After the Steelman

The Christianity I am rejecting

It would be pleasantly easy to reject Christianity by selecting its most embarrassing representatives. There is no shortage of people who think Genesis is a geology textbook, who mistake incredulity for an argument against evolution, or who imagine that repeating "the Bible says" somehow establishes that the Bible speaks for God. Refuting them may be entertaining, but it tells us little about Christianity at its strongest.

I am interested in the version capable of surviving serious contact with philosophy, history and science. Its God is not a large invisible person occupying a remote part of the universe. God is the necessary ground of contingent being, the source of intelligibility, value and rational order. Divine action need not compete with natural causation, because God is said to sustain the entire causal order rather than occasionally shove objects around within it.

This Christianity accepts an ancient universe, common descent, critical biblical scholarship and the literary diversity of Scripture. It does not need six literal days, a global flood or a young Earth. It knows that the Bible is a library produced across centuries, not a monograph dictated in a single accent. It can distinguish mythic, poetic, theological and historical modes of writing without assuming that "not literal" means "false".

Its account of Christ is Trinitarian and incarnational. The cross is not an unwilling Son being punished by an irritable Father. God is in Christ, voluntarily entering the consequences of human estrangement, defeating death, exposing violence, restoring human nature and opening creation to reconciliation. Its case for the Resurrection rests not upon a vacant appeal to Scripture, but upon the early emergence of resurrection belief, the experiences reported by disciples, the transformation of the movement and the Jewish context in which those claims arose.

It also possesses serious answers to evil and hiddenness. A stable, law-governed world permits agency. Freedom makes love possible. Moral and spiritual development require difficulty, uncertainty and genuine consequence. God may preserve enough epistemic distance to prevent bare awareness of divine power from overwhelming human response. Our cognitive limitations warn against assuming that we can see every reason available to an omniscient mind.

This is not a contemptible worldview. It has metaphysical depth, moral resources, considerable explanatory reach and an intellectual tradition populated by minds far better than those ordinarily encountered beneath a Facebook meme.

I still find it unlikely to be true.

That case deserves an answer better than "religion is silly". My answer is that its stages do not support one another as strongly as Christians suppose, its specific claims are dramatically less secure than its general metaphysics, and several large features of reality are more expected if Christianity is false. No one point settles the matter. Their convergence does.

The distance from a necessary being to Christianity

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a cosmological argument succeeds. Contingent reality has an explanation in some necessary reality. Suppose further that the universe's intelligibility, mathematical order or life-permitting conditions favour mind over brute fact. I would not thereby have reached Christianity. I would have reached, at most, an exceedingly abstract metaphysical source.

There is quite a lot of theological furniture between a necessary ground of being and the God proclaimed in the Nicene Creed.

The source must be personal rather than impersonal, knowledgeable rather than merely rationally structured, perfectly good rather than morally indifferent, providentially active rather than deistic, triune rather than unitarian, and specially concerned with a species of recently evolved primate. It must have disclosed itself through ancient Israel, become incarnate in a first-century Jew, raised that man from death, and made his life and execution decisive for the destiny of creation. It must also stand behind some recognisable body of scriptural and ecclesial tradition.

These are not minor deductions from the proposition that contingent things require a ground. They are additional claims, each requiring additional evidence. Natural theology may prepare a conceptual space in which Christianity could be true. It does not furnish that space.

The same limitation applies to arguments from consciousness, morality and fine-tuning. Even if they count against reductive materialism, they do not uniquely favour Christianity. A cosmic mind, axiarchic principle, idealism, panentheism, deism and numerous non-Christian theisms remain available. To move from "reality may have a mental or purposive foundation" to "Jesus is the incarnate second person of the Trinity" is not a small evidential step. It is a ravine.

Natural theology may make God discussable. It does not make Christianity probable.

This matters because Christian apologetics often distributes the evidential burden unevenly. A philosophical argument is used to establish a broad theism. Christianity is then introduced as though it were merely the proper name of the conclusion. But the distinctive content of Christianity comes from alleged special revelation, not from the cosmological argument. That revelation must bear its own weight.

What kind of world should Christianity lead me to expect?

A theory should do more than remain logically compatible with the evidence. It should make some features of the evidence less surprising than they would otherwise be. This distinction is elementary and frequently neglected.

