This essay is an attempt to look at why I have faith in Christ.
First, I'd like to look briefly at what is meant by "faith", since
some people have a rather different concept of it than I do.

I have a problem with "faith" as some sort of independent source of
information: "Take it on faith..." To me faith has two meanings, both
of which refer to the manner in which we hold onto belief in
something, but not to the source of that belief.  One meaning is
commitment.  Belief in God is different from faith in God.  As it is
said "Satan believes, but trembles".  Faith in God has in addition to
the implication that we think he exists the implication that we trust
him and have committed ourselves to him.

The other meaning of faith for me is holding to a belief in the face
of intellectural or emotional attacks (discouragement or apparent
evidence against).  However this is a virtue only up to a point.  I
may have faith in a friend's innocence even when there is very
damaging evidence against him.  The willingness to trust is an
important property of a friend.  But if the person isn't innocent,
eventually one is called on to accept the truth.  This sort of faith
is important even in science, or no scientist would be able to persist
in his efforts to make sense out of an often apparently perverse
nature.  But let me say again: there must be some reason to have
accepted the belief in the first place, and an openness to consider
alternatives.  We want to avoid abandoning things due to
discouragement, but we *should* abandon them due to sufficient
contrary evidence.  I take this as the sense in which faith is used in
the famous Heb. 11.  It is having confidence in things that aren't
immediately visible.  But I don't think the faith talked about there
comes out of thin air.  The things may not be immediately visible,
but there has to be some reason to believe in them.

I've been reluctant to say much in this area, because deciding how one
justifies beliefs is what epistemology is about.  This is really an
area in which philosophers should be speaking, and I am far from a
competent philosopher.  My expertise (still at an amateur level, of
course) is in the areas of Christian doctrine and Biblical studies,
not philosophy of religion.  However I can't completely avoid the
question of where faith comes from.

As for how religious beliefs happen initially, I am not convinced it
is different from the way other beliefs occur.  I see it as basically
an issue of perception and concept building.  The human mind is very
good at building descriptions to characterize sensory inputs.  This
happens at every level, from seeing a pattern of light as an object to
seeing a pattern of behavior as indicating the a person loves us.

Most of this process is rather ill-controlled.  In "lower level"
areas, there isn't so much ambiguity: generally people all agree on
what objects are in a room.  However in more abstract areas, there is.
E.g.  in the area of personal relations people may see the same things
but come to very different conclusions about what it indicates.  Much
human tragedy comes from this.  Science, it seems to me, is a set of
procedures and tools that formalize the processes of observation and
perception.  It allows us to get better agreement among people, and
allows us to see patterns we couldn't see otherwise.

I think science is a great thing.  I'd be happy to see ways to sharpen
our powers to form concepts in other areas.  But in many areas of life
we still depend upon more informal mechanisms.  Religion typically
involves such areas.  (However I welcome cases where we can get input
from more objective techniques.)  As in interpersonal relationships
and other areas, we may see the same evidence, but come to different
conclusions on what is behind it.  Until we find a way to formalize
perception in this area, I don't know of any way to prove to someone
that my perception is right and his is wrong.

When I see God and a spiritual world behind what is going on, it may
be that I am seeing patterns that are not there: the human mind may be
such a powerful tool for building concepts that it builds them even
when it shouldn't.  I can only attempt to do such reality checks as I
can, and proceed on the basis of reality as I see it.  Dealing with
people who don't see it is interesting.  It's unlikely that proofs are
going to help.  If somebody didn't believe in love, I probably
couldn't prove that it exists.  About all I can do is what I'd do in
any case where somebody doesn't see some sort of thing that I see: try
to find a clearer example, keep pointing them to different examples,
etc.

