Last time around, I wrote about some conditions which I would consider necessary to a Christian faith, but that are not sufficient for me to be satisfied with one. If you’re not familiar with the notion of necessary and sufficient conditions, let’s think about what you need to start a campfire. Generally speaking, kindling and firewood are both necessary elements; it’s very hard to start a fire by lighting firewood directly, and kindling alone won’t burn long enough. However, those two things alone are not sufficient for a campfire. You also need a spark as from a flint, or something to heat the kindling, or something that spontaneously combusts like a match. Any one of those is sufficient to start the fire, but none are strictly necessary because one of the others can substitute.
With that distinction hopefully clearer, I’ll return to the topic of faith. It’s rare that anyone becomes a Christian without some exposure to other Christians and without a mind that is receptive to belief, so I consider those factors to be necessary. However, the additional factors that are sufficient to lead someone to accept a Biblical faith are likely to be more specific to each individual. I am not arguing that the following are the only right reasons to be a Christian, merely that they work for me. Nevertheless, I suspect there may be some value in discussing them because others may have similar kinds of questions or a similar mindset to mine.