Why Believe?

Richard Dawkins says faith is "belief without evidence." Peter Boghossian says faith is "pretending to know things you do not know." If that is what faith means, then yes, it is the opposite of reason. The trouble is that no major Christian thinker ever defined faith that way.

In the Christian tradition, faith means trust, the kind of trust you place in a person or in evidence you find compelling. The Latin is fides. When the Bible says Abraham had faith, it does not mean he closed his eyes and guessed. It means he trusted God on the basis of God's promises and previous track record. Faith and trust are the same word in Greek (pistis) and Hebrew (emunah).

Reason (Latin ratio) is the work of weighing evidence, testing claims, following arguments. The classical Christian view is that faith and reason are partners, not enemies. Augustine said "believe so that you may understand," and also "understand so that you may believe." Anselm summed it up as "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum). Aquinas distinguished truths reason can reach on its own (the existence of God, basic morality) from truths that need to be revealed (the Trinity, the Incarnation) and said both are rational, even when one needs help to see.

So faith goes beyond reason in some places, sure, just like trusting a doctor goes beyond what you personally can verify. But faith does not go against reason. The Christian asks for evidence about the resurrection, about prophecy fulfillment, about the moral law written on conscience, about the design in the universe, then commits in trust to the Person behind all of it.

The two errors to avoid are rationalism (only what cold logic can prove counts) and fideism (just believe, do not think). The tradition has always rejected both.

Quick reply line: "Faith means trust, not blind belief. Reason and faith are partners. You weigh the evidence, then commit. That is what every Christian thinker from Augustine to Aquinas to Plantinga has said."

What does it mean for something to be true? Pilate asked the question to Jesus' face (John 18:38) and walked off without waiting for an answer. Philosophy has been working on it ever since.

The major answers fall into a few families.

Correspondence theory. A statement is true if it matches the way things actually are. "The cat is on the mat" is true if and only if there is a real cat on a real mat. This is the common-sense view, the standard Christian view, and the position assumed throughout the Bible. It treats truth as a real relation between language (or belief) and the world.

Coherence theory. A statement is true if it fits consistently into a wider system of beliefs. The system has to hang together; the world out there does not directly do the work. Coherentists struggle to explain how multiple consistent systems could disagree, because consistency alone does not guarantee contact with reality.

Pragmatic theory. A statement is true if it works, if believing it pays off in practice. William James and John Dewey ran versions of this. The problem: a lot of false beliefs are useful, and a lot of true beliefs are inconvenient.

Deflationary theory. Truth is not really a substantive property at all. To say "it is true that the cat is on the mat" is just to say "the cat is on the mat" with emphasis. Useful linguistically, but it does not seem to fit the way we actually use the concept.

Constructivist theory. Truth is whatever a community agrees on; it is a social construction, often tied to power. This is the postmodern position. It cannot consistently be stated; if "truth is constructed" is itself just a construction, why should anyone listen?

Christianity has always operated with correspondence. The Bible's claims are about what actually happened (a virgin actually conceived; a man actually rose from the dead; a Word was actually with God in the beginning). The gospel becomes literally false if "true" is reduced to "what works" or "what my community accepts." Pilate could not afford the answer he was given because Jesus did not just say the truth; He said "I am the truth" (John 14:6), the correspondence between God and reality embodied in a Person.

A belief is falsifiable if you can say what would show it to be false. "It is raining outside" is falsifiable: open the door. "An invisible, undetectable dragon lives in my garage" is not: nothing you could ever see would count against it.

Christianity does something unusual. It tells you, in its own founding documents, what would prove it false. The apostle Paul wrote: "if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14, ASV). If Jesus did not rise from the dead, the whole faith collapses. Paul put the center of Christianity where anyone could check it: a public event, in a known place, with named witnesses.

Not every worldview does this. Some rest on a public event, as Christianity does. Others rest on an inner experience that only the believer can have, such as a feeling or a realization. And naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, makes many testable scientific claims but rests on a core belief that no experiment can test.

This page compares them fairly. The point is not that other people are foolish or dishonest. It is that worldviews differ in where they put their central claim, and that difference matters when someone asks, "How would you know if you were wrong?"

