Note: This is a first draft of an essay on which I have spent many hours. Please feel free to send me comments
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to read offline; and you may print it, in its entirety, for someone without web access.) Thank you. -- Hal Fulton

If you want, you may look at some reader comments.

(version 1.1 - 3 August 1998 - fixed roughly 30 typos)
(version 1.2 - 30 Sept. 1998 - one more typo)
(version 1.3 - 3 March 1999 - eight more typos)
(version 1.4 - 17 October 2000 - added reference to Blondin;
        fixed guestbook which had always been broken)
(version 1.5 - 28 April 2002 - fixed Spong's book title)
(version 1.6 - 4 June 2002 - deleted first name of old friend)



Faith, Reason, and Doubt




There is a story that a teacher once asked a class for a definition of faith. One of the children answered: "Faith is when you believe something which you know ain't true."
This account is traceable to Mark Twain, though I don't think it was original with him. I will assume it is a product of someone's genius and sense of humor rather than a true story.
The point is, it could be a true story. In our modern society, faith is viewed as a wispy, tenuous thing, vague and shadowy. Many people, believers and unbelievers alike, could sympathize with the schoolboy's definition. Yet this kind of doublemindedness is even more unbecoming an adult than it is a child, and even more unbecoming a believer than an unbeliever.
Over the last several years, a growing understanding has slowly dawned on me. I have come to a better conception of what faith actually is— and, almost as importantly, what it is not.
As I grew in understanding, I also became aware that many other people were in the same condition in which I had found myself. It seemed to me that the modern American has, for the most part, simply missed the point entirely.
I don't believe it was always that way. The problem may not actually have arisen in the last two centuries; but I believe it has worsened. I am not sure of all the factors that went into shaping the misconceptions about the Christian faith. I could make certain guesses; but I am neither a historian nor a sociologist, and anyhow, that is not my purpose in writing this essay. Like a doctor trying to treat an injury, I am less concerned with how the injury was received than with how it can be healed.
The question I want to address, then, is simply this: What is faith and how does it relate to the human intellect?



Six Impossible Things

If we look at the schoolboy above, we see a person who, at a young age, has already been torn between his faith and his reason. I can respect such a person; but I cannot tolerate his world view. It is a world view that could only be born in the absence of meaningful guidance and instruction. It is a world view that is unacceptable to the believer and the skeptic alike.
I am reminded of this conversation from Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:

"...Now I'll give you something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day."
"I ca'n't believe that!" said Alice.
"Ca'n't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one ca'n't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast..."

