The Moral Chasm

I sometimes write as if Christian theism (CT) is a variety of explanatory hypothesis and that it derives the greater part of its plausibility from this. Indeed I have compared it to theory within the sciences and have argued that it is very much like them. (A favorite example of mine is quantum mechanics.)

I would still insist upon this point. CT does do much explanatory work, both of entities physical and metaphysical; and its plausibility is bolstered by this. But let it not be thought that for me CT does only this. It does more, and more importantly it does something before. The genesis of my belief in CT does not lie in estimation of explanatory power. Rather the genesis is moral and practical in nature. Let me explain.

I feel that a moral chasm lies between the man I am at present and the man I ought to and can become. I am, in my own eyes, radically defective. I see it in what I think and do, and in what I do not think and do not do. I am quick to anger. I am lazy. I am selfish. I am fearful. (There's more . . . and worse.)

I know that I could do better. I know that there is another and better way. But my 41 years have taught me that I cannot do as I would do. (The spirit does not even always will it; and the flesh is always week.) I find it necessary, then, to look to a power outside myself, a power that would do for me what I cannot do for myself. I find it necessary to look to God.

This is not an argument. It is rather a history, and a current fact. I find it absolutely inescapable that I am a wretched sinner. (This is not flourish. It is plain truth.) The sense of this I carry with me always. It colors all that I think and do. I can no more shed it than I can shed my skin.

Nor do I wish to shed it. I do not wish to become on who believes that my faults are not really faults. Quite the contrary - I wish to become one whose defects have been overcome; and I look habitually and continually to God as the sole power able to grant this wish.

I thus am a Christian theist not by argument but by the sheer weight of the awareness of my sins. When I turn to argument, I do so not to lay out those arguments that brought me to Christianity. Rather I do so to show my interlocutors the intellectual power of CT (a power that they reject). But even if I myself were to come to doubt that power, a Christian I would remain. Knowledge of my sins (and inescapable propensity to sin) and of my inability to heal myself makes this inevitable.