Look around at anything in the room. A chair, a cup, a tree out the window, your own hand. Each of these could have not existed. There is nothing built into the nature of chair that says it had to be. Its existence depends on something outside of itself: the wood, the carpenter, the tree, the soil, the sun. Things like this, things that could have failed to exist, philosophers call contingent.

Now stack all the contingent things in the universe together. The universe itself is the same kind of thing. It exists, but it could have not existed. There is nothing in the bare idea of universe that demands it be. So the same question applies to the whole stack: why is there a universe at all rather than nothing?

You cannot answer that by pointing to more contingent stuff. "The universe came from a prior universe" just pushes the question back. "It came from a quantum vacuum" names another contingent thing. "It's been here forever" still does not explain why an eternal contingent thing should exist rather than not exist. A long chain of borrowers is still all borrowers. Somewhere the chain has to land on something that does not need a loan, something that exists in itself, by the necessity of its own nature.

That is a necessary being. Not a thing that happens to exist; a thing that cannot not exist. There is only one kind of candidate for that role, and it is roughly what every classical tradition has called God.

Notice what this argument does not need. It does not need a beginning of the universe. Even a universe that has always existed is still a contingent universe. It does not need quantum physics or cosmology. It needs only one principle: things that exist have reasons for existing. That principle is what makes science possible. Deny it, and you are denying that "why?" is ever a real question.

The quick reply in conversation: "Anything that could have failed to exist needs a reason for existing. The universe could have failed to exist. So what is the reason? And whatever the reason is, if it could also have failed to exist, it needs a reason too. The chain only ends with something that cannot fail to exist."

The universe began to exist, so something must have caused it. That cause is God.

That is the whole shape of the Kalam in one sentence. The argument has two parts: first, whatever begins to exist has a cause (you cannot get a bicycle, a planet, or a universe from absolutely nothing); second, the universe itself began to exist (it is not eternal in the past). Put those together and the universe has a cause outside itself.

This matters because for most of history, atheists could simply say the universe always was. Modern cosmology, the Big Bang, the expansion of space, and a theorem published in 2003 by three physicists (Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin) closed that door. Even atheist physicist Alexander Vilenkin admits the evidence points to a beginning.

The strongest objection: maybe quantum physics shows things can pop into existence uncaused, or maybe a multiverse keeps producing universes forever. The Christian reply: a "quantum vacuum" is not nothing, it is a structured field with energy, and any multiverse that keeps expanding still has to have a starting point.

If the universe had a beginning, the cause of the universe cannot be made of matter, cannot be inside space or time, must be incredibly powerful, and must be personal (an impersonal mechanism eternally producing the universe would have produced it eternally, not at a finite moment). That profile matches God.

The full debate-prep treatment follows.

The universe is rigged for life. The numbers that govern physics, the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron, the energy in empty space, are set so precisely that if any of them were off by a hair, no stars, no planets, no chemistry, no life of any kind would exist.

How precisely? The cosmological constant (the energy of empty space) is tuned to about one part in 10 with 120 zeros after it. Roger Penrose, a Nobel-winning physicist who is not a Christian, calculated that the universe's initial low-entropy state had a probability so small the number cannot fit in this paragraph. These are not religious claims, working cosmologists across the philosophical spectrum agree the fine-tuning is real. The dispute is over what it means.

There are only three possible explanations. Either the numbers had to be what they are (necessity), they happened to land where they are by luck (chance), or someone set them (design). Necessity is dead, even leading physicists like Stephen Hawking abandoned it. That leaves chance or design.

The strongest objection: maybe there are infinitely many universes with different physics, and we just happen to live in the one that works (the multiverse). The Christian reply has several parts. The multiverse cannot be observed, so positing it to escape design is no more scientific than positing God. The machinery that would generate a multiverse needs its own fine-tuning. And in a vast enough multiverse, you would expect to be a "Boltzmann brain", a random fluctuation of consciousness with false memories, vastly more often than a real person in a real universe. We are not Boltzmann brains.

Design remains the best explanation. The designer would have to be intelligent (capable of selecting from a parameter space), powerful (operating at the cosmic scale), and intentional (selected for life). That profile matches God.

