As I began to question the Christian faith I had held for virtually all my life, I became aware of a fundamental fact:
To have faith in God, you must first have faith in the Bible.
Everything Christians “know” about God ultimately derives from the Bible. So this naturally leads to the question:
Why believe the Bible?
The typical Christian response is very well summarised by The Wheel.
I first saw this diagram on The Thinking Atheist’s Facebook page about a year ago. When I shared it on my own wall, it generated an intense discussion in which several of my Christian friends (many of them seminary students) attempted to give noncircular reasons for why they believed the Bible. Amazingly, every single one of them seemed to reduce to The Wheel. The conversation went for more than 70 posts, yet nobody gave as much as a single good reason for believing the Bible.
Of course if there was a good reason, every Christian minister, apologist and evangelist would be repeating it for all to hear. So why do so many (otherwise) intelligent people believe the Bible? What other document would they entrust with their lives without a single good reason to do so?
