'Why Believe?' with Neil Shenvi

'A lack of evidence is not the ultimate reason for unbelief.'

Nov 26, 2024

As I write this intro to my interview with Dr. Neil Shenvi, the copy of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ I bought in high school out of curiosity sits on the across from me on the shelf. To date, it’s the only fiery, top-to-bottom refutation of the Christian faith I’ve read all the way through.

Try as he did, Bertrand Russell did not sway me.

If anything, I can admire his tar heeled stubbornness, his insistence on keeping God out of nature, the universe, mathematics (he was a prominent logician) and bread and butter things like good and evil. Most memorably, Russell rails against the idea of a heavenly afterlife by arguing that this worldly life is terrible enough. Halfway through the book he fumes, ‘if I found a bucket of oranges with rotten oranges at the top, why should I have any reason to assume those on the bottom (i.e. the next life) that I can’t see aren’t rotten as well?’

It’s as cute as it is laughable—like the future scientists who challenged God to an ex nihilo creation-making contest only to be told ‘get your own dirt.’ Almost nearly three decades into believing Jesus of Nazareth was who He said he was, that orange bit still makes me chuckle.

All this to say, had Mr. Russell (instead of say, the much more humble but still unbelieving Theodore Dalrymple) become my favorite mathematician-philosopher, I might have been squarely in Neil Shenvi’s target audience for ‘Why Believe', his book on four classical arguments for the Christian faith for skeptical STEM majors.

Without saying too much, ‘Why Believe’ is an incredibly packed, thought-provoking read. Not only does Shenvi—a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry and former Duke researcher turned Christian Apologist—lay out the concrete reasons for trusting the historical records of Jesus’s death and resurrection, he attacks challenges like the existence of evil and multiple paths to God from every possible direction.

As you’ll see when you scroll to our interview, Shenvi also asks the pivotal questions of faith and belief; ones that risk putting a damper on the party.

If I believe I need forgiveness and God offered it through Jesus, what follows from that? What situation am I in and what logical step do I take next?

With refreshing frankness, he poses the very questions you and I (believing or not, Baptist or Presby or what-have-you) need to ask, given what’s at stake for us. To hear this believing, research-and-evidence-browsing scientist tell it, the most irrational response to those questions is apathy, the kind we probably know too well.

I hope Neil’s clear, full-bodied telling of the good news will jolt you as it jolted me during our splendid interview.

Check it out

‘Why Believe?’ with Neil Shenvi

C.M. What's the best meme you've seen this week?

Neil: This week I was showing my son a three-panel cartoon. In panel one, a man says, "I wish things were different." In panel two, he takes a baseball bat and smashes the room. It ends with him saying, "oh, no."

What did your son think of it?

He’s fifteen. I was explaining to him what conservatism is, and how we could define it as a respect for institutions, and a commitment to changing things slowly, not radically. I said, "Systems are easy to break and hard to build. So we should be very hesitant to break anything lest we find ourselves like that guy." I showed him the cartoon and he liked it.

‘Why Believe’ explores four classic arguments for Christianity. You cover Jesus' identity, the resurrection, existence for God, and the message of the gospel. How did those four arguments get front and center in your book?

I chose them because I wanted to write a book that was geared toward showing that Christianity in particular is true, not just that theism is true in some general sense. Each of those four arguments points specifically to the Christian God. There are a lot of arguments out there. There are some very old ones that point to Jesus—like the argument from prophecy. But I picked the arguments that point to Jesus and are, I think, the most understandable and comprehensible to modern people, educated people of a scientific bent. I like to pitch my book as Tim Keller's ‘Reason For God’ for STEM majors.

Did any of those four arguments play a role in your own faith journey?

