Sunday, July 12, 2020

The Logic of Christianity and Grace

As a professor of physics I will often work with undergraduate students and graduate students who are just learning the process of analyzing complex data from a high energy physics experiment. The students will show me graphs they have made and sometimes, with a relatively brief look at the graphs, I will know that the student has made a mistake somewhere in their analysis. There are a few ways that an obvious mistake may present itself. Some distributions should have a known shape and a major deviation from that expectation indicates a problem. If the results from different plots contradict each other then something must be wrong somewhere. Consistency across different data sets and different parameters is essential for a properly implemented analysis.

As a Christian who wants to know the truth, I have also analyzed the message and worldview of Christianity to see if it is consistent. If Christian doctrine contained actual logical contradictions, that would be an indication that Christianity has problems and is likely not true. Although I sometimes encounter people who think that the message of Christianity is contradictory, I usually find that those people have an incorrect view of the what is actually believed by Christians who are grounded in biblical doctrine.