Questions on Christianity

In the past several blogs, we have determined that human experience and logic are not always reliable guides to knowing what is true.  Another faculty available to us is what we call our heart or emotions.  However, we have conflicting ideas about the role the heart should take in deciding what is true.  Some tell us we should not act on our emotions alone; we should have reasons for taking a particular path or point of view. [1]  We are told that propaganda is a form of persuasion that appeals to our emotions rather than our reason [2] and propaganda is such a negative term.  Some say that emotions are irrational [3] and stupid [4]; that emotions happen to us and we do not control our emotions. [5]  But others say that emotions have intelligence and involve responsibility, [6] give our lives meaning, address the concerns we have with the world, and are how we engage the world. [7]  To sort through this conflicting advice, we must first understand what the heart or emotions are.

What Is Our Heart?

Webster’s defines the heart as “the center of the total personality, especially with reference to intuition, feeling, or emotion”.  So when we talk about the heart, we are actually talking about several different aspects of human existence, not just one.  If we are to understand the role our heart plays in determining what is true, we must determine the nature of our feelings, emotions, and intuition.

Our problem is that we talk much about our heart and we base many of our decisions upon our emotions but we seem to have little idea what it is that has such an influence upon our lives.  It is like we know something exists but we find it difficult to verbalize what it is.  Well, psychology has told us for a long time that a large part of our lives involve our subconscious.  What is our subconscious?  Webster’s define it as what is beyond our conscious which really does not provide much help.  Science does provide us with help.  First, scientists tell us that we humans sense many things unconsciously. [8]  Our physical world offers us a flood of information.  If our mind did not filter out some of the data, it would be so overloaded we would not be able to function.  Our subconscious consists of information we were not even consciously aware we were receiving.  Second, doctors and scientists tell us that the brain remembers all our senses have ever experienced.  Brain surgery has shown that when certain areas of the brain are stimulated, sensations long forgotten are remembered.  It is obvious our brain is limited in the amount of material it can process consciously so all this other information resides beyond our consciousness.   We cannot remember all that happened to us as children but these experiences do impact our current lives.

While our conscious mind deals with what we are currently aware and remember our subconscious consists of the totality of our life’s experiences.  It would be to our benefit to be able to utilize the totality of our life’s experiences in making decisions rather than to just depend upon the information available to our conscious mind.  Our heart is the way we accomplish this; it brings the entirety of our life’s experiences to bear on the question on which we are working.  Our emotions are a method of summarizing our entire life’s experiences so they can be communicated quickly.  Love is just a shorthand way of acknowledging all the connections that exist between two people.  Anger is a quick way of expressing displeasure of all the slights, frustrations, or humiliations a particular situation has brought us.

Problem with Relying on Our Heart

Relying on the heart to determine what is true, like experience and logic, has its problems.  If our heart is the sum total of our life experiences, our heart is like a flywheel; it keeps us on a steady course.  That is why change is so difficult; we are going against our past and we must ignore our feelings and emotions.  Our heart could mislead us if our previous experiences are at variance with reality and, in these situations, we will need to use our rational abilities to override our heart.  If the heart is just the unconscious sensory data we have personally experienced but filter out, then, as we have previously noted, we face the problem of depending solely upon our experiences.  Our heart or emotions can also be exploited by others.  Thomas Sowell states:  “Many of the unprecedented mass horrors of the 20^th century were the work of charismatic political leaders who knew how to manipulate people’s emotions.” [9]

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[1]   Robert J. Gula, Nonsense (Mount Jackson, VA:  Axios Press, 2002), p. 14.

[2]   Gula, p. 15.

[3]   Robert C. Solomon, The Passions:  Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions, Part I (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company, 2006), p. 1.

[4]   Robert C. Solomon, The Passions:  Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions, Part II (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company, 2006), p. 11.

[5]   Robert C. Solomon, The Passions:  Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions, Part I (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company, 2006), p. 1.

[6]   Ibid., p. 157.

[7]   Ibid., p. 12.

[8]   B. Bower, “Minds May Track Danger Unconsciously,” Science News, Vol. 156 (December 11, 1999), 372.

[9]   Thomas Sowell, “Our Emotional Orgies”, (July 23, 1999).

