Let's look at the pedigree of the modern atheists' claim that Christianity is a silly, evil myth.  First of all, the claim that Christianity is a myth is not new. The seeds were planted about a half-millennium ago in the Renaissance and burst into full flower in the Enlightenment. It began when pagan literature was read with a new spirit—a this-worldly spirit of secularism, a spirit that assumed that the spiritual was impossible.

Suddenly, the incredible myths of ancient Greece and Rome stood beside the incredible stories of the Bible as equals. Zeus and Jupiter stood on equal footing with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were all equally fanciful, foolish, and false. There is exactly as much truth in Homer’s Iliad as there is in the Holy Bible, which is to say, none at all.

Thus was born comparative religion, the notion behind it being that all stories of the dealings of the divine with the human must be fictional. Or, if we get at it from another angle, since some such stories are evidently mythological, then all must be mythological, especially those found in the Bible. The point was not to get at the truth, but to use pagan mythology as a way to deflate Christianity, so that Christianity would be merely mythical too.

What is the problem with this type of reasoning? It contains two erroneous assumptions, one open and obvious, and the other more subtle. The open and obvious error is that if most people get something wrong, then no one can get it right. The more subtle is that human reason defines what is reasonable.

To understand the foolishness of the first error, we need a bit more background. In the Renaissance, and even more fervently in the Enlightenment, there arose the belief that human reason was always and everywhere in wonderful, universal agreement, and that religion only brought confusion and chaos. The cure, for them, was to put forth a religion of reason; that is, to throw out revelation, and worship the human mind as the new divine and unifying god. Comparative religion was the way they sought to discredit Christianity, so that they could make way for the religion of reason.

The obvious problem was not obvious to them. We don't need religion in order to disagree and get mired in error and confusion. Human beings, using their merely human reason, disagree all the time. If mere human reason produced wonderful, universal agreement, then why is the history of philosophy punctuated by so many rival, irreconcilable schools of philosophy—Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Platonists, Aristotelians, neo-Platonists, Skeptics, and to continue from the Enlightenment, Lockeans, Humeans, Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, Pragmatists, Nihilists, Existentialists, etc., etc. (not to mention the sub-school splinter groups at each other's throats)?

Can we then say that because there is so much disagreement, then no philosophy is better than any other? That they are all equally false? That we should give up the search for truth by human reason and study "comparative philosophy" instead? That because most people are illogical, then we should throw out logic, and confine ourselves to the study of "comparative arguments"? Ironically, that is about the state of current philosophy. So much for the religion of reason.

Secularists might be tempted to substitute "science" for "philosophy." But the problem is the same. We shouldn't be misled by histories of science that focus only on the very few paths that led to later successes, rather than the far more numerous dead ends and wild goose chases. The history of science is largely the history of confusion and disagreement among many, while only a few get it right and (not unlike Moses) lead others out of their confusion to a land of more solid conclusions. Do we want to say that because most get it wrong and disagree, that no one can get it right? That there can then be no science, but only "comparative science"?

One can already hear the objection: "But science is about reality!" That brings us to the above-mentioned second error, that human reason defines what is reasonable. The most important truth we learn about science from the history of science—the long, complex story of how it is that we came to know more and more about nature—is that reason does not define what is reasonable; reality defines what is reasonable. The one thing that we can demonstrate about the universe is that it is always proving itself to be stranger than we thought it would be, and that our cherished hypotheses are continually challenged and overturned by new discoveries.

But if we find that reality is continually more mysterious than we'd thought—more strange, intricate, and elegantly contrived—then reason must be open to the possibility that there is a mysterious contriver whose intelligence is far more intricate and elegant than our own. And since He is mysterious, what keeps Him from trying to reveal Himself to us? How can we cut off that possibility?