In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus

[The Grand Nudger]

In this forum, John is largely playing the role of Christian apologist.

However, I do enjoy (and much prefer) him talking more about psychology.  I think of most of Christianity as being uninformed about psychology, so I am still looking forward to how he tries to reconcile them.

Whenever I have read any apologist trying to square free will (of any stripe), with an omniscient deity, it is usually a car crash of contradictions. The worst was an Islamic apologist who simply vacillated endlessly between two mutually exclusive claims. Usually (if they've thought it through) we get "omniscient lite".

-or freedom lite.  As we see in this thread.  That's compatibilism boiled down, whether it involves a god or not.  It begins with the acknowledgement that things are more or less exactly as their detractors say they are...and then insists that the sort of omniscience or freedom they're talking about, while not technically omniscient and/or free... is good enough for government work. This is how determinism fits with free will. By describing a freely willed choice as any one which suits our desires and motivations - even if we acknowledge that those are not parameters we freely set. Fatalism, otoh, doesn't give a shit whether our will is free or what that means. There is a plan, an outcome, a precognition. A fate. No matter what we do, that is what will happen. While fatalism can encompass the notion that things in the past are all set up to cause some particular future outcome, it also allows for the notion that we could do everything that might possibly cause an event not to happen, that all of the seeming preconditions for x could be absent...and it still will. Christian superstitions about free will are deeply tainted by their superstitions about fate. The fate of a person, the fate of man, the fate of the world. Gods grand plan and precognition.