W. P. Montague’s test for self-evident truths, as we noted in the last blog, involves the law of noncontradiction.  Rules of logic, such as this, provided us guidelines in our search for the truth.  As Trueblood states:

It is not intellectually honest to hold a position after it is known that the position leads inevitably to other positions which are recognized as false.  The respect for honesty involves, thus, the respect for consistency.  This presumably is accepted by all; if it is not accepted, intelligent discourse may as well come to an end. [1]

This rule tells us it is important to understand the implications of the positions we take because if we hold a position that involves a contradiction, we cannot expect others to take us seriously.  However, the law of noncontradiction is not an absolute test of truth.  Kant tells us this law can only tell us when two principles are in conflict but cannot tell us if those two principles are true.  Both principles could be false but not in conflict and the law of noncontradiction would not alert us to that fact. [2]  Our legal system provides an example.  There have been people convicted of a crime who later were proved to be innocent.  The jury convicted these people because they determined beyond a reasonable doubt the facts of the case proved the defendants were guilty and because they were of the opinion no major contradictions were present in the prosecution’s case.  Just because no contradictions are apparent does not indicate we have discovered a truth.

Lack of Knowledge

Both deductive and inductive logic can only work with the data the mind has.  Since humans are finite and have incomplete knowledge, logic will always work with incomplete data.  This means some of the conclusions reached by logic will be in error, not because of bad logic, but because of incomplete information.  It is an unfortunate part of the human condition that we will always make errors because our knowledge is limited; this has been and will be the cause of much human suffering.  Our medical science is proof of this.  Doctors do not know everything about the human body and diseases and as a result they do not have the knowledge and technology to heal all patients.  Any new technology represents a great number of unknowns and these unknowns can have tragic consequences.   For example, when engineers designed air bags for automobiles, they did so to protect human life and for the most part they succeeded.  However several young children have been killed by them because the engineers were limited in what they could foresee.  Aviation has had many accidents which have cost many lives but these accidents have taught us much about the technology of flying.  In spite of our lack of knowledge, humans are willing to pay the price to advance our knowledge.  We want to know the unknown and this desire, to a great extent, drives human progress.

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[1]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row:  1963), pp. 9-10.

[2]   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago:  Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1990), p. 65.

Deductive logic is reasoning from a known principle to an unknown.  This approach is illustrated by Archimedes who, speaking of the principle of leverage, stated if he were given a place to stand he would move the world.  In philosophy and religion, if we can determine a known principle (a place to stand), our task of determining truth is greatly simplified.  However, how do we know that a particular known principle is really true?  If we start questioning what we believe is a known principle, we eventually will encounter a fact that we cannot prove.  Consider the classical syllogism:

All men are mortal;

Socrates is a man;

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The known principle is “all men are mortal” but how do we know this is true?  As we saw in the last blog, we cannot use inductive logic to prove this statement.  While everyone we have observed on earth up to this point in time is mortal, we cannot prove that in the future we will not find someone who is immortal.  We must agree with Trueblood who states that deductive logic has no perfect right to its premise. [1]

Self Evident Truths

While inductive logic cannot prove any starting or known principle, there are some who claim the existence of self-evident truths or undeniable first principles which can be used to ground our logic.  Self-evident truths, by definition, cannot be proven.  An example of a self-evident truth is:  knowledge is possible.  If we deny it, we are affirming it because we evidently believe knowledge is not possible and that is knowledge.  Another example is:  There is error.  If we deny it, we are saying the proposition is in error which means there is error. [2]   W. P. Montague proposes a test for self-evident truths:  The truth of a particular principle is proved necessary if the denial of that principle would involve self-contradiction. [3]  The above two examples conform to his test.  While at first glance this sounds like a solution to our problem, it does not because as Trueblood notes, “it is not easy to find propositions which meet this rigorous standard”. [4]  With the few self-evident principles we have, it is difficult to construct a philosophy on them because we would need to employ human experience and logic to make any use of these principles.  As we have seen, human experience and logic have their flaws.

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[1]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row:  1963), p. 107.

[2]   Trueblood, p. 88.

[3]   As quoted in David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row:  1963), p. 89.

[4]   Trueblood, p. 89.

The first area of logic we will evaluate is inductive logic which is reasoning from particular facts or individual cases to a general principle.  A large part of science is based upon inductive logic and we will use science as an example when analyzing inductive logic.  Science gathers particular facts from around the world and even across our universe and is able to deduce general principles of how the natural world operates.  A good illustration of inductive logic is Newton and the law of gravitation.  Newton took observations of the planets in our solar system revolving around our sun and observations of the tendency of all objects on earth when thrown into the air to return to the ground and used these seemingly disparate observations to formulate the general law of gravitation that applies to all these phenomena.