But in the case of religion, although I don't expect any real proofs,
it should be possible to do a reasonable amount of reality checking.
Religion has widespread effects on the way we see life and human
relationships.  We may not be able to do a single decisive experiment,
as in science (though in fact there are cases in which this model
oversimplifies the way science operates -- current philosophy of
science takes a somewhat more flexible view of theory formation.  A
classic example is conservation of energy.  That's as hard to falsify
by a single experiment as belief in God.  Whenever experiments come
out wrong, we invent a new kind of energy, which may not be directly
observable.) Yet as we use a point of view to understand our lives and
the world around us, we should be able to get a feeling for how well
things fit.  This is why issues such as the problem of suffering are
so important.  If we can't account for both the good and bad aspects
of life, eventually we should start looking for another point of view.

So much for general principles, now let's look at why specifically I
believe in Christianity.  I'm going to suggest two major things that
influence me (other than the way I was brought up, which is surely a
critical part): Scripture and Christian experience.
 
1) Scripture.  I'm not going to describe completely my opinions of the
historicity of Scripture here.  I have another essay that does that in
more detail.  In some sense that other essay may be the most critical.
Christianity claims to be a revealed religion.  That is, we believe
that the only way to come to know about God is for him to reveal
himself to us.  At least for Protestants, the events reported in the
Bible are the key revelations.  While we may see God working in our
own lives, our interpretative models come from Scripture.  We would
certainly never think of Christ being with us if we didn't have the NT
to tell us about Christ, barring very unusual individual revelation.
(This is obviously a Protestant view.  Catholics would add the Church
and its tradition as a source of revelation.)  This means that our
view of the plausibility of the Biblical accounts is really critical
to our evaluation of Christianity.  But as you'll see, I think
plausibility is about all one can ask for.  Final decisions about
whether an event really happened depend a lot on judgement, and I
claim judgement in this case comes down to deciding whether what is
claimed in the Bible fits with our experience with the way the world
is.

Briefly, I am not a fundamentalist.  But I do believe the OT gives a
reasonably good account of the history and religion of the Jewish
people, that the Gospels give a reasonable account of what witnesses
would have told someone a few decades later who asked, and that Paul's
letters show us what one of the most influential early Christian
leaders thought a few decades after Jesus' death.  I think the Bible
is what you'd expect to find if God really did reveal himself in the
events as reported.

The problem however is sort of a "signal to noise ratio" problem.
Human history is full of accounts of wonderous things, from vampires
to flying saucers.  All with apparently credible witnesses.  So people
want something more than credible witnesses.  Unfortunately it's hard
to see what that could be.  Fundamentalism comes from an attempt to
say that the witnesses are not just humanly credible, but inerrant.
But I don't see any way to establish such a thing, even if it were
true.  So I think reasonably credible testimony is about all one can
hope for as far as historical evidence, and I think the Bible is that.
But in the end one's evaluation is going to be based on whether you
think the revelation that is supposely reported in the Bible really
looks like it comes from a source that understands what humanity is
and is supposed to be, a power beyond humanity that cares, trying to
help us.

I believe the answer is yes.  Others see in the OT a barbaric God.  I
see barbarism, and people attributed it to God.  But that is the
starting point, not the end.  In the Law and Prophets I see an attempt
to form a society based on justice and compassion, and to call the
nation back when it moves into corruption and power politics.  In the
NT I see this moving one final step, into a relationship of love and
caring for each other and God.  As in the OT, the insights are not
perfect.  Paul's comments on homosexuality and women are no longer
helpful.  But his vision of a community built on love that goes beyond
law is the same as Jesus'.

So you ask, yes, this is all very edifying, but couldn't it be just
human good ideas, which in these primitive times were attributed to
the gods?  We're now in that ambiguous area of personal judgement
where I can't claim to prove anything.  But I see a consistent pattern
in the advances, from the laws in Ex and Deut, to the prophets, to
Jesus.  I see a single hand at work.  The advances all seem obvious
after the fact, but I do not think they were beforehand.  But
ultimately this is an issue of perception, and if you don't see things
this way there may not be much I can do.

Note by the way that Jesus is hard to see as simply a teacher of good
morals.  His message is primarily about the reign of God.  If you try
to moralize it, you have to ignore a large part of what he was saying.