The full debate-prep treatment follows.

The Holocaust was really evil. Not unfashionable, not culturally disapproved, not "wrong for us," really evil. Torturing children for fun is really wrong. If you agree, you have already accepted half the moral argument.

Here is the argument in plain shape. There are moral facts that are true for everyone, everywhere, regardless of opinion (objective moral values and duties). Those facts require an explanation. The best, and arguably the only, explanation is a moral lawgiver who is the standard of goodness. That lawgiver is God.

The argument matters because every functioning human being makes moral judgments constantly, "that was unfair," "that was cruel," "he should not have done that." Those judgments only make sense if morality is real, not a feeling. But if there is no God, where does that realness come from? Atoms do not issue commands. Evolution explains why we believe in morality (it helps us survive in groups), but that is a story about belief, not about whether the beliefs are actually true.

The strongest objection: "Atheists are demonstrably moral, so morality does not need God." The Christian reply: the argument is about grounding, not behavior. Of course atheists can be moral, that is exactly what Christianity predicts (Romans 2 says God's law is written on every heart). The question is not whether atheists follow morality, but whether their worldview can explain why anyone should.

The other big objection: "Is something good because God says so (then it is arbitrary), or does God say so because it is good (then goodness is above God)?" This is the Euthyphro dilemma. The Christian answer: neither horn. Goodness flows from God's nature. God commands what He does because of what He is. Goodness is not arbitrary, but it is also not above God.

If you cannot call the Holocaust really evil, you have given up too much. If you can, you owe an account of what makes it really evil. The moral argument says only God can give that account.

The full debate-prep treatment follows.

C. S. Lewis spotted a strange problem at the heart of materialism. If the brain is just chemistry, every thought you have was caused by molecules bumping into other molecules. The chemistry does what chemistry does. It does not care whether the resulting belief is true.

Now think about what happens when you reason your way to a conclusion. "All bachelors are unmarried; John is a bachelor; therefore John is unmarried." The conclusion follows because the premises are true and because the logical relationship between them is genuine. Truth itself plays a role in producing the belief. We call this the ground-consequent relation, the conclusion holds because of what the premises mean.

Physics does not deal in meanings. Atoms do not respond to truth. They respond to mass, charge, position, and momentum. If your brain is purely physical and nothing else, then whatever thoughts come out of it are produced by physical forces that do not care about truth. The chemistry would have produced the same thoughts whether the premises were true or false.

Here is where it bites. If naturalism is true, no thought is ever a real act of reasoning. It is just chemistry. But the very claim "naturalism is true" is supposed to be a conclusion someone has reasoned their way to. The materialist is offering us a chain of reasoning whose conclusion is: no chain of reasoning can ever track truth. The position cuts its own throat.

The argument does not directly prove Christianity. It proves that something more than pure physics is going on whenever anyone actually thinks. Lewis's point was that human minds are designed to know, made in the image of a God whose own being is rational. That is a separate move (the abductive step), but the first step is decisive on its own terms.

Quick deployment: "If thought is nothing but brain chemistry, there is no reason to think that any particular thought is true, including the thought that everything is brain chemistry."

"If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?" This is the most famous challenge to Christian belief, and the one most people feel personally.

The basic shape: God is supposed to be able to stop evil, smart enough to know about it, and good enough to want it stopped. So why hasn't He?

The first thing to notice is that there are two very different versions of this challenge. The logical version says God and evil cannot both exist, ever. That version is widely treated as answered. Free creatures who can really love and choose are a real good, and you cannot have real freedom without the possibility that some will choose wrong. So evil's existence is not a contradiction with God's existence.

The evidential version is harder. It does not say God is impossible; it says the sheer amount and kind of suffering makes God unlikely. Christians have several responses: some suffering shapes character; some serves goods we cannot yet see; the cross shows that God Himself enters into suffering rather than watching from a distance; and final judgment will settle accounts that history leaves open.

There is also a sharp turn the objection can be made to take. The word evil only has bite if there really is a standard of good it falls short of. If atheism is true and there is no such standard, then suffering is just unpleasant, not evil. The complaint that the world is wrong quietly borrows the moral framework Christianity supplies.