The power of inductive logic is evidenced by the fact that through science we are able to understand how our material world functions which has enabled us to develop our technology.  Our technology has transformed human existence.  It has fed the hungry by increasing the yield of our crops.  It has healed the sick.  In fact, as Gopi Krishna points out, science has done more to heal the sick by eradicating diseases such as small pox than all the religious mystics and saints over the ages who performed healing miracles. [1]  Many of us owe our lives to the advances made in medical sciences.  Science has enriched our lives by enabling us to experience so much more than our ancestors through advances in transportation and communications.  We are able to travel and communicate easily worldwide; we are able to transmit pictures and information across our solar system and beyond.  Science has enabled us to invent all manner of labor saving devices that give us leisure time to do what we want, not what we must.  Science has, together with philosophy, given us a method of determining what is true and what is not.  The scientific method of developing a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, revising the hypothesis based upon test results, and then repeating the process sharpens our thinking.

But inductive logic has its limits just like human experience.  The Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defines inductive logic as “any form of reasoning in which the conclusion, though supported by the premises, does not follow from them necessarily”.  Under deductive logic it further expands on what inductive logic is:  “the truth of the conclusion is verifiable only in terms of future experience and certainty is attainable only if all possible instances have been examined”.

An example of the limits of inductive logic is give by the scientist Carol Cleland when she notes that we can never prove that all copper expands when heated because we cannot test all copper. [2]  We cannot go one million years into the future or one million years into the past to verify all copper behaves the way it does today.  The French scientist Henri Poncairé notes when scientists conduct an experiment, they can never be sure that a later experiment will produce the same result.  It can be highly probable but it cannot be absolutely proven. [3]  The philosopher Karl Popper maintains the laws of science transcend experience but our science is based upon experience (experiments) [4]  and as we have seen in the past two chapters, human experience has its limits.   The philosopher David Hume states we cannot prove that what we have not experienced resembles what we have experienced. [5]  Scientists cannot assume that experiments performed in the future will resemble experiments they performed today.

Also, we cannot be positive that the scientific experiments we perform on our world would be identical to one performed in another place in the universe.  Where and when we perform our experiments can matter.  Popper gives an example of the scientific law that the sun rises every 24 hours.  This seems like a scientific law but if we go north of the Arctic Circle, we will find that in the summer the sun never sets and in the winter it never rises. [6]  It is a firmly established fact the further science goes from the present time and location, the less certain science is.

Scientists could argue that we do have methods of looking into the past to verify what happened then.  Science can observe ancient events in the fossil record and look back in time via astronomy.  The problem with this approach is that the number of events we have observed is so infinitesimal compared to all the events that have occurred; we have not examined all possible incidents.  We cannot know if additional observations will produce a different conclusion.  It was not that long ago scientists believed that catastrophes played no part in the evolution of life on earth (uniformitarianism).  The information the scientist lacked back then was evidence the earth has been hit by asteroids and comets several times in its past.  What other information will we discover in the future which will change our view of our world and the universe?

Inductive logic fails because we humans are limited in space and time.  We cannot travel to all parts of the universe to verify our conclusions are valid everywhere.  We do not have sufficient time and resources to gather all the facts we need to validate our conclusions.  We must agree with Trueblood who states that inductive logic “has no perfect right to its conclusion”. [7]

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[1]   Gopi Krishna, Living with Kundalini (Boston:  Shambhala, 1993), p. 328.

[2]   Carol E. Cleland, “Historical Science, Experimental Science, and the Scientific Method”, Geology, Vol. 29 (November 2001), pp. 987-988.

[3]   Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science (Lancaster, PA:  The Science Press, 1946), p. 96.

[4]   Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London:  Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 71.

[5]   David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London:  Penguin Books, 1969), p. 137.

[6]   Popper, p. 68.

[7]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row:  1963), p. 107.

The past few blogs have concluded that human experiences, both our own experiences and the experiences of others, can provide assistance in our search for what is true.  However, they can also be very misleading.  Isaac Watts explains it succinctly:  “. . .we are deceived by our senses, by our imaginations, by our passions and appetites; by the authority of men, by education and custom.” [1]  Therefore, if we want to find out what is true, we must have more help than can be provided by our experiences.

