Summary

There is a false belief within modern Christendom that to have a meaningful relationship, and certainly to have mystery, it must be subjective. The word “faith” from the Bible has been re-engineered to mean an irrational leap into the dark. This belief is held so highly that it forces many rational people out of Christianity.

The point that I have been making is that this is a false choice. I’ve tried to make the case that the objective examination of life not only leads to better outcomes, but because God is rational, we know even more of the mystery of God via rationality. However, our post-Enlightenment Christian culture has become blind to the profound mystery that is within objective nature. No, this is not the Enlightenment’s fault, but it is the fault of the church’s reaction to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment challenged some of the Church’s dogmas, so they rejected objective truth altogether.

The Problem With Miracles

As an evangelical, believing that supra-natural miracles were common, even everyday, was at the core of that experience. I claimed, as did all my evangelical friends, that we often witnessed miracles. For many of us, like the example I gave in my previous post of the theology student, our whole Christian experience was built on seeing miracles. When I committed to seeking factual truth in 1990, I realized I was lying about the miracles I was witnessing. But I wasn’t alone. I have a great suspicion that my friends were, too.

When your Christian culture demands that you see miracles, and real miracles aren’t happening, then you have no choice but to become delusional. Wishful thinking dominates your worldview, rather than rational reality. Over time, you have lost your ability to discern truth.

We are living in a world right now where there is a crisis in discernment, and the greatest crisis is happening within the miracle-believing churches. I know from personal conversations that the “miracles are common” bandwidth of Christianity is awash in baseless conspiracy theories.

I am not a political person. I voted mostly for Republicans, but “evolved” into being an independent. There is no politician or party whom I put on a pillar. I regret that I allowed my MAGA friends and family to define me as political when I spoke out for the truth and against the rampant lies spoken by Donald Trump and now his political followers. Regretably, almost all politicians lie, but Donald Trump has been known his whole life as a pathological liar. Lying is destructive to a religion and to a nation, and we are witnessing the consequences of that.

My point here is that when you look at the graph of Trump supporters based on basic religious or philosophical orientation, you will see that those who emphasize miracles are also those who believe Trump’s lies the most.

Now, to be fair, the loss of critical thinking is not the only factor driving these voters to vote the way they do. The culture war issues were also a big driver. During Trump’s first election in 2016, he used abortion to win the pro-life Christians. I call “prolife” the “gateway drug” into the cult of Trumpism. In 2016, my conservative Christian friends said that they held their noses to vote for him because of his prolife stance. Now, they are up to their eyeballs in believing in Trump, who is the exact antithesis of the historical Biblical Jesus of Galilee. In his 2024 election, he used the hatred of transexual people as his Christian bait.

I will be clear: if miracles were common, and people believed in them because they saw them, that would be different and would not be a problem of discernment or epistemology. However, the problem lies in believing in supra-natural miracles when they are not occurring. When you are forced to believe in lies, you lose your ability to find truth, and that’s the rub.

Peace, Mike