Christians are taught to believe many things which may seem to be fairy tales suitable only for the minds of children. Countless millions of Christians have felt the burden of trying to believe things which they did not. It is probably worthwhile to remember that Lewis Carroll (whose real name was Charles Dodgson) was not only a mathematician but also a minister.
But is this the real duty of the Christian? To believe six impossible things before breakfast?
One problem with the communication of Christian beliefs is that there is usually no proper foundation given for them. To borrow an example from mathematics: A truth that really should be a theorem is treated as an axiom. Children are fed conclusions without being given any of the subordinate truths that lead up to them; they are dropped from a helicopter onto a mountaintop without being allowed to experience the climb.
In itself, this problem might not be so tragic. What makes it much worse is that questions are not tolerated. If a child asks too many questions, or the wrong questions, or questions that adults themselves cannot answer, he may find the results unsatisfying. He may be told not to worry about it; he may find that adults nervously avoid certain topics; or he may even find himself hushed up.
In any case, I believe that the responses adults usually make have the effect of conditioning the child not to ask questions. The side effect of not asking questions is, of course, not learning.
Why am I discussing children so much? First of all, because most Christians have their beliefs communicated to them when they are children. Secondly, because in regard to matters of faith, many Christians never grow beyond childhood.
It seems to me that most people are laboring under a couple of false impressions. One is that faith is arbitrary; the other is that it works backwards.
I was talking in late 1994 with a college student named Charles, who was relating the story of some conversations he had had with disbelieving friends. I will recall it as well as I can here.
"Belief in God is completely irrational," said one.
"Yes, I know," he said. "I believe anyway."
"There's no logical basis for it at all," was the protest.
"Yes," said Charles. "I still believe."
"But— why do you believe?"
"I just do," he said.
Some people would regard Charles as a kind of hero— and so do I, in a way. I have not always stood up for my beliefs when I had the opportunity, and I admire him for doing so. But I cannot agree with him; I think he is sincere but misguided. I think he is a foolish kind of hero, rushing wildly at the enemy line even though he is carrying neither weapons nor armor.
His faith is arbitrary. It is based on nothing, and he even admits it. His faith works backwards— he knows his conclusion at the very beginning. If he even attempts to justify or rationalize his belief, it is only after the fact. He spends his energy bolstering his prejudice.
A minister recently told the story of a student who went to one of his elders in the agony of a faith crisis. "Why do you believe in God?" he asked. And the answer came back: "Because I want to." The minister who told this story seemed to approve of the answer.
But, of course, I can believe in anything that I "want to." I can believe in the Tooth Fairy or in pink elephants if I really wish. It won't make them real, however, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to be convinced on the basis of my personal tastes. Such a faith is arbitrary— and it works backwards, presupposing the thing which should really be the conclusion.
I remember reading once a discussion between an agnostic (who started the ball rolling) and a few other people. This was on an online forum transmitted over the Internet. This person (whose name was Brian) asked some honest questions which I thought were really very reasonable. He had some difficulties with the Christian world view in general, and picked the existence of God as a starting point— naturally one of the most common starting points of all. But the responses he got did not seem very well-reasoned to me, and even less so to him. One respondent made light of his attempts to be rational, and said, "Choose God over logic." But Brian answered, "Why not say, 'Choose Hitler over logic'?"
In a sense, he was right. If your choices are made by rejecting the powers of reason that God gave you, then anything is believable. Choose the Tooth Fairy over logic, if you want to; or choose peanut butter over logic. It's a purely arbitrary decision; and it is backwards reasoning because you have already decided where you want to be: Just jump to a point in midair and resist any questions about how you got there.
But I cannot accept an arbitrary faith. For one thing, it is not accepted in any other area of life. Many people have believed there was a burglar outside the house; but unless they can say that they have heard or seen something, we regard them as just nervous people with overactive imaginations.
When a jury convenes to hear a case, why do they listen to the evidence? Surely it would be a great timesaver if all the jurors could simply believe in the guilt or innocence of the accused without having to go to all that effort. And surely millions of high school geometry students would benefit greatly if the teacher asked for the proof of a theorem and they were allowed to answer, "Well, I just believe very strongly that the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees; I know it in my heart."
For another thing, I find that people with an arbitrary faith were usually influenced to think that way at a very early age. If you shape a child's mind early enough, he will believe anything; and if he never learns to think for himself, he will continue in those beliefs forever.
Many atheists and agnostics point to the cultural aspects of religion as being proof that it is all nonsense anyway; and I confess, the argument is somewhat compelling. After all, the vast majority of "religious" people believe the same things their parents taught them as children. The argument goes: If you had been raised in India, you would probably be Hindu or Buddhist; if you had been raised in Iran, you would be Muslim. You're just a Christian because your parents were; and they, because their parents were.
This is frighteningly close to the truth. The world must contain untold millions of people (of all religions) whose faith can essentially be summed up in the phrase: "Because Mommy and Daddy said so." Entire wars have been fought over this, and countless lives have been claimed.
I think that there are many things in our society masquerading as faith. What many see as faith may actually be just force of habit; or patriotism; or stubbornness; or family pride; or intellectual laziness; or childishness; or gullibility; or the effects of being brainwashed. The problem I see is that faith is kept separate from intellect, whereas God wants every part of a Christian, including his mind.



