I’m an INTP, and if you’re a fellow “NT” Myers-Briggs personality type, I’m especially eager to dialogue with you about the reasons why I believe Christianity is true.

This may sound like a somewhat surprising topic for someone of my Myers-Briggs temperament, because, according to what I have read, INTPs and INTJs, who tend to pride themselves on following the path of reason, have higher rates of atheism or skepticism about religion than most other personality types.  According to the 16 Personalities website, for instance, only 22% of INTPs consider themselves religious, compared to 40% of the general population.  And this is why I want to address the topic.  In our contemporary Western society, a lot of logical NTs think that they have seen the logical flaws in Christianity and all religion, and they reject belief in God – and especially the God of Christianity – as irrational.

I sympathize with this view, because I have similar tendencies myself, and in fact, for a short time a number of years ago I did reject Christianity because I thought in my mind that I had disproved it.  I now believe that I was wrong to reject it.  I believe that a logical analysis of Christianity that is honest about our own presuppositions will reveal why.  So, if you’re a skeptical NT – such as an INTP or INTJ – I want to appeal to your sense of logic and ability to theorize about systems of thought, and I want us to analyze together the presuppositions that lead people to reject Christianity.

 

The presupposition of fairness

To examine our presuppositions and biases as NTs, I’d like to first engage in a thought experiment and imagine the universe that we might desire.  In my experience, most NTs in our contemporary Western culture – including myself – would like to imagine a universe that is highly rational (not random) and they subscribe to a view of “fairness” that assumes that everyone should be treated equally and should be given as much independence as possible as long as their pursuits do not harm other people.  If there were a God in the universe, we would want that God to be a deist God – somewhat along the lines of what the eighteenth-century deists, like the NT Thomas Jefferson, imagined.  This deity would be completely fair and would conform to the expectations of Enlightenment rationality.  Or, if such a personal God does not exist, we might imagine that the universe’s order is maintained by the sort of God that Albert Einstein imagined – a very distant, impersonal force that was vaguely defined and certainly did not interfere with human affairs.  And today, many NTs see no need to invoke the hypothesis of God at all, because they think that science has offered a compelling picture of a materialistic universe.

While many other personality types – especially the NFs – are repelled by a picture of the universe that is completely mechanistic and impersonal, NTs often revel in the idea that there is no personality behind the cosmos, and that in the end, the universe is structured around nothing except physical forces and universal constants.  I think that a lot of NTs would actually still prefer the rationalist God of Thomas Jefferson if they could persuade themselves that such a God exists, but if they can’t bring themselves to that, a world of matter and numbers is far more comfortable than a world controlled by a capricious personal deity.

In all honesty, I will admit that I found the deist God very attractive, and I’m not naturally drawn toward the picture of the biblical God.  But I eventually had to admit that in imagining the deist God, I was doing exactly what I and other INTPs or INTJs have often derided New Age spiritualist NF types for doing when they get excited about shamans or seek spiritual power in neopagan rituals or astrology – I was making a God of my own image that was based not on what is actually true, but on what I would like to be true.

So, if you’re an intellectually honest NT, I would challenge you to ask yourself not whether you think the God of Christianity is fair or whether you would like this God to exist, but ask yourself instead whether instead Christianity is true.

 

Is Christianity true (even if we might not like it)?

How do we determine whether Christianity is true?  There’s far more to this topic than I can cover in this short video, so let me just give you two points.  First, in regard to the existence of God, let me ask you, if you’re an NT atheist, whether a purely materialist, atheist universe gives you the possibility for the sort of rational thinking and rational cosmic order that you imagine.  The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that atheistic materialism gives us no reason to believe in the rationality of our own minds, and I think that his arguments are persuasive.  In fact, I would go beyond what Plantinga has said, and also ask how the physical constants in the universe – constants that have existed since the earliest moments of the Big Bang and that have provided a rational, mathematical structure to the universe that allows for the possibility of rational scientific investigation – could arise from purely materialistic forces.  If you pride yourself on your rationality and if you love to analyze systems, I’d like you to consider whether impersonal matter could really produce rationality both in the mathematical structure of the cosmos and in the rationality of our own minds.