In probabilistic terms, an observation supports Christianity over a rival only when that observation is more to be expected if Christianity is true. I do not need to assign theatrical percentages to ancient miracles or divine intentions. The comparative question is enough. Explaining why some awkward fact could occur in a Christian world establishes consistency. It does not establish that the fact confirms Christianity.

Christianity can be reconciled with an immense and ancient universe. An infinite God need not be economical with space, and physical size does not determine moral value. The fact that humanity occupies no privileged geographical centre does not entail that it lacks significance to God. I do not regard the scale of the cosmos as a simple disproof of Christianity.

Yet scale changes the prior shape of the story. For nearly fourteen billion years, the universe expanded, cooled, formed stars and destroyed them. Life on Earth arose late. Almost every species that has existed disappeared before humans arrived. Our entire history occupies a microscopic interval on one planet around one ordinary star, in one galaxy among numbers beyond any ordinary human scale. Christianity asks me to believe that the creator of this entire order made the moral drama of Homo sapiens so central that God entered our species, in one province of one empire, and arranged the reconciliation of creation around a Roman execution.

That is possible. Possibility is inexpensive.

The Christian may reply that divine love attends the small, that incarnation dignifies material creation, and that an infinite intelligence can care for every creature without strain. I grant all of it. The objection is not that God lacks sufficient attention. It is that the revealed story looks remarkably like the enlargement of local human concerns into a universal drama. Christianity relinquished geographical centrality only to retain narrative centrality.

There might be excellent divine reasons for doing this. But if the universe were indifferent to us, if consciousness were a late and local accident, and if religions were human attempts to interpret mortality and order, the world would look much as it does: vast, old, mostly lethal, silent and without a discernible preference for our theological expectations.

Under Christianity, the same observations require an accumulating commentary. Immensity displays glory. Waste is fecundity. extinction belongs to a good creation. Silence preserves freedom. ambiguity invites faith. suffering forms souls. The commentary may be coherent, but it is too often supplied after the fact. What looks like indifference under naturalism is redescribed as a subtle form of care under theism.

A worldview does not gain probability merely by possessing enough interpretative ingenuity to absorb whatever occurs.

The silence of a personal God

Divine hiddenness troubles me more than the familiar demand for a spectacular miracle. Christianity does not merely propose an inaccessible metaphysical ground. It proposes a personal God who loves human beings, desires their reconciliation, responds to seekers and has acted in history to make himself known.

J. L. Schellenberg gives the modern argument its most influential form. If a perfectly loving God exists, there should be no capable, nonresistant person who remains unaware that this God exists and is open to relationship. Yet nonresistant nonbelief appears to exist. The force of the argument lies not in divine shyness as such, but in the tension between hiddenness and perfect personal love.

There are people who are capable of relationship with God, who are not resisting God, and who nevertheless cannot honestly believe that God exists. I count myself among them. I do not reject Christianity because I wish to escape moral scrutiny, preserve a cherished sin or enthrone myself as a substitute deity. I simply do not find the evidence sufficient. An omniscient God would know the difference between rebellion and nonbelief.

Freedom does not explain this. Knowing that another person exists does not compel me to love them. The disciples, Satan and any number of biblical characters are depicted as possessing more direct awareness of God than I do without losing the power to refuse. A relationship cannot be protected by concealing one of its participants beyond reasonable recognition.

Nor is belief ordinarily a voluntary switch. I can choose what to investigate, what arguments to read and what communities to encounter. I cannot decide that the evidence convinces me when it does not. Commanding belief under threat of spiritual consequence would be peculiar enough. Withholding the evidence required for belief and then treating disbelief as culpable would be worse.

The most sophisticated response appeals to epistemic distance. Perhaps overwhelming disclosure would distort human motives, reducing love to submission before irresistible power. Yet the present distribution of evidence is not merely restrained. It is geographically, historically and psychologically uneven. Religious conviction correlates conspicuously with upbringing and culture. Some report an unmistakable divine presence; others seek for decades and encounter their own thoughts returning from the ceiling.

A God interested in freely reciprocated relationship could provide clear awareness without moral coercion. We manage this elementary distinction in every ordinary human relationship. I know that my friends exist; I remain entirely free to neglect them.