Two Kinds of People

There is an old joke which says that there are two kinds of people— those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. If that is true, I must be the first kind; because I intend to draw a distinction between two different personality types that I have seen among my fellow Christians.
For now, let's just call these Type A and Type B. And in case the reader is curious about my own stand, let me admit in advance that I am a Type A.
The Type A Christian is involved in a continual inward struggle with regard to his faith— a spiritual tug-of-war that is not necessarily related to the struggle between good and evil desires. The Type B Christian, on the other hand, is involved in the struggle between good and evil tendencies, but the other struggle does not exist in his life. And if he perceived it in someone else, he would probably associate it with the other (moral) struggle.
Type A is plagued by fear and doubt— especially doubt. He questions the foundation of his faith; he worries about conflicts between his faith and the other areas of his life; and he is frustrated by the Type B person who does not share (or understand) these concerns.
Type B is highly pragmatic. He is always conscious of the moral struggle and is always trying to improve himself and increase his faith; but this increase is measured chiefly in the moral dimension. He may think that Type A is confused— perhaps even sinful or rebellious.
My last college roommate was named Dan Butcher. He and I lived together for three years and got to know each other pretty well. We usually got along and often agreed with each other on various issues; but there were times when we could not only not agree, we could not even understand each other.
He was an English major. I was not so well-read as he, but we occasionally found common ground. We had both read James Joyce's fictionalized autobiography A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; this was a book that I liked very much and had read two or three times. As I recall, he did not enjoy it.
But there was a conversation that we had about James Joyce which I still remember. He told me about something that had come up in class— something to do with Joyce commenting on a fragment of scripture. I don't recall whether Joyce was speaking as himself or through a fictional character. I never read the passage myself.
The scripture reference was from Mark 9 (I quote here from the New International Version):

When they came to the other disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and the teachers of the law arguing with them. As soon as all the people saw Jesus, they were overwhelmed with wonder and ran to greet him.
"What are you arguing with them about?" he asked.
A man in the crowd answered, "Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not."
"O unbelieving generation," Jesus replied, "how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me."
So they brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth.
Jesus asked the boy's father, "How long has he been like this?"
"From childhood," he answered. "It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us."
"'If you can'?" said Jesus. "All things are possible for him who believes."
Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"

