Ducking the Big Question

    First the story, then the point:
    The young man was full of himself, in the way young men can be. He was puffed up with his new scientific graduate degree. And his girlfriend was listening. He was showing off.
    He announced to fellow dinner guests (who had not raised the subject) that the Christian gospels are so much hooey. Full of discrepancies and contradictions. Not even close to the standards of real history. Written 100 years after the events they purport to record, by persons unknown who could not have been eyewitnesses.
    Our young lecturer did not know that the earliest Christian scriptures were written 18 to 20 years after the events of Jesus' life. They are Pauline letters. More to the point, these letters  were written by Paul to congregations already up and running across the region. In the bosom of an ancient theocracy, something fundamental had happened. It had caused people in numbers to abandon their very concept of reality, even at the risk of their lives.
    Our young dinner lecturer, being thus uninformed, had no occasion to consider some points of simple fact: The existence of the man Paul is settled. The authenticity of the main body of his letters is settled.  In these letters he says he did business with the apostle Peter and Jesus' brother James.  He says he met people who had encountered the resurrected Jesus. And he says he met the resurrected Jesus himself.
    Had our lecturer known as much, he would have faced a decision: Where would he place the information on a yardstick of credibility?  At one extreme, he would conclude that the man Paul gave his life to propagate a cockamamie yarn among folks indulging a mass delusion. At the opposite pole, he would conclude that Paul knew what he was talking about and meant what he said.
    That's the story. Here's the point:
    The young lecturer has brethren in attitude. Our rational and enlightened age hosts a mode of thinking that is neither. It embraces an ethic of skepticism that questions everything but itself. It swallows whole the doctrine that faith and reason are foes. It tolerates and even celebrates a  certain kind of cultural ignorance.
     Holding the Christian gospels to standards of modern history is simply silly. The discipline of modern history did not exist at the time of the gospel writings. Judged knowledgeably and objectively, the case for the historicity of the Christian gospels is sound. The evidence is available to anyone who knows how to read and bothers to look.
    But we moderns don't do a lot of bothering. Our reasons may seem good-hearted.
We are put off by the loons and scoundrels who caricature religion to their own benefit.  Or we are put off by rule-mongers who use the Bible to push what one writer calls "a narrow, hard and exclusive piety." Or we are confident of pursuing morality without religion.
    Or we're just too modern and too skeptical. In the upshot, a wise and beautiful book languishes at the outskirts of cultural literacy,  and supposedly discerning  people tap dance past the essential question about Judeo-Christian scripture.  The question is not whether the Bible describes an elevated system of morality. The question is whether it tells a story that is, in its essence, true.
    Ultimate questions can be mercilessly simple, also the decisions they imply.
    True? Or false?
    Yes? Or no?
    On this question, our rational age has not dealt rationally with the fact that automatic skepticism amounts to a  lazy form of evasion. Our young lecturer hadn't dealt rationally with it, either.  For intellectual  rigor, poor marks all around.