Sceptical theism says that a finite mind should not expect to understand God's reasons. As a caution against intellectual arrogance, this is sound. As a general defence, it corrodes more than it protects. If my inability to discern a good reason for hiddenness has little evidential force because divine reasons exceed my understanding, then my apparent recognition of providence, goodness or revelation should be treated with the same caution. The distance between human and divine judgement cannot be selectively enlarged whenever the evidence becomes awkward.

Mystery may contain an answer. It does not count as evidence that an answer is there.

Suffering and providence

The logical problem of evil is not the strongest form of the objection. I do not claim that the existence of any suffering is formally incompatible with an omnipotent and perfectly good God. Freedom can justify the possibility of some moral evil. Stable natural regularities make action, responsibility and science possible. Courage, compassion and endurance arise only in a world containing danger and loss.

The question is not whether Christianity can explain some suffering. It is whether the amount, distribution and apparent pointlessness of suffering are what I should reasonably expect from perfect providence.

Human freedom does not explain the long prehuman history of predation, parasitism, starvation and extinction. Soul-making does not explain the infant whose life consists principally of pain, the animal consumed alive over hours, or the civilisation erased by disease before its people could learn whatever lesson was supposedly on offer. Natural law explains how such events occur. It does not explain why an omnipotent goodness chose, sustains or declines to amend a system so prodigal in agony.

One may say that every apparently gratuitous evil contributes to goods beyond our sight. That remains possible. But it is precisely what is in question. We would not acquit a human guardian merely because an invisible justification might exist. The worse the observable record becomes, the more work is transferred to undisclosed reasons.

The incarnation supplies a more moving Christian response. God does not observe suffering from a celestial balcony. In Christ, God enters pain, abandonment and death. This may answer the charge that Christianity's God is emotionally remote. It does not answer the charge that providence permits apparently needless suffering. A ruler who joins victims beneath the rubble may show solidarity; if he could effortlessly have prevented the building's collapse, solidarity is not a sufficient defence.

Appeals to an afterlife can compensate sufferers, but compensation is not justification. Restoring what was lost does not retroactively make an avoidable horror necessary. A child cured after torture has still been tortured.

Again, none of this proves that God has no morally sufficient reasons. It affects probability. Extensive, indiscriminate and apparently purposeless suffering is unsurprising in a world generated by indifferent natural processes. It is more surprising in a world continuously upheld by limitless knowledge, power and love.

Revelation through the bottleneck of history

The distinctive claims of Christianity depend upon history. This is often presented as a strength. Christianity is not merely a set of timeless abstractions; it says that God acted publicly in particular lives, places and events. Historical claims can, in principle, encounter evidence.

They also inherit the limitations of historical evidence.

The Bible is a rich, composite literature. Its plurality is part of its interest. It preserves different genres, theological tendencies, moral visions and accounts of Israel's relation to God. The New Testament contains genuine early testimony and brings us closer to its originating movement than many surviving ancient sources bring us to theirs.

But "impressive for ancient history" and "adequate to establish a unique divine revelation" are different standards.

Texts were selected, copied, transmitted, interpreted and canonised through human institutions. The Gospels are theological narratives, written within believing communities, not disinterested transcripts. They disagree in detail and emphasis, and their relationship to one another complicates simple claims of independent corroboration. The earliest Christian writings already interpret Jesus through theological commitments rather than providing unmediated access to events.

None of this makes them worthless or dishonest. It makes them ancient religious sources. Historians can responsibly infer that Jesus existed, preached, attracted followers and was crucified. They can infer that some followers soon believed he had been raised and that experiences understood as appearances played a major role. History becomes less secure when asked to identify the cause as an act of God that overturned death.

If an omniscient God intended a universal and salvifically important revelation, the chosen means is curious. The message arrives through disputed texts in ancient languages, conditioned by cultures remote from most of humanity, followed by centuries of disagreement over canon, doctrine, authority and interpretation. Entire populations lived and died beyond its reach. Later readers inherit not the event, but traditions about the event, embedded within institutions that disagree about what the event means.

Christians can explain this through divine accommodation. Revelation enters history as history, respecting human language, culture and freedom. A perfectly polished text dropped from the sky would bypass rather than redeem human processes. There is theological elegance here.

There is also a cost. The more thoroughly revelation resembles an ordinary human product, the less confidently its human texture can be cited as the chosen signature of God. Accommodation can explain any degree of ambiguity, development and error short of total disappearance. It therefore predicts very little about where the human ends and the divine begins.