I will break off the story there. If you are unfamiliar with the ending, you are welcome to look it up.
The key sentence here is the utterance of the boy's father: "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" In the King James Version, it reads: Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!
Joyce apparently made the comment that he never understood what the man meant by saying that— why he said it in that particular way. And Dan, as I recall, considered this a refreshing point of view, a relief and an encouragement to him because he had never understood it either.
On the other hand, I identified deeply with that man in the story; and I suppose I thought everyone did. In fact, I almost felt that the words could have come from my own mouth. So I was confused by what Dan was telling me— that the author Joyce was did not grasp the man's viewpoint and neither did Dan.
Obviously, I couldn't ask James Joyce about it, since he had been dead for many decades. But I had my roommate right here in front of me, and I could certainly interview him a little.
"Well," I said, rather at a loss. "What would you have said instead?"
I don't think Dan even hesitated before replying. "I would have said, 'Help me to believe more,'" he told me.
I don't remember the rest of this conversation, if it even went on from there. I do remember that I was completely unable to grasp what Dan was trying to tell me. But it was neither the first time nor the last that he and I had thoroughly confused each other; so life went on. I never forgot the conversation, though, and over the years I went back to it many times in my mind.
I suppose it was three or four years later that I finally came to a sort of understanding of what was going on here. At least, I think I understand it now. I have never spoken about it with Dan since that time; and Joyce is rather close-mouthed these days.
It seems to me that some people have an inner conflict between belief and doubt— a conflict that others do not have. I am the first kind; Dan was the second.
Thus some will feel a battle raging within, a battle in which belief and unbelief are locked in a perpetual struggle. The father in the story seems to me to be this type; he is torn between two world views. When Jesus calls on him to believe, he appeals to Jesus to help his weakness. This type of person will view doubt or unbelief as an almost palpable thing— perhaps to the same extent that belief is a thing in itself.
To show the difference in these points of view, let me make two analogies. Some people look at faith and doubt as being like light and darkness; we sometimes speak of light as "pushing back the darkness," but we are only using a figure of speech. "Darkness" is not a real thing; it is only the absence of light. The only way of getting rid of the darkness is with more light.
But I say that faith and doubt are more like the boundary between the land and the ocean. If you walk along the beach, where the land ends and the water begins, you would never make the mistake of thinking that the ocean was simply "the absence of land." It is a real thing, just as real as the land. When the tides come and go, the boundary wavers back and forth; and if you are afraid of a flood, you can put out sandbags.
The father in the story was not concerned merely with increasing his faith, because his doubt was more than just the absence of faith. It was a separate entity living inside— a thing to be dealt with in its own right.
It seems clear to me that these two types of people exist. What is less clear to me is this: Which viewpoint is the more correct one?
I have a natural prejudice to believe that people whose experiences are similar to mine are the ones who are "right." There are other possibilities, of course. It may be that each side has elements of the truth, that neither one can claim a monopoly. It may be that it is strictly a perceptual matter— a matter of individual personality or taste. It may be that it is necessary to have both types around in order to achieve some kind of balance.
However, I am not ready to give in so easily. I want to make a case for my own viewpoint being the more accurate. After I make that case, the reader must judge for himself.



The Paradox

Many people would say that the Type B Christian is better off than his Type A counterpart. But speaking in defense of my own kind, I would argue that this isn't necessarily true.
But how can that be? How can it be better to live a life punctuated by episodes of doubt than to live a steadfast life day to day never experiencing doubt?
I feel obligated to offer some support for this idea so that the reader will not think it is purely my own. Allow me to quote a few thinkers from the past:
Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. (Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity)
Genuine doubt is the reverse side of genuine faith. (George Buttrick)
Doubt is but another element of faith. (St. Augustine)
Perhaps the quotations above will at least pique the interest of the Type B reader. This leads us back to the original question: How can this be true?
I have an answer, but it is one I find difficult to express. I will begin with an analogy.
Imagine a person who occasionally spends some time weightlifting. A good workout will cause him to exert himself, to strain his muscles. He will perspire; he will become fatigued; maybe he will even get winded. A few hours or a day later, he may be stiff and sore— even to the point of having difficulty moving.
Now imagine a person who not only does not lift weights, but knows nothing of the intent or purpose of doing so; the whole experience is totally foreign to him. If he sees the other person sweating, grunting, and straining, he will feel sorry for him. When he sees him stiff and sore, he may even be alarmed. He might say to himself, "This person has a problem. All this can't be good for his health. Look at me. I'm never tired. I never sweat that way. I'm never in pain or stiff or sore. And when he's lifting those huge barbells, he can only lift his hands over his head ten times. The weights are obviously the problem. I'll bet I could lift my hands over my head two hundred times. And I'll bet that without those weights, he could be just like me."
All right, I will admit this analogy is rather extreme; but it gets my point across. The first person is a Type A, and the second is a Type B. And clearly it is the first person who grows and becomes stronger. To the Type B person I am compelled to say: Do your muscles never ache? Perhaps it is because they have never been used.



