts of God, things are trickier. We only have experiences of others, and consequent opinions constructed by those people and passed on to other people throughout the centuries. That’s why third person perspectives of first person’s revelatory experiences of God have limited appeal to the intellect, because they remain rooted in the proprietary subjectivism of human construct. A Muslim’s claim that the Qur’an is the word of Allah has no more of a strong appeal to me than a man’s claim that Nostradamus visited him in a dream. If a holy book or revelation is from God, it could only be compelling to the sceptic if it purports to bring in something that does not depend solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains. That would be the only way to demonstrate that mere men probably couldn’t have invented it.
Let us think of religious belief systems by using an analogy of a set of complex, interweaving road networks. We can begin by separating aspects of belief into length of the road, width of the road and depth of the road. By length of the road, I mean the part of the belief systems which provide direction in moral, theological, philosophical, empirical and experiential analyses, and the universal search for purpose and meaning. By width of the road, I mean the parts of the belief systems which have rituals, traditions, artistic expressions and cultural attachments that cement themselves into the bedrock of any society in which that belief is influential. And by depth of the road, I mean the strength and solidity of its primary truth foundations - a belief system that has centre points in history around which the power of these truth claims are firmly representative.
If one religion is going to claim itself to be the right one, it must have all three road qualities in abundance. It must be long enough, wide enough and deep enough to stand out as the only road on which we should be travelling if we are to know God. The belief system’s road must show itself to be long enough to offer a consistent route for guidance in moral, theological, philosophical, empirical and experiential examinations, as well as continual enlightenment in the universal quest for purpose and meaning. It must be wide enough to cement itself into the bedrock of any society that enables its influence, and expect to emerge and impact through its rituals, traditions, artistic expressions and cultural attachments. And finally, and most importantly, it must have enough depth and firmness of foundation to support everything that travels on it, by being based on truthful propositions.
The one true God would be expected to be found on the only road that met these preconditions. And if we are to have a relationship with Him, He must be accessible through the prism of our daily phenomenological experiences, and His revelations must be explicable and receivable in the cognisance of everyone, irrespective of their background, their nationality, their status, their heredity, their culture, and their physical and mental abilities.
I believe that Christianity is the only religion that gives us a road of sufficient length, width and depth to claim itself to be the one true religion. The roads of some of the most influential belief systems are long and wide but shallow in depth (Hinduism, Islam), whereas Judaism is deep and wide, but its natural path turns the road into Christianity at the beginning of the first century, as Christ is the fulfilment of the Old Testament laws and prophecies. The pantheistic religions (of which Hinduism is the strongest) fail to solve the problem of Aseity; Islam (along with its superfluous subsidiaries) is only the most propagated of the Christian heresies (of which there are many); and Buddhism (along with its many subsidiaries) is only the most propagated of the Eastern heresies (of which there are many). Authentic Paganism has long since ceased to exist, and all that pertains to truth in Judaism and Greek Philosophy survives in Christianity.
The only revelations with God being a tangible presence beyond ordinary human ideas are the ones found in Christ: He went beyond mere private and subjective ideas about Divinity – He actually showed us God Himself. The Incarnation is not just about God bringing Himself to us to die for mankind’s salvation; it is also the response to a genuine epistemological problem that humankind could never solve without some help; without God becoming the focal point in our earthly existence, we would have no hope of knowing we are on the right road towards Him, and we would only be left with humankind’s distant conjectures about the true nature of God ("If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know Him and have seen Him." says Jesus in John 14:7)
Here we are beginning to understand a bit more of what Christ is in relation to other religions. His specialness is as far above the other religions as man is above the other apes. His truth is the one found in the Christian gospel, and all the false religions grow by virtue of the truths they borrow from Christianity, and the falsehoods they rivet on to their doctrines. To quote Chesterton “A novel in which a number of separate characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a sensational novel” – well, what Christianity does to the other religions is rather like what an author would do with those characters. Christ shows that all the previous religions (and ones not even founded yet) are all separate characters that, when stripped of all their false and extraneous bits, will be seen to have been Christ all along – the need to worship, to be loved, to communicate with the Divine – they are all human traits that too comfortably find their way into spurious belief systems
Here is where the length, width and depth of the strongest road combines in force to reveal the one true God; the power of grace takes an evil man and tells Him that if accepts the living God he can have salvation and be washed and cleansed. It takes an African tribesman, whose mind has been inculcated with spurious local customs about sea gods and animal worshipping, and it tells him seek revelation in Jesus Christ. It tells an oppressed woman in Iran or North Korea or Syria whose distressed mind has been impressed upon with fanatical teaching that the situation is not hopeless - that Christ is the way, the truth and the life - that hope can be found in Him because God chose to take a personal sharing in the human condition. It tells lost souls scattered all over the world - from Devon to Darfur, from South Yemen to South Korea, from East Brooklyn to East Timor - that their lives can have direction and meaning because the one and only God, the Creator of the universe, loves us enough to be born a man so that He could die on the cross and wipe out all our sins to bring us salvation.”