Another resource we can utilize is our reason and logic.  Using reason and logic does not mean we disregard human experience.  In fact, logic must use experience as Trueblood notes:

A great part of the life of reason lies in the consideration of the fruitful relationship between experience and thought.  The mere experience, though necessary, is never sufficient, for it must be analyzed and developed by a rational process of ordered thinking. [2]

Kant compares thinking to the flight of a bird.  In flight a bird needs air to support its wings just as the wings of our airplanes need air.  In thinking we need experience to support our reasoning. [3]  The role of logic is to assist us in our search for truth by giving us methods of examining what our culture has taught us, where our senses lead us.  It can help us correct our errors. [4]  So let us take our own experiences plus the experiences of others and examine what logic can tell us about how we know what is true.  We will first examine inductive logic and then deductive logic.

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[1]   Isaac Watts, Logic:  The Right use of Reason in the Inquiry after Truth (Morgan, PA:  Soli Delo Gloria Publications, 1996), pp. 2-3.

[2]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row:  1963), p. 70.

[3]   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago:  Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1990), p. 16.

[4]   Watts, 206-209.

As we saw in the last blog, we must have the assistance of other if we are to discover what is true; if we are to discover valid reasons for Christianity.  However, there are dangers in relying on others.  All of us soon realize that we cannot believe all the information presented to us and we often express doubt about what we hear from others.

One of the most difficult aspects of evaluating what is true is being aware of the impact that others, our culture, has had on us.  Because we have unconsciously picked up a belief system from our culture, when those cultural beliefs are challenged it is so easy to automatically assume our beliefs are right.  Schumacher notes the difficulty of questioning such beliefs but asserts that this action is part of our human makeup:

There is nothing more difficult than to become critically aware of the presuppositions of one’s thought. . .A special effort, an effort of self-awareness, is needed:  that almost impossible feat of recoiling upon itself—almost impossible but not quite.  In fact, this is the power that makes man human and also capable of transcending his humanity. [1]

Once we are aware of the presuppositions of our thoughts and of the influence of our culture, our work has just begun because we must now consider if these beliefs are valid.  Which beliefs we decide to critically examine is one of the many choices we make in life.  It is obvious that we cannot examine them all because, first of all, we do not have sufficient time and, secondly, because we need some stability in our lives.  If we constantly reexamined every area of our lives, we would be in a constant state of flux; our lives would be in chaos as we changed our mind on important choices and decisions we need to make.

Once we have decided to examine a particular belief, there is the distinct possibility that belief will be proven wrong.  Erroneous beliefs must be changed and we will spend a considerable amount of time and effort deciding what belief should replace it.  Such a change requires facing many unknowns and that is difficult.

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[1]   E. F. Schumacher,  A Guide for the Perplexed (New York:  Harper & Row, 1977), p. 44.

In the last two blogs, we learned that in our search for what is true, our personal experiences are so limited.  Therefore, we must have assistance from other sources.  One source we can turn to is other humans.  We can verify our observations by comparing them with the observations of others.  Other humans, challenging our perceptions, help to keep us honest.  As Trueblood says, we need others to keep us from leaving reality:

We cannot, without some perverse act of the mind, avoid the conviction that common verifiability is the ultimate criterion of the independence of the known object, the final way of distinguishing between imaginary and real objects. [1]

. .  .we need to devise a multitude of ways of correcting our errors.  This is done chiefly by engaging in a series of efforts, in which we subject individual view to the impact of other views which may bring correction or corroboration. [2]

The benefit of working with others is illustrated in the book The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan.  In it he describes the effect changes in climate had on civilization between 1300 and 1850 but the book also describes other causes, besides the climate, of the famine and disease that killed millions.  The other causes were the lack of knowledge and the lack of coordination among the people of that time.  It was not until humans developed new agricultural methods that increased the yields of crops, imported new crops from other lands, and shared that knowledge with others that most farmers moved beyond substance farming and began to produce a surplus which they could sell.  Methods of transportation were developed and used to move food stocks from country to country which helped eliminate famine when one country’s crops failed.  Governments began to coordinate relief efforts during times of crisis. [3]  Learning from and working with others helps us survive.