A Fragile Faith

Once while I was in college, I was in a night class on the four gospels. It was taught at the University Christian Student Center by a minister named Ray Notgrass. I have forgotten most of the material, but one or two things stick out in my mind.
It's probably impossible (or at least irresponsible) to study the gospels as a group without discussing some of the places where they conflict. I am not prepared to say that the four accounts actually contradict each other; but that is a subject beyond the scope of this discussion. Let us at least admit that there are passages that are difficult to reconcile with each other.
One of these came up in class when Ray pointed out a difference in two parallel passages. One was Matthew 5:32, which reads, "But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to commit adultery, and anyone who marries a woman so divorced commits adultery."
The other was Mark 10:11-12, reading in part, "...Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery." Note that in this passage there is no mention of marital unfaithfulness as a justification for divorce.
Ray mentioned this in passing, but it did not make much of an impression on me. Although I was not much of a Bible scholar, I had noticed this before; and furthermore, I thought it was one of the least troublesome of the conflicts that I had seen.
But there were two students who were very disturbed by this discovery. One was a university student named Keith Yarbrough; the other was Gladys Walls, an older woman who served the student center as a cook. They went to talk to Ray during our break in the middle of the two-hour class. They had not noticed this little discrepancy before, and I gathered that they wished Ray had not brought it up now.
I can't remember the details of that discussion, but I remember wondering how a person could read the Bible for as many years as they had and never have seen the difference in those two sections of the gospels. I also got the impression that they were almost accusing Ray of weakening their faith by even mentioning this little item.
Well, there was no lack of respect between me and them; and I never had a single argument with either of them. But there are two observations I would like to make.
First of all, how does anyone read the Bible as intensively as these people had for so many years without seeing conflicts of that nature? Without even stopping to think, I could name half a dozen that bothered me much more than this one. Could it be that they were reading each little passage in isolation from all the others, much as we read a dictionary? Did they read the Bible carefully, seriously, and critically? It seems to me that they probably did not.
Secondly, it appears obvious to me that it is never wrong to place two passages from the Bible side by side and ask how they relate to each other. Of course, the answer may well be that the two passages are not related at all; but if they are, then we have nothing to fear from comparing them. If the Bible has internal consistency, then we may browse through it at will and see what we may find. If it does not, then we gain nothing by refusing to face that fact.
Let me put that second point a different way: If your faith as a Christian is upset by reading the Bible, then there is probably something wrong with your faith. Furthermore, if your faith keeps you from reading the Bible or from studying it too deeply or too seriously— again, there is a problem with your faith.
Of course, I am approaching all this as someone who has gone through that entire experience and emerged on the other side of the tunnel. I am not saying that we should enter into Bible study with arrogant prejudices. I hope that I am saying just the opposite— that we should study the Bible with honesty and sincerity. If our study is serious enough, and we approach it with an open mind, there will be times when our faith is disturbed. I view these as growing pains.
Many people would say that if things arise which disturb your faith, you should simply put those things out of your mind— simply ignore them. I just can't agree with that. The thing to do is not to ignore such things or pretend they don't exist, but to work through them and resolve them. If the overall Christian world view is true, then there is a valid explanation for every conflict or problem we encounter in the scripture. If that world view is not true, then what is the purpose of ignoring facts in order to hold onto a falsehood?
But in our society, the question of truth or falsehood is sometimes forgotten. I recall once that my friend (and physics teacher) Dr. F. Douglas Shields once commented on this. I can only paraphrase from memory what he said; so any inaccuracy here is my fault.
Dr. Shields pointed out that people give every reason to believe in Christianity except that it is all true. They will talk about "what Jesus has done" for them, or "what Jesus means" to them; they will talk about fulfillment in life, about meaning and purpose; they may talk about what a great teacher Jesus was, how important his ideas were, what beautiful thoughts he expressed; they may talk about how Christianity is still relevant today and how it combines high ideals with down-to-earth practicality; what the results would be if everyone practiced the teachings of Jesus; and so on. They may give all these reasons and more for believing; but rarely will anyone suggest that you believe in Christianity because it is true.
