by Salahuddin Khan

Created on: May 23, 2009   Last Updated: May 24, 2009

For me, although practising Christians represent some of the leading exemplars of proper upright human conduct, and although in my own religious beliefs, I accept certain of the key messages of Christianity having to do with attitudes and behavior toward fellow humans, there are several "essential" beliefs in Chrisitanity that appear to be required of Christians without which their essential Christianity would be compromised and which I, in turn would find intellectually challenging.

I can't profess to be intimately familiar with all tenets of Christian belief but among those I have more than passing familiarity with, there are several issues. In order to approach the debate though, I think we need to array both the challenges to intellectual acceptance and those to moral acceptance and then weigh them objectively. Let's examine these in turn.

For the intellectual challenges, an obvious process of intellectual objection founded on "scientific method" is to me inappropriate, since I personally don't think that a reasoned acceptance of religion can be arrived at using this method and I don't propose to rely on it in my own approach to this subject. Interestingly, several schism-forming events during the emergence of Europe's conflict with Catholic and later Protestant positions on scientific matters, led to the present "Science versus Christianity" (often wrongly labeled "Science versus Religion") framing of many a key question. That is not where I'm coming from. So, I want first to dismiss the notion that "intellectual approach = scientific method", and the latter needs to be founded on formal observable proofs and repeatable experiment while the former is more an act of pure reason.

So we should look at some of the reason-based objections to the core beliefs identified with Christianity. Intellectually, we can accept the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient God. It is, intellectually, a viable concept that God created all that exists, and is somehow extra-existential (i.e. in a condition lying outside space and time, both of which are His creations). At the very least, it is viable since it isn't really possible to prove the non-existence of God.

From this perspective then, let's look at the origin of Christianity beginning with Christ's birth. Here the intellectual challenge is not very great since having accepted the possibility of an almighty God, the causing of an embryo to form in a womb by God's command, while scientifically challenging, is not thereby

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