The Resurrection and the weight placed upon testimony

The Resurrection is where Christianity properly risks falsity. Paul understood the point: without it, Christian proclamation collapses. A Christianity reduced to the moral influence of Jesus may remain admirable, but it is no longer the faith's central historical claim.

The strongest historical case should be granted what it establishes. Jesus was crucified. His followers came to believe very early that he had been raised. Paul preserves a tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that predates the letter and names appearances to individuals and groups. Paul himself was transformed by an experience he interpreted as an appearance of the risen Christ. Something requires explanation.

Yet the proposition requiring explanation is not initially "a corpse returned to transformed life". It is "a religious movement came to believe that a corpse returned to transformed life". Those claims are not identical.

Bereavement experiences, visionary experiences, scriptural reinterpretation, cognitive dissonance, memory development, group reinforcement and legendary elaboration are all well-attested human phenomena. No single one needs to provide a neat modern reconstruction of Easter morning. Ancient evidence frequently underdetermines the detailed sequence of events. The question is whether a supernatural resurrection is sufficiently probable before examining the testimony, and sufficiently well established by the testimony, to outrank combinations of processes already known to occur.

Apologists often object that natural explanations are speculative. They are. So is the reconstruction of a unique divine miracle from partisan ancient sources. The choice is not between a perfectly documented natural account and the bare facts of resurrection. It is between underdetermined historical explanations, one family involving familiar human processes and the other requiring an unprecedented suspension or transformation of death by the God whose existence and intentions are also disputed.

Early testimony matters. Sincere conviction matters. Neither is a solvent that dissolves prior improbability. Other religions and movements also produce early, costly and transformative testimony. I do not accept their supernatural explanations merely because ordinary historical reconstruction leaves residues of uncertainty.

If Christianity were independently well established, the Easter evidence might confirm it. If the Resurrection were established by exceptionally strong evidence, it might establish Christianity. In practice, each is commonly used to support the other. God makes the Resurrection plausible; the Resurrection proves God acted in Christ. The resulting circle can be widened into a cumulative case, but it does not vanish.

I therefore regard the evidence as good evidence for early resurrection belief. I do not regard it as good enough evidence that a resurrection occurred.

Doctrinal clarity after doctrinal reconstruction

Christian doctrine did not arrive as a finished systematic theology. The Trinity, the relation of Christ's humanity and divinity, the canon of Scripture, the nature of grace and the mechanics of salvation were articulated through prolonged controversy. This does not by itself discredit Christianity. Ideas develop because communities encounter new questions and need greater conceptual precision.

Nor is the Trinity simply the childish contradiction that one equals three. Classical doctrine says that God is one in being and three in person, not one and three in the same respect. Whether the distinction is finally intelligible is another matter, but careless arithmetic does not refute it.

The difficulty is evidential. The more essential a doctrine is said to be, the stranger it is that revelation leaves the doctrine dependent upon later technical reconstruction. Scripture supplies the materials from which Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy was built, but it did not prevent intelligent, devout readers from building rival structures from the same materials.

Orthodoxy can tell a coherent retrospective story: the Spirit guided the Church towards a fuller understanding implicit from the beginning. Rival traditions can tell structurally similar stories about their own development. Once historical victory becomes evidence of providential guidance, success risks certifying itself.

The steelmanned Christian will not pretend that every doctrine is obvious. Mystery is expected when finite minds speak about infinite reality. Fair enough. But mystery and explanatory achievement pull in opposite directions. A doctrine cannot simultaneously be beyond our conceptual grasp when challenged and a lucid explanation of reality when advertised.

I do not reject Christianity because the Trinity is difficult. I lower my confidence because a supposedly universal disclosure of God's identity produces precisely the ambiguity, faction and retrospective system-building expected from human religious history.

The moral architecture of the cross

A steelman must not identify all Christianity with crude penal substitution. The Christian tradition contains satisfaction, ransom, recapitulation, participation, moral influence, Christus Victor, Girardian and other accounts of atonement. Several avoid the claim that the Father punished an innocent third party instead of the guilty.

The strongest incarnational reply is that God does not outsource the cost of forgiveness. In Christ, God bears it. Father and Son are not rival beings; the self-giving is divine, voluntary and internal to the life of the Trinity. Participatory accounts add that Christ is not merely an unrelated substitute. He assumes human nature, enters death and heals humanity from within. Christus Victor depicts the cross and Resurrection as God's defeat of sin, death and oppressive powers rather than the satisfaction of retributive anger.