This reminds me further of another incident in Ray Notgrass's class. I was talking during the break with a friend named Kenny Kemp; I don't remember how the conversation started— perhaps from some remark he made during class— but he must have said something about believing in Jesus because of the sense of peace that comes from knowing him.
"Well," I said, "that's fine; but that's not why we believe in Christianity."
"Sure it is," he said, looking a little amazed.
"No," I said. "We believe because it's true, not just because it works. After all, even Buddhism works."
"No, it doesn't!" he said. "I don't believe you can find a real sense of peace there."
"I think millions of Buddhists would argue with you," I told him. "If all you want is a peaceful feeling, you can get it from pretty much any religion you like."
He was even more amazed. "Let's ask Ray," he said.
He called him over. "Ray!" he said. "Why do we believe in Christianity? Because it works, right?" he asked.
"No," Ray said. "We believe it because it's true."
Kenny was undaunted and pressed Ray again. "Does Buddhism work?" he asked.
"Yes," said Ray.
I don't remember the rest of the conversation; in fact, I think I have probably forgotten the most important parts. I only recall this much because I was unduly pleased that the teacher took my side in the argument.
The point of the story, though, is that some people lose touch with the very idea of truth. And although Kenny believed in the truth of Christianity, I think he had taken the first step on a road that some have explored much farther— a road that leads nowhere worth going. Some people have completely abandoned the concept of the truth of Christianity— if they ever had such a concept in the first place. Some regard their religion as simply a source of comfort, and they don't care if it is merely an enjoyable fantasy. Some regard their church as a kind of club organized for the benefit of the members— a way to make friends, to feel a sense of belonging, to socialize, to pass the time. Some regard the church as only a force for social change— an organized attempt to fight injustice, cruelty, crime, and poverty.
I once read part of a book called Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism. ("Fundamentalist" has become rather a buzzword in our society in recent years, a convenient label for someone you want to put down. But that is another topic.) The author was an Episcopal bishop who obviously in some sense considered himself a believer; but as I dug deeper, I found that he believed in nothing of a "miraculous" nature. I am not sure whether he believed in the divinity of Jesus or even in God; I know that he did not consider the resurrection of Jesus to be a real event in history. He treated it as a story and discussed the significance, beauty, and power of that story and its impact on our daily lives. But I say this: If the resurrection is just a story, then it doesn't have any real power or significance, and its real impact on my daily life is in the long run precisely zero.
This man had reached the end of that road. He had reached a point where the truth or falsehood of Christianity was irrelevant to him. Not only did he not believe, he did not even think that belief was an issue. I was reminded very much of the bishop in the fifth chapter of C. S. Lewis's fictional work The Great Divorce.
Some who regard Christianity as "true" will believe for purely emotional reasons. These people have become so common in our society that I think the average unbeliever thinks of these people when he thinks of believers.
I recall a conversation with some friends of mine at work a few years ago. (This was a large computer company which shall remain nameless.) About four of us had gotten into a conversation and it somehow took a turn toward "religion." All that I recall of this part is a comment made by Pat Barrett— something to the effect that religious belief "was based purely on emotions," that there was no other possible basis for it.
You may wonder what I said in reply. Well, I said nothing. For one thing, he was not talking to me; and for another thing, I was outgunned three to one.
Pat's attitude is fairly typical, I think; and in a way, we have brought this on ourselves by all our talking about Christianity without any attempt to substantiate any of it. I am reminded of another conversation with a coworker named Nigel.
Nigel and I both started work at a new job on the same day. We got to be friends fairly quickly and got along well enough. But he was somewhat annoyed when he eventually found out that I was a believer.
Nigel was an atheist who had been brought up in a Christian environment; he had a father who had been a churchgoer since youth and his grandparents were likely real believers. But as for his father, the impression I got was that of a man who did not truly believe, but was immersed in Christian culture all his life and could not quite bear to break with it wholly. Perhaps he also feared the consequences of rearing a child without any Christian influence.
