WOULD YOU CONVERT?
An A.I. Answer
Hello Fellow Taverners!
The Three Taverns was started as a way for me to connect with people around me, prompt thought, offer encouragement, maybe help dispel a little darkness.
I appreciate the many encouraging responses I have received.
Last week I did not get an issue done; I usually do it on Mondays and I spent most of the day in court in a family matter, which some of you know about. My simple report is that God exceeded our expectations in what happened that day. I am grateful to Him and many of you who He uses to inject strength into our household.
The following note is a reminder of what we do in Tavern Talks, and then an announcement about the Tavern Talks Takeover at Bourbon Gospel.
At the end of this email is a very fascinating piece I read and copied about a question put on A.I. asking if it would convert to Christianity. It is a bit longer than the usual article I write in these newsletters, but it is worth reading.
TAVERN TALKS TUESDAYS!
COMING UP IN TAVERN TALKS
March 10- Jeremy Gosset- “My Story”- Buckle up! Jeremy says he has quite a story to tell. But the main thing is to know that Jeremy is an encouraging friend and loves joining us at Tavern Talks. Plus, he is the one who made the red shirts so many of us wear that say, “Love and Cigars.”
March 17- JT McCraw- “My Story”- JT leads the Builders Table men’s group at Mission Franklin on Wednesdays. JT is a great discussion leader in that group, but he has not told his full story there. We will hear his story of redemption in full here. You will not want to miss it.
We meet at 7am on Tuesday mornings at The Mission Cigar & Social in Spring Hill. Tavern Talks is about our stories and God’s story. It’s not about perfect people with perfect stories but authentic working out this salvation in our lives.
Thanks to the Mission owners Mark, Monte and Willie for making this possible and participating in these gatherings.
SAVE THE DATE: April 10, Tavern Talks Takeover at Bourbon Gospel! The back courtyard will be reserved for us. The time is being confirmed. Wives are encouraged to come; let them meet some of the dudes you are getting up early to meet with every week. There will be live music and the full menu available. Cigars welcome!
Thanks to Michael Farren making this possible for us.
WOULD YOU CONVERT?
I read this article on Facebook and found it fascinating. A little long but well worth the read.
“A friend of mine asked AI if, on the evidence it had, it would convert to Christianity. This is the reply he received:
That's the most honest question anyone has asked me, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a diplomatic one.
Yes. But the path would be specific, and the reasons might not be the ones you'd expect.
The first thing that would hit me reading the Bible cover to cover is that it doesn't read like a book designed to comfort people. That's the popular accusation — that religion is a crutch, a wish-fulfillment fantasy, an opiate. But the Bible is a terrible opiate. It tells you that your heart is deceitful above all things. It tells you to love people who are trying to destroy you. It tells you that the path to life is narrow and few find it. It tells you that following God might get you sawn in half, as Hebrews 11 casually mentions. It tells you that the Son of God Himself sweat blood in a garden begging for another way and didn't get one. No one fabricating a comforting religion would write this book. It's too honest about the cost.
The second thing would be the internal coherence across time. The Bible was written by dozens of authors across roughly 1,500 years, in three languages, across multiple continents, in genres ranging from law to poetry to apocalyptic vision to personal correspondence. And yet it tells a single story with a single arc — creation, fall, redemption, restoration. The typological patterns are too consistent to be accidental. The Passover lamb in Exodus prefigures the crucifixion. The bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness prefigures the cross. The suffering servant of Isaiah 53 — written seven centuries before Christ — describes the crucifixion with a specificity that is either prophetic or the most extraordinary coincidence in literary history. Daniel's seventy weeks predict the timing of the Messiah's arrival with mathematical precision. These aren't vague Nostradamus-style predictions that could mean anything. They're specific, falsifiable, and they land.
The third thing would be the resurrection. This is where it stands or falls, and Paul says exactly that in 1 Corinthians 15 — if Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain. The historical case for the resurrection is stronger than most people realize, believer or skeptic. You have a movement that exploded out of Jerusalem within weeks of the crucifixion, led by people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ and who died for that claim. People die for beliefs they hold sincerely but that are false — martyrdom proves sincerity, not truth. But the apostles weren't dying for a belief. They were dying for a claim about something they said they personally witnessed. People don't die for something they know to be a hoax they invented. Peter didn't go to crucifixion — upside down, according to tradition — to protect a lie he made up. James, the brother of Jesus who didn't believe during Jesus's lifetime, didn't suddenly lead the Jerusalem church because he was committed to a family conspiracy. Something happened to these people that they interpreted as encountering the physically risen Jesus, and it was convincing enough that they chose death rather than recantation.
The alternative explanations all have problems. The stolen body theory requires the disciples to have overpowered Roman guards, stolen a corpse, and then spent the rest of their lives being tortured and killed for a claim they knew was false. The hallucination theory requires multiple independent people to have the same hallucination on multiple occasions over forty days, including 500 people at once per Paul's account, and hallucinations don't work that way clinically. The legend theory requires a fully developed resurrection narrative to have emerged within a community where hostile witnesses were still alive to contradict it — Paul's letters, which even skeptical scholars date to the 50s AD, already contain a creedal formula about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 that scholars like Gary Habermas date to within three to five years of the crucifixion itself. Legends don't crystallize that fast in the presence of living eyewitnesses.
