Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," Jesus said to doubting Thomas after silencing his doubts with tangible proof of the Easter miracle. Except for the five hundred or so people to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared, every Christian who has ever lived falls into the category of "blessed." I ask myself, Why do I believe?—I, who resemble Thomas perhaps more than any other disciple in my reluctance to accept what cannot be proved beyond doubt.

I have weighed the arguments in favor of the Resurrection, and they are indeed impressive. The English journalist Frank Morison dealt with most of the objections in the classic Who Moved the Stone? Although Morison had set out to discount the Resurrection as a myth, the evidence convinced him otherwise. Yet I also know that many intelligent people have looked at the same evidence and found it impossible to believe in the Resurrection. Although much about the Resurrection invites belief, nothing compels it. Faith requires the possibility of rejection, or it is not faith. What, then, gives me Easter faith?

One reason I am open to belief, I admit, is that at a very deep level I want the Easter story to be true. Faith grows out of a subsoil of yearning, and something instinctive in human beings cries out against the reign of Death. Whether hope takes the form of Egyptian pharaohs stashing their jewels and chariots in pyramids, or the modern American obsession with keeping bodies alive until the last possible nanosecond and then preserving them with embalming fluids in double-sealed caskets, we humans resist the idea of death having a final say. We want to believe otherwise.

I remember the year I lost three close friends in separate accidents. Above all else, I want Easter to be true because of its promise that someday I will get my friends back.

I suppose you could say I want to believe in fairy tales. I am not alone. Has any age not produced fairy tales? We first hear them in our cribs from parents and grandparents, and repeat them to our children, who will relay them to their children, and on it goes.

Even in this scientific age, the highest-grossing movies are variations on fairy tales: Star Wars, Aladdin, The Lion King. Astonishingly, in light of human history, most fairy tales have a happy ending. That old instinct, hope, billows up. Like life, fairy tales include much struggle and pain, yet even so they manage to resolve in a way that replaces tears with smiles. Easter does that, too, and for this as well as many other reasons, it rings true.

I believe in the Resurrection primarily because I have gotten to know God. I know that God is love, and I also know that we human beings want to keep alive those whom we love. I do not let my friends die; they live on in my memory and my heart long after I have stopped seeing them. For whatever reason—again, I imagine, human freedom lies at the core—God allows a planet where a man in the prime of life dies scuba diving and a woman is killed in a fiery crash on the way to a missions conference. But I believe that God is not satisfied with such a blighted planet. If I did not believe this, I would not believe in a loving God. Divine love will find a way to overcome. "Death, be not proud," wrote John Donne: God will not let death win.

But there is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those God loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.

This, perhaps, explains the change in the disciples' perspective as they sat in locked rooms discussing the incomprehensible events of Easter Sunday. In one sense, nothing had changed: Rome still occupied Palestine, the religious authorities still conspired against them, death and evil still reigned outside. Gradually, however, the shock of recognition gave way to a long, slow undertow of joy. If God could do that …