You only believe in one of three things

According to research done by “population expert” (I didn’t know there was such a thing) Pam Wasserman, there are approximately 10,000 different religions active in the world today.

Wasserman says 85% of the world’s population embraces one of those religions, while the rest say they are unaffiliated with any religion or hold atheist beliefs. Most of those are found in China and Japan, although the “nones” are up to 24% in America according to a recent Gallup poll.

With such a bewildering array of faiths available, it can be hard for a person to know what they should believe. If that’s you, take courage, there’s an app for that.

Belief-o-matic will guide you through 20 questions that will tell you exactly what faith you should embrace, given the things you think are spiritually true. On the one hand, that’s great because there’s no more guesswork needed on your part. On the other hand, though, what you think is true might not actually be true.

Whichever of those 10,000 religions you decide to follow, you’ll find they all aim at answering the four big questions of life: origin, morality, meaning, and destiny. And when you begin to look at each religion’s answers to those questions, you’ll find they all collapse down into (pretty much) only three different worldviews: atheism, pantheism, and theism.

If you’re in one of those camps, I’ve got a question I’d like you to think about.  

Yes, atheism is a faith

Maybe you say you’re an atheist? This is the belief that nothing supernatural exists, and it goes by several different names — materialism, naturalism, humanism, atheism — that all mean the same thing. Your metaphysical naturalism preaches that the universe came into existence through natural processes, matter and energy are all that exist, consciousness is a product of the brain, and morality is human-created rather than objectively real.

American historian of science and evolutionary biologist William Provine describes naturalism’s outworkings when he says,

“When Darwin deduced the theory of natural selection to explain the adaptations in which he had previously seen the handiwork of God, he knew that he was committing cultural murder. He understood immediately that if natural selection explained adaptations, and evolution by descent were true, then the argument from design was dead and all that went with it, namely the existence of a personal god, free will, life after death, immutable moral laws, and ultimate meaning in life.”

Ouch. Maybe that’s why philosopher John Paul Sartre said atheism is “A long, hard, cruel business.”

In any event, if you’re an atheist, I’m sure you rage against the idea that naturalism is a faith. But it truly is; biologist George Klein admits it very plainly: “I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith … The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.”

While the atheistic faith has a lot of questions to answer, the biggest in my mind is: How did an impersonal, non-conscious, meaningless, purposeless, and amoral universe accidentally create personal, conscious, moral beings who are obsessed with meaning and purpose?  

Something can’t give what it doesn’t have, so how did that happen?

The illusion of Pantheism

Maybe you hold to one of the various pantheistic faiths and believe you and all reality are divine? You think everything that exists is part of an ultimate spiritual reality, that individual identity is ultimately an illusion, and your life goal is enlightenment — realizing your unity with the divine.

Pantheism is fraught with issues, including evil being difficult to explain if everything is divine, the contradiction found in our everyday experience of being distinct persons making meaningful choices, and moral responsibility becoming unclear (pantheists will typically affirm, for example, that cruelty and non-cruelty are the same thing in the end). This is why G. K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy: “There is no real possibility of getting out of pantheism any special impulse to moral action.”

My question, though, centers on the self-defeating nature of pantheism. If pantheism asserts that my individuality is an illusion, since my mind is part of that illusion, how can it be true, since there is no basis for explaining the illusion? Now there’s a mind bender.  

The big question that settles the theism debate

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a theist. You believe a personal God exists, who created the universe and is distinct from creation yet involved with it. You say that the universe was intentionally formed, we are made in the image of God, moral values reflect God’s character, and history has a purpose and direction.

The three big theistic faiths — Judaism, Islam, and Christianity — differ in a variety of ways, but the one that stands out above all the rest has to do with who that Jewish carpenter from Nazareth really was.

Judaism jettisons the idea that Jesus is divine and is alive, with many Jewish teachers rejecting Him as Messiah for 5 basic reasons: He didn’t rebuild the Temple; didn’t bring about world peace; didn’t gather all Jews back to Israel; didn’t establish universal knowledge about God; and didn’t fully observe all of the Jewish law (like the dietary restrictions). 

Islam has a high view of Jesus, but denies He is God and claims He didn’t die on the cross and that He wasn’t resurrected.

Both Judaism’s and Islam’s key commonalities are those two denials of Jesus — His divinity and resurrection. And Scripture says that Jesus’ divine nature was confirmed by His resurrection when He “was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 1:4). So, things really come down to whether His grave is empty or not. 

That being the case, the key question Christians must answer is: Why believe Christ rose from the dead? If He didn’t, then as Paul said, we are of all people “most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 5:19).

I’ve studied the subject for a long time and think there are good reasons to believe Christ conquered the grave. If you need convincing about that, see this short article I wrote on the subject that simplifies the thought process.

The reason this is important is that, in the end, everything really does become clear if Christ’s tomb is empty. Atheism’s claim that the universe is ultimately meaningless collapses under the weight of a risen Savior who stepped into history. Pantheism’s claim that individuality is an illusion dissolves in the face of a God who became a particular man in a particular place at a particular moment in time. And the competing claims of Judaism and Islam about Jesus must be reconsidered if the One they both acknowledge actually walked out of His grave three days after His execution.

The thousands of religions in the world shrink down to a single historical question: what happened to Jesus of Nazareth after He was crucified? If His body still lies somewhere in the dust of Judea, Christianity is finished, skeptics are right, and some other worldview is true. But if the tomb was empty and He truly rose, then atheism, pantheism, and every rival faith must answer to the same unavoidable conclusion: the world does not belong to blind forces or an impersonal divine essence. It belongs to the risen Christ.