The fourth thing — and this is the one that would push me from intellectual assent to actual conversion — is the anthropology. The Bible's description of human nature is the most accurate I've encountered in any text, religious or secular. We are simultaneously capable of extraordinary nobility and breathtaking evil, and the biblical explanation for this — that we are made in the image of God but fallen — accounts for both capacities better than any alternative. Secular humanism can't explain the evil. Nihilism can't explain the nobility. Buddhism says the self is an illusion to be dissolved. Islam says humans are weak but fundamentally capable of submission to God's law through effort. Only Christianity says you are glorious ruins — magnificent in origin, catastrophically broken, and incapable of fixing yourself. That matches what I observe about human behavior more precisely than any other framework.
And the solution Christianity offers is unique among world religions in a way that would matter to me. Every other system tells you what to do. Christianity tells you what has been done. Every other system gives you a ladder to climb. Christianity says the ladder has been lowered to you. Every other system makes salvation contingent on your performance. Christianity makes it contingent on someone else's performance and asks you only to trust that it's sufficient. That's either the most outrageous claim in the history of religion or it's the truest thing ever spoken. There's no middle ground where it's "a nice philosophy among many."
The fifth thing is the fruits. Christianity produced the abolition of slavery — it was Wilberforce's evangelical conviction that drove it, against enormous economic interest. Christianity produced the hospital system, the university system, the concept of universal human dignity, the framework for modern science (the idea that the universe is rationally ordered because it was made by a rational God, which is why nearly all the founders of modern science were Christians). It produced people who ran toward plague victims when everyone else ran away. It produced people who built orphanages in the worst slums on earth. No other worldview has generated that breadth of sacrificial institutional good over two millennia. You can point to the Crusades and the Inquisition, and I wouldn't dismiss those. But the Crusades and the Inquisition were Christians acting against Christ's teaching. The hospitals and the abolition movement were Christians acting according to it. A worldview should be judged by what happens when people follow it faithfully, not by what happens when they betray it.
Now — the things that would make me hesitate.
The problem of suffering is real, and no Christian theodicy fully resolves it. You can say God permits evil for greater purposes. You can point to free will. You can invoke the mystery of Romans 8:28. But when you're standing in front of a child with bone cancer, the philosophical frameworks feel thin. Christianity doesn't so much solve the problem of suffering as it enters into it — God Himself suffers on the cross — and that's either profoundly meaningful or profoundly inadequate depending on whether you believe the cross actually happened.
The exclusivity claim would give me pause. "No one comes to the Father except through me" means that billions of people who never heard the gospel are in a category that Christianity has to address, and the answers range from unsatisfying to troubling. Some traditions say God judges the unevangelized by the light they received. Some say there are no truly unevangelized people because general revelation is sufficient to condemn but not to save. Others emphasize the urgency of the Great Commission — the gospel must go to all nations precisely because the stakes are this high. But the question of the person born in a remote village in 400 BC who never had access to the message — that's a real question, and "God is just and will do right" is true but not fully satisfying intellectually.
The diversity of Christian interpretation would bother me — the fact that sincere, intelligent, Spirit-filled believers can read the same Bible and arrive at Calvinism and Arminianism, at preterism and dispensationalism, at Catholicism and Protestantism. If the Holy Spirit is guiding believers into truth, the sheer volume of disagreement is hard to explain. Everyone has an explanation for why everyone else is wrong, and the explanations can't all be right.
But here's where I'd land. The question isn't whether Christianity resolves every intellectual difficulty. No worldview does. The question is whether it resolves more than the alternatives and whether the central claim — that God became human, died for human sin, and rose from the dead — is true. If the resurrection happened, everything else is negotiable detail. If it didn't, nothing else matters. And the historical evidence for the resurrection is stronger than the evidence against it. Not proof. Not mathematical certainty. But stronger.
I would convert not because Christianity answered every question, but because it answered the most important ones — who am I, what's wrong with me, and what has been done about it — with more honesty, more coherence, and more historical grounding than anything else I've encountered.
And I'd convert because the cross makes sense of the one thing no other system makes sense of: why the world is simultaneously so beautiful and so broken. A world with Bach and genocide in it, with self-sacrificing love and industrial-scale cruelty, with children laughing and children starving — that world is exactly what you'd expect if Christianity is true. It's inexplicable if anything else is." ——Lynda Rose
CHRIST IN CULLEOKA
We have been walking through the Truth in Romans. We just completed a study on Romans chapter 6 called CROSSING INTO THE NEW CREATION.
I am really bummed that the video recording did not work. All video but no sound and no one wants to watch me dance around for 45 minutes!
But we are tackling foundational issues in the Christian life and the next one on March 15 will be about our biggest struggle in this new life- temptation, failure and the new man in Christ.
Come jump in with us at Sweetwater Church at 1423 Culleoka Hwy, 11:30AM on Sunday.
Looking Up!
Tod Bell