These are morally superior to the celestial whipping-boy model. Some escape the specific injustice of transferred punishment altogether. That should be said plainly.

They leave a deeper question. Why must the reconciliation of an omnipotent God and finite creatures be organised around an execution?

If God could forgive without the cross, then the cross is not required by justice. It may reveal love, expose violence, express solidarity or transform those who contemplate it, but its necessity becomes unclear. An omnipotent deity has no shortage of less sanguinary means of communication.

If God could not forgive without the cross, then something about divine nature or moral order requires suffering before mercy can operate. Saying that God bears the suffering himself changes who pays; it does not explain why payment is needed. A creditor who wounds himself before cancelling my debt is more generous than one who wounds a stranger, but the injury remains irrelevant to the debt.

Recapitulation and participation offer a more promising route. Christ need not be punished; God enters the mortal condition in order to heal and transform it. Yet the more successfully these theories abandon substitutionary punishment, the less they explain the persistent scriptural and liturgical language of sacrifice, blood, debt and dying "for our sins". The theology improves morally as it moves away from some of Christianity's most familiar formulations.

I do not claim that every possible Christian account of the cross is incoherent or immoral. I claim that the central mechanism remains oddly fitted to the alleged agent. Human cultures have repeatedly imagined reconciliation through sacrifice because human cultures inherited altars, debts, scapegoats and blood rituals. The Christian cross can be read as their subversion. It can also look like their ultimate projection into heaven.

That God is simultaneously victim, priest and author of the requirement makes the drama more mysterious. It does not make the requirement self-evidently good.

Religious experience and the accident of birthplace

Christian experience deserves neither contempt nor automatic credence. People report forgiveness, presence, guidance, moral transformation and a relation with Christ that seems more immediate to them than any philosophical argument. Such experiences can produce courage, generosity and sustained reform. A complete account of Christianity must explain why they occur.

But Christianity must also explain why structurally similar confidence arises within incompatible traditions. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews and adherents of newer movements report experiences interpreted through their own religious worlds. Mystics may discover convergences, but doctrinal conclusions remain stubbornly diverse. The experience rarely arrives carrying a creed independent of the culture that supplies its vocabulary.

Christianity can absorb this. Perhaps God is partially known everywhere and fully disclosed in Christ. Perhaps common grace operates beyond the Church. Perhaps human cognition distorts genuine contact with the divine. Less attractive traditions invoke deception or spiritual counterfeits.

Once again, compatibility is not discrimination. Every religion can treat its own experiences as veridical and rival experiences as partial, misinterpreted or false. To use experience as public evidence, we need a method that does not assume the tradition whose truth it is meant to establish.

The predictive power of birthplace is difficult to ignore. Most people inherit the religious possibilities made socially available to them. Conversion occurs, sometimes at great cost, but the global pattern remains heavily cultural. That is what I would expect if religious systems were human interpretative traditions. It is less obviously what I would expect from a God providing a clear and universally important revelation.

Nor do the moral fruits decide the question. Christianity has inspired charity, resistance to oppression, intellectual achievement, art and lives of extraordinary self-command. It has also sanctified cruelty, hierarchy, persecution and empire. Christians can distinguish faithful fruit from corruption, just as other traditions do. The mixed record is best explained by the obvious fact that religions are inhabited by humans. It neither proves nor rescues their supernatural claims.

The cumulative case cuts both ways

Christian apologists are right that worldviews should be assessed cumulatively. A cosmological argument need not prove the Trinity by itself. Historical evidence need not carry the entire case in isolation. Religious experience, moral knowledge, the intelligibility of nature and the figure of Jesus may reinforce one another.

But accumulation is not achieved merely by placing several debatable arguments in a room and announcing that they form a team. Their dependencies matter. If the historical case for the Resurrection relies upon prior theism, and the move from theism to Christianity relies upon the Resurrection, the components are not independent. If religious experience is interpreted through doctrines whose credibility is then confirmed by that experience, the evidential gain is smaller than it appears.