Working with others also enables us to move beyond a survival mode to developing technology that allows us to accomplish more than previous generations thought possible.  Our telephones, cars, airplanes, buildings, and all of our modern conveniences did not spring up overnight.  They are the result of scientific discoveries and business ideas that have been centuries in the making as one generation teaches another what they have learned.  If each of us did not learn from others, we would repeat the same experiences and make the same mistakes throughout our life that our ancestors did.  By assimilating the knowledge, values, and norms of our culture, we and our culture advance.

Our existence has been structured so each of us is limited in what we individually can accomplish.  Each of us cannot build our own cars, houses, appliances, and computers.  Each of us cannot grow our own food and make our own clothes along with the equipment necessary to do so.  We simply do not have the time and knowledge to accomplish all these tasks.  This means we must work with others if we want to overcome our limitations.  Our civilization provides the mechanism to accomplish this task of working with others.  Our own selfish interests drive us to participate in a society because our individual lives are greatly improved by doing so.  We are able to enjoy an exceedingly richer life because we work with others.  If we did not, we would be back with the caveman. [4]

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[1]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row, 1963), p. 41.

[2]   David Elton Trueblood, Philosophy of Religion (New York:  Harper & Row, 1957), p. 44.

[3]   Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age (New York:  Basic Books, 2000), pp. 106-112.

[4]   Robert M. Prisig, Lila (New York:  Bantam Books, 1991), p. 255.

Using our personal experiences as a guide to finding truth has its limits.  Our experiences provide us with the raw material of knowledge but, as the philosopher John Locke says, our mind is constantly interpreting what we experience. [1]  Trueblood amplifies what Locke observed by noting what the mind knows is a world of ideas which represents real things but is never identical to real things.  If the ideas were real things, errors in perception would be impossible but that is not the case. [2]  The philosopher David Hume agrees when he states our perceptions are not the same as the external objects we observe. [3]  What we experience is colored by our previous experiences and these previous experiences sometimes distort what we are currently experiencing.  When I was attending college, I was involved in an automobile accident on my way back to school.  What surprised me were the substantially different accounts of the accident given by the various witnesses.  These differing accounts were the result of different previous experiences which colored what was observed and of different visual perspectives of the accident, not a deliberate attempt to distort the truth.

Different perspectives make it more difficult for us humans to determine what is true but in spite of the limitations of our personal experiences, experience has its place.  Trueblood concludes:

We may, and must, go far beyond experience, but unless we use it as a way of touching reality there is nothing to keep us from imagining any kind of dream we like and the dream will be absolutely worthless. [4]

The importance of experience, in contrast to mere argumentation, accounts for the significance which we rightly attach to the famous experiment conducted at Pisa by Galileo (1564-1642).  Instead of merely arguing about falling bodies, Galileo dropped the balls from the top of the leaning tower and thereby changed an intellectual fashion.   Of course it would be naïve to suppose that the dropping of the balls, or any other single experiment, is sufficient to establish a case.  Seeing is not necessarily believing!  There is always the possibility of deceit, of optical illusion, or of the presence of peculiar circumstances which are effective though unrecognized.  But seeing helps! [5]

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[1]   John Locke as quoted by David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row, 1963), p. 35.

[2]   David Elton Trueblood, General Philosophy (New York:  Harper & Row, 1963), p. 35.

[3]   David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London:  Penguin Books, 1969), p. 266.

[4]   Trueblood, p. 70.

[5]   Trueblood, p. 69.

We are starting a discussion on the reasons why we believe in Christianity.  First we will discuss is the role our personal experience plays in our beliefs.

There is something about personal experience that touches our soul in ways other types of knowledge cannot.  The movie “Good Will Hunting” illustrates this by noting we could read every book on art but that would not tell us what it is like to experience the sights and smells of the Sistine Chapel.  We could read every book on war and talk to many war veterans but if we never held our wounded best friend’s head in our arms and watched him gasp his last breath looking to us for help, could we really understand war?  We could read all the books on love but if we had never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, known someone who could level us with her eyes, felt she could rescue us from the depths of hell, could we really understand love?  Could we, by reading Oliver Twist, know what others have experienced as an orphan? [1]

A few years ago, my wife and I received the most terrifying Christmas gift we had ever received—gift certificates to go sky diving.  Before we went, we talked to other people who sky dived.  We watched videos to see what it would be like.  We read articles and books on the subject.  We imagined what it would be like to jump out of an airplane.  But until we actually jumped out of that airplane, we did not truly know what it was like to sky dive.  Personal experience teaches us more than reading a library of books or listening to the experiences of all of our friends.

