Are we building a house on sand, or more accurately on air? The Bible itself builds from the roots up to the far branches. Atheistic chirstisnity kicks the whole trunk out from under the branches and hopes they will keep floating unsupported. If it does, why does it? And does it? The advantage of floating unsupported is that it’s much easier to remove any particular branches you don’t want or don’t like. And you can move the tree where ever you like because it isn’t fixed by anything other than your own preferences and acceptance of it as catering to your tastes.

Most people either think they must or wish to remove the trunk, but they’re not willing to actually let go of the whole tree and let it fall. They’re willing to let the foundation of the tree fall, and anything they aren’t keen on, but they will not and cannot let the whole thing go. This is a very curious way to approach belief. You would think that either the tree, being rooted, has sufficient claims on you to prevent you from moving it, removing its branches, or cutting down its trunk, or you would think that it was suffieicntly unrooted that it would all fall. Either you’re uncovering something actually true, ou you’re just stringing together things you like and calling them true. Which is it? And if it true, why and how is it true? And if it isn’t, then what is, and what should you be willing to give up?

Atheistic Christianity seems insufficiently attached to the idea of truth to be willing to accept the consequences, either negative or positive, of reality’s claims on you. It wants to grant intellectual assent and practical alignment without any actual faith. Because it is so conditional, in any given circumstance where there is any claim that doesn’t line up with your own natural preferences, you can simply refuse to assent to that bit and drop it out.

But not everyone has identical preferences; people have quite different natural instincts, so you have no basis for arbitrating between disagreements. Your faith cannot be shared, except by happy coincidence, because neither of you has to admit anything that doesn’t square with your own personal judgments. As a result, you’ve chopped out bits that really matter to them and they’ve chopped out bits that really matter to you.

Because the whole thing is so mutable, there isn’t really any way to force either of you to retain and tolerate the bits you each reject from the other. Unless, of course, the tree had grown up from its own roots, rather than being something we built, unless it has a fixed structure we both had access to and both have to accept regardless of how it suits us.

This is the problem of basing theological identity purely on individual consent. Whose consent? Why does their consent validate it? Why is that person’s opinion so important? Why should it be more valuable than eanyone else’s? Why should it have a stronger claim than the claims of, say, purely atheistic darwinian materialists?

The universe, as far as I can see, is a put up job. It is arranged in just such a way as to suggest contradictory possibilities, and provides no ultimate means of resolving them without risk or placing a bet. Faith, placing that bet on which system actually underlies reality, is ultimately necessary. You have to embrace a vision. But there are good reasons to observe, love, or reject either. Both make compelling cases. Both could be true. Both carry pretty extensive consequences of being true. But both could map on to the current universe of experience. At the level of cosmology, in physics,

Does aligning your life with the true state of the universe matter? If it doesn’t, then what does that tell us? And if it does, what does that tell us? If your faith is a lie, why should it be useful or helpful in a universe that does not in any way reflect it? What kind of system could we possibly be in where an essentially counterfactual approach to life is the best or correct one? And what do we even mean by best or correct in this type of world?

Faith is a terrifically hard bargain to make, and it’s understandable to want to hedge your bets, at least as far as accepting the things it’s easy to accept (based on preference) and leaving out for now the things it’s hard to accept. That way you can live as if by faith in those areas that require the least of it and not by faith in those areas that would require the most. How consistent and helpful that approach really is remains questionable. If your faith really is true, then you’ll be getting just those things you would have assumed anyway and missed out on just those things you actually needed to have a more complete picture of the world.

The real benefit of faith is in gaining access to those things you wouldn’t take for granted, not just validation of the things you would (which is how some people seem to view it). If you didn’t really believe in the object of your faith, if they were groundless, the most likely outcome is that you would fall back on mere prejudice (relativism, solipsism), which means you would default to just those things in your outlook you already assume and prefer (regardless of justification).

Faith carries some cost. It obligates you to a choice of how to live as if (as if X explanation of the underlying realities were true). Faith also carries a certain implicit assumption about the value of authenticity. The idea that truth, knowledge of it, and conforming your approach in life to it, has some essential value. There’s an assumption that this is correct, whatever the content of your faith is. That if the universe is mechanistic and contains no essential purposes or direction, but only those we imagine, then it is best to approach it with this in mind. Or that if the universe has fundamental designs and purposes that we are enmeshed in, that it is best to approach it with that in mind.

There is a basic assumption in choosing any system of belief that there is at least some value in consistency and harmony between our understanding of the world and our actions in it. This premise is, of course, open to questioning. But it’s such a built-in assumption for a species with such developed senses, especially vision, keenly oriented toward giving us the best picture possible for navigating the terrain before us, that it’s hard to escape such assumptions. Our whole orientation and experience confirms it daily. And we know that you’re likely to die or be hurt if you don’t see clearly.

We want to see. We want vision. And we want to be guided by that vision.