Interestingly, they didn't exactly. I was a non-Christian at Princeton as an undergraduate. I took Professor John Gager's course on the New Testament and Early Christian origins, a totally secular course that used a lot of material from the Jesus Seminar, which has a very liberal, progressive revisionist view on Jesus. Among evangelical Christians, that class was known as the ‘Faith Buster’ because it challenged many Christian beliefs. Well, I took this class as a non-Christian, and I thought it was great, and I totally bought into all of the critical scholarship. Things like ‘the Bible's not reliable.’ ‘It's just a collection of ancient documents.’ But interestingly, the one thing the course did not teach was this radical, skeptical notion that Jesus is just a myth. No scholar believes that. There’s a standing challenge to atheists: find five credible scholars who believe that Jesus was a myth. Just five, who have PhDs in some field of history or biblical studies.

Neil laughs.

And I think there are two. They've never managed to find five in the entire world.

Oh, wow.

That's right. So, in this totally secular class at Princeton, we were taught there are basically twelve major facts about Jesus, the historical Jesus: he was born in first century Palestine. He was a Jew. He was baptized by John the Baptist. He traveled around with disciples. He hung out with Pharisees, tax collectors, these outcasts... he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. They taught these twelve core facts about Jesus that everybody agrees on. And if you look at it, it's basically the entire outline of Jesus' life minus the resurrection. But as a non-Christian, I thought, "Well, yeah, we have the gospels, and they're full of errors and flaws… but I can read them as ancient flawed documents." So interestingly, when I met my future wife, Christina, who was a Christian, and was interested in what she believed, I thought, "I'm not a Christian like you are, but at least I'm a cultural Christian. I’m a vague, be nice, be good, God loves everybody kind of guy." But I believed that Jesus existed.

You were a cultural Christian before it was cool.

Well, a question for me was, "who is he? Is Jesus really who he claimed to be or not? Did he die for my sins?" That's what I wrestled with. The first thing I realized was, well, that's a theological claim. He did die, I know that's historically true. Did he die for my sins? I can't really answer with evidence. I can't go to archeology. And then the resurrection. I began to look at the resurrection using the tools we learned in that class. Things like early attestation: do multiple, early sources confirm that it happened? Criterion of embarrassment: do the accounts include embarrassing details that they would've not included if they had made these accounts up? All of those tools we use to discern fact from fiction pointed to the Resurrection being fact. So, then I had to say "Wait a minute, what I learned in this secular, non-religious class is pointing towards this being if not true, then at least plausible.” And now there's an existential question on my heart, which is, “do I need this?" One, is it true? But then two, is it relevant to me if it is true?

All thanks to a class called the ‘Faith Buster.’

I would say C.S. Lewis' writings obviously contributed to my conversion. So did knowing my wife, going to church with her in Berkeley. But the background was ironically a secular college course which provided the framework and the foundation for me to take these claims seriously.

“While some arguments require quite a bit of philosophical or scientific sophistication, a child who wonders where the universe came from, or who listens in awe when she hears that math can predict the motion of planets, or who asks why some things are good and other things are bad is knocking on the door of theology.”

-‘Why Believe’ Chapter Five - God and Revelation Part II

You mentioned something about embarrassing details helping confirm the gospel accounts. Can you elaborate?

Yes. The principle is that if you're claiming a source was made up by some group of people, then you’re assuming they have some motive. Usually the motive is to make the authors look good. So if the early Christian leaders were writing these documents about Jesus, they would make themselves look good, because, well, they're the leaders. But for example, in the gospels, the disciples are routinely slow, stubborn, lacking in faith. Even Peter gets rebuked by Jesus and called Satan.

That’s right.

That's one example. Another one is the resurrection being first discovered by female disciples. In that culture, women had a very low social status. They weren’t considered trustworthy, they weren't allowed to testify in court. So, if you were inventing a story about who discovered the empty tomb, why would you invent it with untrustworthy witnesses? And one of the women is Mary Magdalene, who was formerly demon possessed.

Disciples arguing over who’s going to be first in heaven?

Neil laughs.

That’s another one. When we read the gospels, my kids are often like , "Daddy, what are they doing? I can't believe they're doubting Jesus again.”