But of course, this by itself is not an argument for Christianity, because even if you find it persuasive, a belief in some sort of higher power behind the mathematical structure of the universe would make you no more than a deist at best.  And it’s certainly not the foundation of my Christian faith.

So let me give you one further reason why I have been unable to dismiss Christianity’s claims.  I’ll give you the short version of an argument that would take hours to unpack in detail: I don’t think that Christianity is a religion that people could have made up.  The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament present a cohesive, unified (but very complex) picture of a divinity that is completely unlike any other ancient deity.  The passion that the biblical God has for justice and righteousness, and the love that he extends toward his people, are a far cry from the picture that any of the ancient pagans had of their gods.  The picture of Jesus that the New Testament presents – a picture of meekness and boldness, humility and self-assurance, love and righteous zeal – is also completely different from that of any other individual who has ever lived.  Furthermore, the view of sin and salvation that Christianity presents is far different from any other religion.  Most religions that describe the need of divine forgiveness picture humans as at least partly good and capable of doing good works on their own, and religious teaching is presented as a way to get the knowledge needed to reform ourselves and find God.  Only Christianity depicts humans as completely alienated from the God who made them and in need of God’s intervention to save us.

So, if you’re an NT who is skeptical about Christianity, I would encourage you to ask yourself why Christianity, if it’s merely a human product, is so different from the ancient pagan cultures that allegedly produced it – and, for that matter, different in its essential claims from every other religion that the world has ever produced.  Where did such a countercultural religion come from, and why has it continued to appeal to people from every continent, social class, and racial background?

In other words, to dismiss Christianity, we would have to explain where its countercultural ideas came from.  I’ve read a number of books by skeptical scholars, such as Bart Ehrman, who have tried to explain Christianity away, and I haven’t been persuaded by their claims.  I think that scholars such as N.T. Wright, Larry Hurtado, and a host of others have made a compelling case for the countercultural uniqueness of the early Christian claims about Jesus.  To worship a crucified man was anathema to Jews, Greeks, and Romans in the first century, and yet that’s exactly what the early Christians did when they called Jesus “Lord.”

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussions of Christian evidences, and I haven’t had time to touch on issues such as the resurrection of Jesus, the Bible, and the question of how there could be a good, all-powerful God in a world of suffering and evil.  Like any complex worldview, Christianity can’t be thoroughly examined in only ten or fifteen minutes.

 

An invitation to question and examine

If you’d like to continue the conversation, I would love to talk with you and listen to your questions, feedback, and arguments.  I want to treat your questions fairly and engage in a dialogue that will allow both of us to learn something from each other, even if we disagree.

I would also encourage you to read thoughtful books from people on all sides of this discussion.  If you haven’t read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Tim Keller’s Reason for God yet, you should definitely check those out before dismissing Christianity if for no other reason than to make sure that you’re engaging with the best Christian arguments and not merely battling with straw men.

If what the Bible says about the deep sinfulness of our human nature is true, all of us, from every personality type, will be inclined to reject the message until God changes our will and desires.  We all have our own way of rejecting the message, and for many NTs, we’ll probably do so by arguing that it’s irrational and unfair.  If we’re honest with ourselves, I think that we may have admit that the criteria that we’re using to judge God, the Bible, or the Christian message are shaped not necessarily by what is objectively true about reality, but by what we would like to believe about reality because of the biases of our particular personality type.

As an INTP, I would encourage you to look beyond your own presuppositions and consider the possibility that what we might not want to imagine – the possibility that a sovereign God is in control of our lives and that we do not have the autonomy that we would like to think we have – is true.  Ultimately, the Christian message offers much deeper meaning and joy than we could find outside of Christ, but before we get to that, we’ll have to confront the possibility that its message might be deeply uncomfortable for us because of our personality type.  If you’re committed to a quest for knowledge of what is true, discomfort with Christianity should be no reason to dismiss it; it should instead be a reason to investigate it further.