2) Christian experience.  I have two things to report here.  First,
the people whose lives I admire report that their lives are based on
God.  I am impressed with the balance and spiritual wisdom of
dedicated Christians.  (This also applies to some non-Christians.  I
have never seen why Christians feel it necessary to reject others'
contact with God.)  Second, my own life works better when I pray.  I
am not going to tell you that I hear voices and see visions.  I will
say that when I allow myself to fall out of the habit of regular
prayer, I find my life falling into a rut, in which I am not as useful
either to myself or others.  As with so many other things, these
reports are open to multiple interpretations.  Spiritual discipline
may be good even if it is based on an illusion.  The spiritual power
that people think comes from outside may be a basic human capability
that spiritual practices tap into.  All I can do is report the way
things seem to me and to others that I admire.

I would also say that I see a spiritual dimension to what goes on
around me.  As someone who is very involved in technical matters, it
is very easy to move into a world where humanity almost disappears.
Even in the "real world", what is often most visible is politics,
economics, advances in technology, etc.  But when you look at what
matters in people's lives, you see a human dimension that is quite
independent of these other things.  This is the world of love, hate,
of people struggling to make sense of their lives.  Now Christianity
certainly does not have a monopoly on this world.  Other religions
also focus on spiritual reality, and non-religious philosophy tries to
deal with it as well.  But Christianity at least seems to me to orient
me towards living in this world, both in the sense of pointing me to
it, and of providing the spiritual tools to deal with it.

One thing that bothers a lot of people is the number of different
religions.  As I commented above, I am not one of these Christians
that feels it necessary to show that every other religion comes from
Satan.  I think there is something to admire in many of them, and I
believe people of many religions are in contact with God.  However I
see in Christianity a balance among law, grace, and ritual that I do
not see elsewhere.  What Christians claim is that in Jesus, we have
both authoritative teaching by someone who understand what God is
really about, and a life that is in itself an acting out of God's
message.  It is no denigration of founders such as Mohammed and Buddha
to say that while they may have had a message from God, we do not have
in their lives the sort of "medium is the message" aspect that we have
in Christ -- in short, they did not die for us, nor did they claim to.
There are of course figures who play a somewhat analogous role in the
Greek mystery cults, but those figures do not look very much like
historical figures.  They look like symbolic representations of
archetypes.

Part of the issue is simply the specific message in the various
religions.  Although all religions may have some real insights, what
they say is not identical.  Most religions seem to be about some
combination of good principles for living and ways for us to reach
religious insights.  (Judaism and Islam tend to emphasize instructions
on how we should live.  The Eastern religions tend to emphasize
techniques for reaching insight.)  These are all well and good (though
there are certainly details I don't agree with), but what Christianity
claims to offer is rather more ambitious -- God's plan for redeeming
humanity.  This plan does not exclude either ethical instruction or
spiritual discipline.  But it provides the context in which
instruction and discipline should be placed if you want the full
picture.  

Without this full picture, the religions that do the best job of
ethics (Judaism and Islam) tend to leave us on our own to obey God or
not.  Christians say that we are not alone, that God loves us and has
taken action to save us.  Now of course the mystery cults also had the
concept of divine saviors, but there it is some combination of myth
and philosophical speculation.  What Jesus does is provide us with a
more solid foundation: a person who in historical times taught, and
whose teachings we have (more or less -- I'm not a fundamentalist -- I
don't claim we have them verbatim, but I think we have a pretty good
account), and whose actions showed us God in many ways more clearly
than his words.  

So to me Christianity doesn't so much disprove other religions as it
completes them.  To the ethical religions it adds an insight into
God's love for us and his plan to redeem us; to the mystical religions
it provides a solid foundation for the idea of redemption, and
supplements it with a basis for ethics.

This message is intended for use in response to several different
kinds of question.  Most commonly, someone has asked how I justify
being a Christian, more or less as an intellectual issue.  I've tried
to answer that above.  But sometimes someone has a bit more personal
question: they have at least some inkling that they might be
interested, but they want to know how to proceed.