Having scoped out the logos and ethos of Christianity, what was the pathos like? What drew you to Jesus personally, emotionally, imaginatively?

So I was going to grad school with my future wife Christina, and I was going to church with her. I heard the gospel. I heard that Jesus came to die for our sins, rose from the dead, and then offered that forgiveness to you. … but I began to see more and more that I was a sinner. And not in that puritanical sense where you think, oh, you have to follow the rules. No, just that I had problems. On the outside, I looked pretty good. But I know myself and everyone knows themselves better than other people. So you can look good on the outside and still be covering up a lot on the inside.

Neil chuckles.

This is an unrelated story, but when I was a senior at Princeton, I was doing some research that went really well for me. And in my mind, my research as an undergraduate was actually much better than the research being done in the same lab by the graduate student who was my advisor on the project. And I was bragging to my friends. I said something like, "the results I'm getting are a hundred times better than this graduate student's results. And he's supposedly getting a PhD." Well, it got back to him that I was saying that and he emailed me. I remember thinking to myself and telling Christina, "I'm a jerk." So that's an example. Sometimes God pulls back the curtain and shows you what you're actually like. So I eventually came to the realization that I needed forgiveness. Going back to the evidence I talked about, the facts about Jesus that all historians agree on, I had to ask what if this is the way God chose to grant forgiveness? Through the death of Jesus? I wanted God to explain things to me, but he kept pressing on me, do you need it or not? And are you going to accept it or not?

Near the end of ‘Why Believe’ you talk about Christianity's response to two unique problems. One of them is we're all moral failures, and the other is we all need a savior. It sounds like those two problems were hitting home for you.

Yeah. I think Christianity is the only religion based on those two truths. In the book, I go through different religions and how they approach that. You know, what do Buddhists believe? What do Hindus believe? What do Muslims believe? What do Jews believe about those issues?Are we really moral failures, yes or no? And then do we need rescue, not just a little help?

Broadly speaking, how do other faiths approach this?

I think all those religions would just deny that you are born with a corrupt nature. They deny that you're way more wicked than you believe and, because the problem isn’t that dire, their solutions tend to be less radical. They don't need God to come and die in your place and to be punished on your behalf. You can ask for forgiveness and God will just give it to you, or you can just try harder and God will appreciate that, or you can do these rituals and cleanse yourself. So the point is Christianity is unique—you can say it's uniquely wrong—but it's unique. And then I would just challenge skeptics to ask themselves, honestly, are you a moral failure? Does Christianity get that right? And I think the answer is just obviously yes.

We are our own worst enemies.

And then I would just say, you know what? Try to save yourself, try to live by your own standards of morality, try to live by Jesus’ standards, just try it. I love what C.S. Lewis said when he actually started trying to obey the moral law. He quoted the demoniac in Mark’s gospel, “I am legion.” He found he was filled with corrupt desires.

Do you have a favorite Christian apologist?

I always say Charles Spurgeon. He’s a well-known preacher and he actually didn't like apologetics from what I can tell. But he was so good at conveying the gospel in simple terms, I would say he was an apologist, whether he knew it or not. And then more traditionally, C.S. Lewis—we actually talked about that during my interview with Michael Knowles on The Abolition of Man. I've read, I think, all of Lewis’s fictional works multiple times and his nonfiction books as well.

How about a favorite atheist?

Steven Pinker. I really love his book The Blank Slate. There's a lot in it that Christians can agree with, actually, because his main thesis is that there is a complex human nature, that we are not blank slates; we’re born with basic principles and intuitions that are just there, they're given and we're not infinitely malleable. Christians affirm that we have a fixed, complex human nature and that idea has fallen on hard times in the academy. Pinker is one of the people saying, nope, it's absolutely correct. Ironically, C.S. Lewis has a similar list of universal moral human laws in his Abolition of Man, so it dovetails in a fascinating way with what Pinker's work is saying.

