Rachel scrolls down the page to the final entry - Reason Number 6 to believe that God exists. It's been quite a journey to get here and Rachel, a true believer with an open mind, has found it a troubling, disturbing experience. She expected to find her faith underpinned, but instead she has found herself wondering whether she might just have been wrong all along. If these are the best reasons that anyone can come up with to believe in God, it's not making her feel any better.
She turns to Reason 6.
6. Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God pursuing us.
The argument here, Rachel discovers, is that as well as doing what lots of other people or Gods have claimed to do through the millennia - healing, feeding, changing the weather, walking on water, etc. etc. - Jesus is the only major religious figure who also claimed to be equal to God, and pointed believers to his own person rather than to his words.
First Rachel sets aside the problem that Jesus is not the only religious figure who has claimed that he was equal to God. She also leaves aside the problem that Jesus is not the only religious figure who claims to have healed people or fed multitudes or changed the weather. She focuses on the question of whether that matters. We have to treat the miracle stories of the historical bible with the same reverence as we treat other mythical historical documents - ie we don't believe them. We don't believe the story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by wolves. We don't believe the story of Achilles being magically protected over his whole body except for his heel. And there are countless other myths and legends involving magical powers that we choose not to believe. Why, Rachel thinks, would I, as a rational, open minded believer, give this evidence more credence than any of the other myths and legends that I have read?
And this is where Rachel's doubts begin. To believe the stories about Jesus are more than myths, she has to believe in Jesus' divine connection. So the stories can't be used as any kind of proof of Jesus' divine nature, because you need to believe in his divine nature before you can believe the story. It's a non-argument.
So Rachel has made it all the way to Number 6 and she is wracked with torment. How is it that the best arguments that can be assembled for belief in God are so bad? A mixture of tautologies, bad logic, misleading comments and nonsense. And this is the best that God can do?
She simply can't believe that an all powerful personal God can have left so little real evidence to help us work out whether or not he exists. Every argument is reduced, ultimately to faith. If God does exist he has forced her to make a terrible, guilt-laden guess, because he has given her nothing, nothing to actually show her that he exists. Why would God do that? Why would he leave every individual turning in the torturing glare of uncertainty, when it would be so easy for him to give each person a sign. Why would he make it so hard? Maybe it's because he doesn't exist at all, which is why there is no single piece of evidence to show that he does.
Well, we'll have to leave Rachel to her awful realization that her belief is built on faith or nothing. What's clear is that the 6 reasons to believe in God are nothing of the sort. Why does it matter? It matters because this kind of garbled, inconsistent, bad logic is being presented to people as if it's meaningful. It's intellectually dishonest, and it leads people to a sense of certainty that is not supported by any evidence, any facts or any coherent reasoning. The people who write this stuff should be ashamed of themselves - either for believing that these arguments make sense, which means they should think harder; or for knowingly misleading people into thinking these are reasonable arguments. Faith, presented in this way, is an assault on reason, and people deserve better.
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