A final note: there are three layers here that need different answers. The intellectual question (is this consistent?) gets a philosophical reply. The evidential question (is this probable?) gets a cumulative case. The pastoral question (how do I live with my own loss?) gets Job, the Psalms, and the cross. Mixing the three up makes all three harder.

Did Jesus actually exist? It is a question that comes up on social media all the time, usually with confidence and a YouTube link. The short answer is yes, and not because Christians want it to be yes. The agreement is essentially universal among historians, including secular and atheist scholars who otherwise reject Christian claims.

The historicity question is narrower than the question of who Jesus was. It just asks: was there a real first-century Jewish teacher from Galilee, baptized by John, crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30 AD? Whether he rose from the dead or worked miracles is a separate conversation. The mere existence question is what historians have already settled.

The evidence is broad. Inside the New Testament you have multiple independent sources (Mark, the material Matthew and Luke share, John, and several letters of Paul). Outside the New Testament, the Roman historian Tacitus mentions Jesus' execution under Pilate around 116 AD. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus twice, including referring to "James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ." The Roman governor Pliny the Younger writes to the emperor around 112 AD describing Christians worshipping Christ as a god. Suetonius mentions "Chrestus" causing disturbances in Rome under Claudius.

The opposite view, mythicism, says Jesus never existed and the Gospel figure is a literary or pagan-borrowed invention. Even Bart Ehrman, an agnostic scholar who has built a career criticizing conservative Christianity, wrote a whole book against mythicism in 2012, calling its supporters "amateurs."

This page lays out the evidence inside and outside the New Testament, walks through what mythicism claims and why historians reject it, and gives the standard apologetic deployment.

How do we know the Bible we read today is anything close to what the original authors wrote? It is a fair question. The original autographs (the actual sheets Paul or Luke wrote on) are long gone. What we have are copies. Copies of copies. So the question is: how good are those copies?

The answer is striking. By the standards of ancient literature, the Bible is in a class by itself. Take the New Testament. We have around 5,800 Greek manuscripts, another 10,000 in Latin, and roughly 9,300 in other ancient languages. Total: about 25,000 witnesses. The next-best-attested ancient book is Homer's Iliad at maybe 2,000. Tacitus survives in around 33 manuscripts. Caesar in around 250. No serious historian doubts what those Roman authors wrote. The New Testament's evidence base is ten times richer.

The earliest fragments push close to the original authors. A scrap of John 18 (called P52) is dated by its handwriting to the second century; the traditional estimate is around AD 125, and specialists now argue the real range runs later, perhaps to around 175. Even at the late end, a copy of John was in circulation in Egypt within a century of its writing. Substantial portions of John survive from around 200. Two near-complete Bibles, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, date to the mid-300s.

What about errors? Yes, the manuscripts disagree on small things: spelling, word order, one or two missing words. But for the questions that actually matter, no major Christian doctrine depends on a contested passage. F. F. Bruce's old line still holds: the wording of the New Testament is about 99 percent certain, and the 1 percent that is contested touches no central teaching.

The Old Testament's evidence works differently. The Hebrew text was preserved by the careful scribal tradition of the Masoretes. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran gave us Hebrew manuscripts a thousand years older than what we had before, and they match the later Masoretic Text astonishingly well. The Bible has survived intact.

Jesus made claims about Himself that, if false, would mean He was either lying or out of His mind. If neither, the only option left is that the claims are true and He is Lord.

That is the trilemma. C.S. Lewis put it on the modern map in Mere Christianity: a man who said the things Jesus said is not on the menu as "a great moral teacher who never claimed to be God." That option is gone. Jesus forgave sins on His own authority, accepted worship, applied God's name to Himself ("before Abraham was, I am"), and stood before the Sanhedrin and made a claim they convicted Him of blasphemy for. His own contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, heard those claims as deity claims.

So you have three options.

He could be a liar: He knew the claims were false and said them anyway. But liars want something out of the lie, and Jesus got tortured to death with no payoff He could not have walked away from. He explicitly refused political power. Liars also slip; close companions catch them. His disciples lived with Him for years and went to their own deaths convinced He was telling the truth.