I see what you did there.

Yeah, they're both saying we have a shared human nature and we have a shared set of moral intuitions. Now, Lewis says that they come from God, Pinker would say they come from evolution, but they both agree we have them.

‘Why Believe’ explains how many in the scientific community operate with a pre-commitment to naturalism. Does that go for Pinker too?

As far as I know, Pinker's a naturalist. He believes that nature is all that exists. But as for the scientific community, I’d guess it's about half and half. Half are, you know, atheists of some kind, and that number hasn't changed for decades.

Speaking of naturalism, are you familiar with A Secular Age, Charles Taylor's book?

Yeah.

Taylor talks about the ‘loss of enchantment’ that took place as medieval Christendom evolved into modernity. Basically, medievals saw magic as an everyday part of the real world. They had good magic—angels, relics, miracles like the resurrection—and bad magic. So for over a millennium the world was enchanted, and then you get that slide into rationalism, naturalism, and no possibility of God or miracles. Is there something to be said for a worldview that’s more open to magic?

I think C.S. Lewis would have an interesting take on this because on the one hand, he laments the fact that science has sort of killed the supernatural. We have science, but we’ve lost a universe charged with meaning, and our appreciation of beauty and truth and all these immaterial realities which are actually there. And he rightly lays that at the feet of the Enlightenment and the idea that we can explain away all of the beauty and truth as just chemicals and molecules. In The Abolition of Man, he says ‘maybe we can reimagine science from a theistic or at least a more humanistic view of a reality that's actually beautiful.’

What’s the other hand?

Lewis opposed the idea that magic or an enchanted world is necessarily a good world. So the great example of this is in his book Perelandra. You remember that the evil scientist, Weston, in the first book Out of the Silent Planet is a naturalist. He completely dismisses religion; all that matters is science and matter and energy. Well, in the second book, he tells the protagonist Ransom that he's changed his mind and thinks there’s a lot of truth in spirituality. In fact, he's even, he thinks, been in contact with spirits that are helping him achieve his destiny… and it becomes clear that Weston is actually toying with Satan worship. So I think: ‘Is a spiritual worldview closer to reality?’ Yes. We live in a spiritual world, not a naturalistic one. But is an enchanted world necessarily good? No.

Between Russell Brand leading Tucker Carlson in prayer and Richard Dawkins saying he’s a ‘cultural Christian’, faith is strangely trending. What do you make of that?

Neil chuckles.

I think nature abhors a vacuum. So for the New Atheists, the idea was that they were going to get rid of religion, and usher in this new age of reason. Clearly, that didn’t happen. We exorcized the spirit of religion, only to find ourselves possessed by seven spirits more evil than the first, like Jesus says. As for wokeness, well… some of the Richard Dawkins types are starting to realize it’s a far worse disease than the Christianity they were trying to cure.

Do you see wokeness as a replacement religion?

It’s an alternate religion for sure. So if we get rid of that, will we end up letting in some other form of religion? If we're trying to exorcize wokeness now, what's going to replace it? Jesus' answer is, ‘you have to replace it with me.’ And if we don't, could we end up in a more theocratic age? I think it's possible. I would just say maybe every age is theocratic, meaning that every age has some religion—that is, a motivating force behind human behavior.

Christianity is having a ‘Book of Acts’ moment in developing countries. To go back to the magical world question, have you heard the accounts of healings and miracles happening in those parts of the world?

I have. One thing I’d say is that in the context of missions, where there are often very few Christians, miracles serve the way they did in Acts to confirm the gospel message. They are ways to show people that have never heard the gospel, never met a Christian, that yes, the gospel is true. That’s how the miracles functioned in Jesus' ministry. Most of the time in the Bible, miracles serve the purpose of a message. Another thing, more personally, is that my in-laws are missionaries. I’ve asked them and they’ve said, "Yeah. Absolutely. We've seen miracles.”

What do you make of that?