The contrary evidence also accumulates:

The most successful arguments for God underdetermine Christianity. The universe lacks any obvious human centre. Vast suffering is built into biological history. Nonresistant nonbelief persists. Revelation is culturally local and textually mediated. The decisive miracle is known through ancient partisan testimony. Central doctrines required centuries of contested formulation. Accounts of salvation either retain morally troubling sacrificial logic or reduce the necessity of the event they are designed to explain. Religious experience is powerful but doctrinally promiscuous.

Christianity has responses to every item. What it lacks, in my view, is a response that turns the whole pattern into something I should positively have expected.

This is the difference between defence and confirmation. A barrister may produce a possible innocent explanation for each incriminating fact. At some point the question becomes whether the conjunction of explanations is more credible than the simpler account. Christianity increasingly survives by auxiliary reasoning: God values freedom, permits epistemic distance, works through natural law, accommodates culture, reveals progressively, allows institutional fallibility, hides providential purposes and reserves final resolution for an afterlife.

Any one of those propositions may be true. Together they make Christianity extraordinarily resilient. They also reduce its predictive exposure. A worldview capable of interpreting presence and absence, miracle and regularity, clarity and confusion, flourishing and catastrophe as manifestations of the same providence risks explaining the world only in the sense that a sufficiently flexible story can explain any ending.

Naturalism is not an all-purpose explanation. It has deep questions of its own: why there is something rather than nothing, why reality is intelligible, how consciousness arises, and whether value is fundamental or emergent. I do not conceal those difficulties beneath the word "science". Nor do I suppose that explaining the operation of nature automatically explains why any reality exists.

But naturalism predicts no providential signature, no universal revelation, no moral arrangement of history and no divine protection from apparently gratuitous suffering. It expects minds to be late products of nature, religions to vary with culture, death to remain death, and the universe to continue without regard to human hopes. Its silences are not surprising on its own terms.

Christianity offers more existentially. It offers an ultimate mind, objective purpose, the defeat of death, cosmic justice and the astonishing claim that the foundation of reality knows and loves persons. But desirability is not probability. A consoling hypothesis does not receive an evidential discount for kindness.

What would change my mind?

An unfalsifiable atheism would be no more intellectually respectable than an unfalsifiable faith. I cannot specify every possible route to belief, because evidence can surprise us. I can say what would matter.

Clear, public and independently examinable manifestations of agency would matter. Specific information unavailable by ordinary means, repeatedly supplied under controlled conditions, would matter. Unambiguous fulfilments that could not reasonably be written after events or satisfied by broad interpretation would matter. A revelation distributed across cultures without dependence upon conquest, birth or inherited texts would matter. The verified return of a person from irreversible death would matter rather more than reports that ancient people believed one had occurred.

A direct experience might also matter, although I hope I would examine it as critically as I examine the experiences of others. I know that brains misperceive, memories reorganise and expectation shapes interpretation. The more personally overwhelming the experience, the more important independent checks would become, not less.

The standard Christian answer is that God knows what evidence I need and may provide it in his own time. Precisely. An omniscient God would know not merely how to overwhelm me, but how to make himself reasonably recognisable without destroying my freedom. If such a God exists and desires relationship, the continuing failure of that recognition is not neutral. It is part of the evidence.

After consolation

My disbelief is not a claim to certainty. It is an attempt to proportion confidence to what the world appears to disclose. Christianity may be true despite hiddenness, despite suffering, despite religious diversity, despite the frailty of its historical evidence and despite the strange moral machinery of salvation. Reality is under no obligation to select the theory I find simplest.

But neither am I obliged to treat every surviving possibility as equally plausible.

The strongest Christianity is not absurd. It is a vast, intricate and often beautiful metaphysical interpretation of existence. It can incorporate the findings of science, absorb historical criticism, refine its moral vocabulary and answer crude objections with considerable force. What it cannot do, to my satisfaction, is show that its central narrative is more likely than the human processes by which such narratives arise.

The cosmos does not look Christian in any clear and independent sense. It looks ancient, indifferent and uncentred. Human beings make meanings within it, experience moral demands, love one another, construct metaphysical systems and tell stories in which the immensities finally know our names. Some of those stories are profound. Profundity is not revelation.

I therefore remain outside the faith, not because I have refused its best case, but because I have considered that case and found that the steel required to protect it also insulates it from the world it claims to explain.

The silence may conceal a God. It is not what should most naturally raise my confidence in one.

Therion Ware
City of Dis - cosmicism without consolation.