He could be a lunatic: He sincerely believed He was God and was just sincerely wrong. But people who sincerely believe they are God look like people who sincerely believe they are God. They do not write the Sermon on the Mount. They do not handle hostile interrogations with the wisdom Jesus showed. They do not have skeptical family members eventually convert. The clinical profile does not fit.

If He was not lying and not deluded, the third option is that the claims are true.

The point of the argument is to block the cultural escape hatch ("great moral teacher who never claimed deity") and force the honest question.

How do you argue for the resurrection of Jesus without first having to convince your audience the Bible is reliable? Gary Habermas's answer: don't argue from everything the New Testament says. Argue from only the small handful of historical facts that the great majority of scholars, including non-Christian and skeptical ones, already accept. Then ask which explanation best accounts for those facts.

Habermas spent more than four decades cataloguing the scholarly literature on the resurrection (over 3,400 publications) and tracking which claims about Jesus's death and what followed have near-unanimous acceptance. Five rose to the top. (1) Jesus was killed by Roman crucifixion. (2) His tomb was found empty shortly after His burial. (3) His disciples sincerely believed they encountered Him alive after His death. (4) The persecutor of the early Church, Paul of Tarsus, was abruptly converted by an experience he interpreted as the risen Jesus appearing to him. (5) Jesus's skeptical brother James was similarly converted and went on to lead the Jerusalem church and die for the claim.

The argument is then straightforward. The resurrection explains all five facts at once: the empty tomb (the body is gone because it was raised), the appearances (because He actually appeared), the conversions of Paul and James (because they actually saw Him). The leading naturalistic alternatives each fail on one or more of the five. Hallucinations don't happen to groups, don't empty tombs, and don't convert enemies of the movement. A stolen body doesn't explain the disciples' martyrdom or Paul's conversion. The swoon theory (Jesus survived) is medically untenable and doesn't explain Paul either. Late legend is ruled out by an early creed buried in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 that dates the claim within a few years of the event.

What makes the approach distinctive is the rhetorical move: by accepting only the data the skeptic already accepts, it forecloses the easy deflection of "you're using Christian premises against me." The premises are the skeptic's own. The argument is abductive, inference to the best explanation, not a strict deductive proof. Its force comes from the combination of conceded premises and the explanatory failure of every naturalistic rival on the table.

Is Jesus the only way to be saved, or just one good way among many? Christianity has always answered: only way. Jesus said it about Himself: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Peter said it about Him: "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12).

That sounds arrogant in a pluralistic culture. The standard pushback: "How can you say one religion is right and all the others wrong? What about sincere Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists who never heard of Jesus?"

The Christian answer comes in layers. First, exclusivity is about Christ's work, not Christian smugness. There is one fix for the human problem because there is one problem (sin alienating us from a holy God) and one fixer (the Son of God dying in our place). The exclusivity is built into the gospel itself, not bolted on by missionaries.

Second, Christian thinkers have long distinguished different views on who actually receives Christ's salvation. Restrictive exclusivism says only those who consciously trust Christ in this life are saved. Inclusivism says Christ saves everyone who is saved, but some of them may not have known His name (think of Old Testament saints, infants, people who never heard the gospel through no fault of their own). Pluralism says all religions are equally salvific. Christianity has consistently rejected pluralism. The debate between restrictivism and inclusivism stays inside the church.

Third, even on the strictest view, Christianity is not saying "people in other religions are bad." It is saying salvation runs through one channel, the cross, regardless of who is invited to that channel. Inviting more people is the church's job, not narrowing the channel.

Quick reply: "Exclusivity is about Christ being the only fix for the human problem, not about Christians being superior. Jesus is either the way or He isn't. Both can't be true."

Sin is one of the most misunderstood words in Christianity. People hear it and picture an angry church lady wagging a finger. The biblical idea is darker and also more honest than that.

The Hebrew and Greek words for sin do not mean naughty behavior. The main Hebrew word, chattat, means missing the mark, like an arrow falling short of the target. Another word, pesha, means willful rebellion, the deliberate choice to cross a line. A third, avon, means bentness or twistedness, a shape that has gone wrong. The Greek word hamartia also means missing the mark. The Bible uses several words because sin has several layers.