I know some of my more conservative colleagues would end this message
with an "altar call": if you are in this position, get down on your
knees right now and pray to God, and he will surely answer you.
That's not necessarily bad advice, but it depends upon what you expect
as an answer.  The problem is that God's answer seldom comes in the
form of the skies opening up (at least not for me).  I've already
described the ways I see God.  My impression is that people typically
come to understand him (at least in a Christian way -- I'm not trying
to speak for other religions) after exposure to other Christians.
Their experience with the Christian community in whatever form --
whether through regular worship or simply knowing someone -- leads
them to start seeing God as active in the world and/or their lives.
At that point they are prepared to make some sort of commitment.  If
there's nothing about the Christian community that attracts you to get
involved in the first place, then of course it's going to be hard for
this process to happen. (Providing that initial reason is our job in
evangelism.)  I guess what I'm saying is that I doubt most people get
involved in Christianity due to a single miraculous vision -- more
often something about it attracts them, and they are led in over time
in a sort of progressive fashion.  This allows the more subtle sorts
of perception that I tried to describe above to happen.

------------
As to your response:

If I understand what you're saying most of us don't expect guidance
"from the spirit world" on all decisions.  At some point you get into
differences among Christians.  I'm an anti-legalist, and as such some
Christians don't even think I'm a Christian.  But I don't think very
many of us expect to get voices in our heads telling us what to do.
Rather, the feedback is a somewhat longer-term thing.  Christians are
supposed to have an active prayer life.  What this means is that on a
regular basis, they pray about what they are doing.  What I expect to
happen is that my overall goals and thought processes will be brought
into line with God's will, not that I'll get direct answers.

There are of course two views of this.  One is that God isn't there,
and so it's not surprising that I don't get direct answers.  The other
is that God isn't interested in dictating to people, because his goal
is development of Christian character, not creation of slaves.  After
all, if he wanted to dictate to people, we'd have a very different
religion: why shouldn't he send lightning bolts on people who do
things that displease him?  When a gap develops between us and him,
why should he send his son to die, rather than taking rather more
direct and unambiguous action?  The whole difficulty with
Christianity, and the reason why there's no clear answer to the
agnostic, is that God -- assuming that he exists -- has chosen to work
rather indirectly.  You can see this even in Jesus.  Christians have
already been frustrated that he didn't simply prescribe official
doctrine.  Instead he taught in parables, which invite people to
respond to them personally, but are terrible as an unambiguous source
of doctrine.  My conclusion is that God values personal growth above
doctrinal conformity.

I've given some thought to what prayer is, and I'm still not sure I
know the answer.  It is at the very least putting myself into a state
of receptivity to God.  But do I receive information from him in some
supernatural fashion?  I think most Christians assume this is what is
supposed to happen.  I simply don't know.  The insights I have gotten
could all be explained by reflecting on my life in the context of what
Jesus taught, as we come to know him through the Bible.  There are
certainly mystics who claim to get more direct input.  I'm afraid that
I just can't comment on their experiences.  For me, the Bible is
critical because Christianity is basically about following Jesus,
becoming his disciple, and the Bible is the way we get to know him.  I
think there's something else going on as well, that somehow God speaks
to me through the Bible, but I surely can't prove to anyone that
there's supernatural information going on.

I agree with your assessment of the negative features of religion.  I
don't want you to take my comments as a defense, because I see no
reason to defend the Church when it does what is wrong.  But it's hard
to see any connection between Jesus and bigotry, sexism, wars, and
censorship.  Any church I would have a connection with does its best
to fight such things, though I have to say that in the area of
supporting homosexuals we're still fighting about it internally.  I am
reluctant to say anything against Catholicism publically, because
there are many fine Catholics with the same goals that I have.  Father
Andrew Greeley is one of my favorite authors.  However it's not so
obvious to me that the Catholic Church as an institution has given up
all of the things you correctly complain about.  To the extent that
they have not, I believe they are failing to follow Christ.