The Christian Detective: A Project Proving the Christian Truth

By James Axel

“The Christian Detective” was the codename given to a group of retired English detectives in the mid-1930s that wanted to see if they could put forward a convincing case for how Jesus Christ – a man – could also plausibly be God. They sought to forensically investigate all the circumstances of the Christian story using their extensive detective skills and experience and put Christianity on a sound footing that would pass muster in a court of law and meet the standard of proof of being true at least on the “balance of probabilities” if not “beyond reasonable doubt”. In 2015, a number of practicing detectives across the world, keeping in touch via the internet, adopted the name and retained the same objective: to prove the truth of their Christian faith. Here is their proof.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244769116

James Axel

James Axel writes about Christianity. Can it be made relevant to the modern world? You won't believe what the TRUE Christian message is. Come and find out what Christianity is really all about. It will change your life forever.

Book preview

Preface

The Christian Detective was the codename given to a group of retired English detectives in the mid-1930s that wanted to see if they could put forward a convincing case for how Jesus Christ – a man – could also plausibly be God. They sought to forensically investigate all the circumstances of the Christian story using their extensive detective skills and experience and put Christianity on a sound footing that would pass muster in a court of law and meet the standard of proof of being true at least on the balance of probabilities if not beyond reasonable doubt. The outbreak of WWII brought the project to a premature end, and it became one of history’s many forgotten stories.

In 2015, a number of practicing detectives across the world, keeping in touch via the internet, adopted the name and retained the same objective: to prove the truth of their Christian faith.

The Christian gospels tell eternal truths, yet are also documents of their time, designed for the unsophisticated understanding of the audience of the day. There would have been no point in Jesus teaching quantum mechanics to the people of 2,000 years ago. It’s difficult enough to teach quantum mechanics today.

It’s also the case that Christ’s audience had a different psyche from that of the average person today. It was a spiritually superior psyche but intellectually inferior.

These considerations raise two vital tasks: to try to get modern people to understand the minds of ancient humanity in order to see through the eyes of their ancestors and thereby enhance their own spirituality, which is increasingly diluted and corroded by modern life, and to try to present the ancient truths in modern intellectual language that will make them comprehensible to today’s audience. This is the mission of the Christian Detective.

The group hired me, a ghostwriter, to present their conclusions, which they had couched in closely reasoned detective-speak. They decided that at this stage it would be better to provide the flavor of their findings, rather than their detailed, lengthy arguments.

I took on the task as a mere job, albeit a fascinating one, yet it has had the profoundest effect on me. I am happy to admit that I have now become a Churchgoing Christian, having previously been an atheist zealot in the camp of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. My life has much more meaning and purpose now, and everything seems much brighter and more optimistic.

I always saw myself as a Doubting Thomas: the eternal truth seeker, condemned to work out everything for myself, refusing to take anything on faith. Then, while I was working on this book, I had an epiphany. I understood that Jesus is real, not as a matter of simple faith but of reason, and, above all, of direct personal experience. You will never experience Jesus Christ unless you let him in. Once you do, your perspective on everything changes once and for all.

Working on this book was what allowed me to make myself receptive to Christ, to fully open my mind to the possibility that he was indeed real, and always had been. Previously, I had closed my mind to Jesus’ existence, and so, naturally, I could never find him. Nothing is more important than freeing and opening your mind.

The center of the modern Christian Detective’s case is a theory called bicameralism, which concerns the fact that humans have two brain hemispheres rather than a single brain sphere. Strange though it may seem, this means that humans can have two minds rather than one. According to the Christian Detective, this explains how Jesus Christ the man and Jesus Christ the God (God the Son) could exist as two independent natures – human and divine – in one person. This is the only realistic way to unite man and God.

Thanks to bicameralism, as I shall show, we can all be Jesus in the truest sense. The mechanism really exists, and I should know. The reason why I am now a convinced Christian is that I had a direct experience of Jesus. Writing this book made me receptive to Jesus, and Jesus needed no second invitation. Jesus came into my brain, and specifically into my right hemisphere, and he can do the same for everyone else.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. All good books require a beginning, a middle, and an end. To understand the reality of Christianity, we must of course begin at the beginning, the beginning of everything. How did things begin at all?!

In the Beginning

What is the first task of the Christian Detective? It’s to explain what existence is. There is no bigger task.

What is something? According to science, it’s the spacetime world of matter. But what would happen if we stripped away space, time, and matter? Would that then leave nothing? But what is nothing? Is it the same as non-existence? Is an immaterial entity outside space and time – the opposite of science’s something – nothing at all, or something with radically different properties from conventional, scientific something?

Descartes, the first modern philosopher, said that there are two substances: thinking substance (mind) and extended substance (matter). Thinking substance is immaterial, unextended, and outside space and time. It is not non-existence, but it is certainly not matter in space and time either. We might refer to matter as external, observable substance, and mind as internal, unobservable substance. We experience matter as something outside us and mind as our inside nature. We can see matter, we can’t see mind. We can’t directly experience matter (it must be interpreted via mind), but we can and do directly experience mind.

Matter is one type of something and is associated with space and time. Mind is a different type of something and is not associated with space and time. In the post-Cartesian period, science could not understand the concept of mind – something they could not see, something outside space and time with no material composition, something on which they could perform no observations, measurements, or experiments – so it concluded that mind didn’t exist. Science declared that everything is matter, and that mind, to the extent that it exists at all, must be a product of matter. No matter, no mind; mind is totally dependent on matter.

Science inevitably leads to atheism, meaninglessness, purposelessness, and nihilism. Why? Because matter is inherently meaningless, purposeless and pointless, with no intentionality and no objectives. Matter is not trying to achieve anything.

Science has staked everything on matter, and the space and time by which matter is always accompanied. But what if Descartes was right all along? What if there is something beyond matter, beyond space and time? Why should the fact that empirical science cannot detect it mean that it does not exist? Contrary to what science concludes, absence of empirical evidence is not evidence of absolute absence. Science has never disproved the existence of mind as something different and independent from matter. It has simply decreed that mind (the inside) comes from matter (the outside), though it has never once demonstrated how this is possible (and how can the inside come from the outside?). How can mindless matter produce mind? It’s a logical impossibility. You cannot extract a property from something that does not possess that property. Similarly, lifeless matter cannot produce life, regardless of how you arrange matter. You cannot produce subjects from objects, insides from outsides.

Matter, space, and time are all about parts. Parts can come together and break apart. Bodies, made of atoms, are continuously gaining and shedding atoms. When bodies die, they break up into individual atoms, or small clusters of atoms. They become dust. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Are there natural wholes, things that are not parts and can never be parts? Minds are wholes. When bodies die, minds do not. Minds go on. A living person is a combination of a whole living mind connected to a body made of parts. The body is alive by virtue of being connected to the living mind. The body is the outside of the mind, and the mind the controlling inside of the body. When the connection between mind and body breaks, the mind continues to exist without a body, but the body is now lifeless and immediately starts breaking down into dust.

Minds, being partless, cannot die. They are immortal. What is the ultimate mind?

Reviews for The Christian Detective

[Mikey Somersall · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent perspective on Christianity in rational terms. Highly recommended.