The Christian claim is not that humans are cartoon villains. It is that every one of us, by nature and by what we do, stands in a real rupture with the God who made us. Some of that rupture is visible: lies we tell, people we hurt, vows we break. Some of it is invisible: pride, envy, self-deception, the inner orientation that puts ourselves at the center.

This matters because if you do not understand the diagnosis, you cannot understand the cure. The cross of Christ only makes sense as a response to something serious. If sin is small, then the cross is overkill. If sin is what the Bible says it is, then the cross is exactly what was needed.

The codex page covers the biblical vocabulary, the three aspects of sin (the inherited condition called original sin, the things we ourselves do called actual or personal sin, and the way evil settles into structures called social sin), and the major traditions' positions: Catholic, Reformed, Wesleyan, Eastern Orthodox.

The word gospel means good news. It is the announcement at the center of Christianity, and what makes it news rather than advice is that it is about something that already happened.

Paul gives the shortest version. "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, He was buried, He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Three events, all historical, all public, with consequences that change everything else.

Here is the longer version in plain order. God made the world and made people in His image. People rebelled, and we are still rebelling. The Son of God became human in Jesus of Nazareth, lived a perfect life, willingly died on a Roman cross to take the penalty our sins deserve, was placed in a tomb, came back to life bodily three days later, and is now reigning as Lord. He has given the Holy Spirit to everyone who turns from their old way of life and trusts Him. The result is forgiveness now and resurrection life in a renewed creation later.

This is news, not advice. Religion in the general sense is mostly advice: do this, follow that, climb the ladder, balance the scales. The gospel is the announcement that the climb has already been made, by someone else, for you. The right response is not effort but trust, and that trust then changes everything that comes after.

A useful distinction: the gospel itself is one thing, and gospel presentations are another. The Bridge Diagram, the Romans Road, Four Spiritual Laws, Three Circles, all of these are teaching tools. They are useful for explaining the gospel to a particular person in a particular setting, but they are not themselves the gospel. The Bible itself preaches the gospel differently in different places. Peter at Pentecost (Acts 2) starts with the Jewish Scriptures and the resurrection. Paul in Athens (Acts 17) starts with the unknown God and creation. Both are preaching the same gospel; both are using the presentation that fits their audience.

The page below works through the historical-doctrinal content, the gospel-versus-presentations distinction, the five-pillar pedagogical structure (God, Man, Christ, Response, Result), and how different evangelical traditions package the same core message.

Paul calls it "of first importance" (1 Corinthians 15.3-4, "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures", NASB95). The gospel is not advice (do this); it is news (this happened, and here is what it means for you).

This page is a search-landing-page distinguishing the gospel itself from gospel presentations, and surveying the position-spread on what is essential content.

See G2098 - euangelion for the word study.

How does a Christian know the faith is true, and not just think it probably is? Part of the answer is public evidence: arguments for God, the historical case for Jesus, and above all the resurrection. But the New Testament adds a second ground that no argument can supply. Paul writes that "The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God" (Romans 8:16, ASV). John writes his letter "that ye may know that ye have eternal life" (1 John 5:13, ASV).

This is called the witness of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, gives the believer a direct, personal assurance that the gospel is true and that he belongs to God. It is not a feeling that replaces evidence, and it is not an argument. It is closer to the way you know a friend's voice: you do not reason your way to it, you recognize it.

The two grounds work together. Evidence is what a Christian can show to someone else. The Spirit's witness is how the believer knows for himself. Neither one replaces the other, and Scripture itself tells believers to test every inner claim to the Spirit against the truth God has already made public.

Maybe you have been asking questions about God for a while. Maybe today something clicked. Either way, you might be wondering: what do I actually do now?

Becoming a Christian is not about cleaning up your life first. It is not about joining a club or learning the right words. It is about turning to Jesus and trusting Him. God does the saving. Your part is to come to Him honestly.

This page walks through it in four simple steps, gives you a prayer you can pray, and tells you what comes next.