So, I talked to my father-in-law, who lives close to us now. I was asking "well, why don't we see miracles like that in the states?” Number one, he said, many people don't ask for them, because we're like, yeah, we'll take care of it. We don't ask, so we don't receive. And then number two, he said, miracles are supplied by God to meet the difference between what we have and what we need. But in a country like the U.S. we have doctors, so… God takes care of us through doctors. Now, there are plenty of things that doctors can't do, but if you're in a place where there's literally no medical care—as in, you stub your toe, you could die of blood poisoning—now God has to do a miracle.

Right.

So God's factoring in the lack that exists in other countries… and that’s not to say he won’t factor in healing here. My kids and I pray for people’s healing every single night; we’ve been doing it for fifteen years. I can’t tell you how many people we prayed for who recovered from some crazy thing… or had a really severe surgery that went incredibly well and they're fine now.

Can you describe one recovery that you guys prayed for?

Sure. One is my recovery from a brain tumor I had 14 years ago. I was rushed to the emergency room. I had people all over the country praying for me… and here I am 14 years later. So we tend to say "Oh, but those aren't miracles.” I think we are just jaded in some sense. Maybe we should begin to appreciate that many of these things really are God providentially intervening as we asked Him to, and not write them off so quickly.

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What would you say to the spiritual seeker leafing through your book? By ‘seeker’ let’s say somebody who sees Christianity’s arguments as a good alternative to the madness everywhere and a recipe for moral character… but in the end, he’s unsure about making the leap. Any thoughts?

A couple things. First of all, you have to realize that apathy is not really a rational option. You can say “well maybe Christianity is good for civilization.” Okay, but is it true with a capital T? Because if it’s true then there's a lot more at stake than civilization for you personally, right? In my book, I say, if a doctor comes to you and says, "You have stage four pancreatic cancer" and you respond, "Yeah, I don't really care. I mean, that’s your belief. If I do, great, if I don't, it's fine,” your attitude is not rational. What you’re really saying is, I don't believe you, or I haven’t really thought about it. If you really believed what the doctor said about having cancer, it would matter to you. In the same way Christianity says, "You are going to go to hell unless you repent and believe the gospel.” If you respond, "Yeah, if you believe that, good for you…" the same principle applies. It’s what C.S. Lewis called a ‘man or rabbit’ moment.

Man or Rabbit?

Yep. “Are you just going to hide in your burrow and ignore these truth claims or will you at least investigate them?” If you came to the conclusion that it’s all fake, all right… then why aren’t you going out and telling people not to waste their time with this garbage? You can do that, you can roll up your sleeves and try and debunk it. But you can’t just don’t go back and play Fortnite or something like that.

Neil laughs.

I think one interesting point is the apathy itself about issues like eternal life or death. The fact that we can be apathetic about them suggests that Christianity is true and that we're incredibly irrational. If I said, “Look out, your house is on fire,” and your response was “I don’t feel like getting up right now” that would be irrational. I mean—okay, this is just an example—people who thought we were all going to die if we didn’t take the COVID vaccine were out there evangelizing. Maybe they were wearing triple masks or whatever, but they were getting the message out.

Yeah, you can’t knock the true belief there.

And they weren’t saying “Oh, I don’t want to be awkward. I don’t want to make a scene.” They were saying “this is too important.” So when you actually care about something, when it’s a matter of life and death, you don’t care about awkwardness. There’s a great, well-known clip of Penn Jillette, a famous atheist magician. He’s talking to the camera, and he’s talking about how he got a Gideon Bible from a Christian after a show. A little New Testament. And Jillette basically says “I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize because if you think I’m going to hell and you don’t want to tell me because it would be awkward, you don’t love me. That guy loved me enough to be awkward and tell me, I respect that.” …and he’s a huge atheist.

That’s a great clip.

'Why Believe?' with Neil Shenvi

'A lack of evidence is not the ultimate reason for unbelief.'

‘Why Believe?’ with Neil Shenvi

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