Since personal experiences have such an influence on us, can we use them as proof of the validity of Christianity?  There are many people who claim that becoming a Christian made major positive changes in their lives.  Surely such experiences demonstrate what Christianity teaches is true.  However, there are several problems with doing so.

The first problem is that it is our natural inclination to accept as true what we experience within our lifetime.  The ability to doubt, to raise questions about the validity of our life experiences is much more difficult.  Daniel T. Gilbert states:

Much recent research converges on a single point—people are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. . .We assume beliefs are under conscious control at all times.  But beliefs can be created merely by passively accepting information without attempting to analyze it. [2]

The same article quotes several philosophers as saying the same.

Aristotle said the ability to doubt is rare, emerging only among cultivated, educated persons. . .Descartes said. . .the mind effortlessly and automatically takes in new ideas, which remain in limbo until verified or rejected by conscious, rational analysis. . .Spinoza argued that to comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true.

The fact that we are predisposed to believe should not be surprising.  If we do not believe what our senses tell us, how can we function in a material world in which we must depend upon our senses?  We do not have the time to sit down and analyze each and every bit of information that strikes our senses.  We can not analyze each sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch that impacts our senses each second, minute, hour, or day.  It would be impossible and so we simply accept (believe) what our senses tell us.  Additionally, we can not question everything we hear or read in one given day.  We could spend the rest of our life verifying the information we gained in a single day.  A better solution is to accept, or at least provisionally accept, the information we accumulate each day.  However, we must also recognize that much of the information we accumulate has the distinct possibility of being in error.  Therefore, utilizing such information to make major changes in our lives requires careful consideration, not just an acceptance of the experiences life has thrown at us.

A second problem with using our personal experiences to prove the validity of Christianity is that if we utilize them to prove Christianity, then Christianity has no validity over any other religion or philosophy.  Someone else’s experiences might convince them to become a Muslim, a Buddhist, or an atheist.  How could a Christian counter such an argument?  A Christian cannot use their experiences as an argument and deny its use to others.

Next week we will continue this discussion of the role personal experience plays in what we believe.

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[1]   Gus Van Sant,  Director. Good Will Hunting.  With Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Minnie Driver.  Miramax Films, 1997.

[2]   B. Bower, “True Believers”, Science News, Vol. 139 (January 5, 1991), p. 14.

I have been reading The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher.  In this book, Fletcher recounts how the people who practiced paganism in Europe during the 4^th to 14^th centuries converted to Christianity.  What is disturbing is that much of the conversion was because rulers were convinced (and this belief was reinforced by the religious leaders) that God gave them victory in battle, gave them material success, or healed them or their people of diseases. [1]  Writings on missionary strategies of that time state that Episcopal wealth, might, and display were necessary to win converts.  Missionaries who were poor had little success in converting the pagan.  The pagan attitude was that if God is as rich and powerful as the Bible describes, then his messengers should not be destitute. [2] The prosperity gospel as we know it today existed as early as the 4^th century.

The problem with the prosperity gospel is the same today as it was in the Middle Ages.   When people no longer had success, many times they reverted back into their pagan ways. [3]  Also, there were many examples in the Middle Ages of kings and peoples who did not convert to Christianity and who continued to enjoy success. [4]  So how can Christians claim God grants success to those who are Christian?  We discussed this issue in greater detail in my blogs titled “Christian Determinism” dated December 6, 2011 and “Empirical Religiosity” dated November 1, 2011.

There were other reasons why people converted to Christianity in the Middle Ages including coercion (a Christian king would conquer an area and force its inhabitants to be convert to Christianity) [5], witnessing a miracle [6], and some were bribed with material wealth [7].  Some converted to Christianity because they were truly convinced it was the right thing to do as the Hungarians who changed from a raiding people to helping others [8].  So why would or should have the rulers or the common people of the Middle Ages converted from paganism to Christianity?  Why should we today believe in Christianity?  That is the topic we will address in the upcoming blogs.

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[1]   Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, New York:  Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1997, pp. 106, 214, 243-245, 405.

[2]   Ibid., pp. 457-458.

[3]   Ibid., p289.

[4]   Ibid., p. 122, 246.

[5]   Ibid., p. 215-216.

[6]   Ibid., p. 405.

[7]   Ibid., p. 444.

[8]   Ibid., p. 433.