Of course, Nigel was fed up with this; he probably saw through his father's petty inconsistencies at a young age. He admitted to me that as a child he grew sick of being forced to go to church. He told me he "didn't think that children should be forced to do something that wasn't provably good for them." Inwardly I winced, but what could I say?
I think that I was always a bit of a curiosity to him. He knew that I didn't have an inferior mind, and he seemed confused by that. In one of our occasional conversations, he asked me point-blank why I believed. A little jittery, I told him it was mainly because of the Resurrection— that this was my starting point, though I supposed there were others. I outlined the facts in the matter— the historical events which were largely unquestioned by anyone, believer or not— and then I proceeded to analyze those facts to come up with a viable theory of what really happened. The point I tried to make was that the Christian world view was reasonable, was internally self-consistent, and fit the facts as they were known.
As we talked, it turned out that he had expected some kind of different answer from me. He had expected me to talk about some mysterious "feeling" which I had inside me, or some such thing. He was all prepared, of course, to shoot that down (as I halfway want to shoot it down myself when I hear it).
I talked about the weight of the accumulated evidence and about reliable witnesses. He was understandably disturbed by the lack of absolute definitive proof; and the conversation turned toward science. I wish I had the whole thing on tape, but I have forgotten most of it. I brought up the issue of the Bohr model of the atom, or something like that, and asked if he believed in it— as of course we both did. I asked then if he himself had ever performed the classic experiment which proved it, or had he even seen it performed by someone else. "No," he said, "but you have to accept certain things on the authority of others who—" Then he broke off. "Wait," he said. "I'm being inconsistent." He stared at me in confusion.
I was glad he had said it, because I was too polite and might not have had the guts to point it out anyhow. One of my best memories of him will always be the mildly stunned expression coupled with the words, "I'm being inconsistent." But of course, nothing was ultimately resolved.
On another occasion, he and I were watching TV together and a news broadcast showed the scene of a plane crash. I can't remember the details of the crash, except that the number of passengers who died was oddly close to fifty percent. The passengers' families were all contacting the authorities with the advance knowledge that the probability of their family member having survived was equivalent to a coin toss. The film footage showed one tearful woman (crying tears of joy, as it turned out) who told the reporter, "Now I know there's a God."
My stomach muscles tightened, and I gritted my teeth a little in annoyance. I knew that Nigel would jump on that instantly, and he didn't disappoint me. "See?" he said. "The other fifty percent of the people can just as easily say, 'Now I know there's not a God.'"
And he was right. On the other hand, I understand the spirit of what the woman was trying to say. If pressed, she would surely have to admit that her reasoning was hogwash. If God's existence depended on her husband's staying alive, did that mean that her husband would never die? Or would it mean that when he died, God would cease to exist? Or would it mean that when he died, she would conclude that there never was a God after all? All of these are nonsense.
And this sort of nonsense is all too common in Christendom. I was always a little irritated by the words of a popular Christian hymn, "He Lives":
You ask me how I know he lives;
He lives within my heart.
This is exactly the kind of response that I think Nigel was expecting from me. But surely a person can "feel in his heart" anything he wants to. He can feel Buddha in his heart if he tries; he can feel William Shakespeare or Mickey Mouse in his heart if he wishes.
I am not trying to invalidate human emotions. I am not any kind of "cold fish," nor do I want anyone else to be. But I keep my emotions in their place; they are an effect, not a cause. I do not use them as a guide to truth, because they have proven to be an incredibly unreliable guide.
I should also mention that in the Christian worldview, there is such a thing as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and I would not want to deny this. But I am not sure of all the modes of operation of the spirit or the ways in which he manifests himself. If some people claim an inner "religious experience" of a supernatural nature, well, I cannot prove them wrong. But I have never been impressed with the people who made such claims, nor do I see any evidence from the Bible that the Christian in general has the right to any such confirmation.
Of course, if anyone believes in Jesus, he cannot help but feel some emotional response to the love of Jesus and his sacrifice. But the emotions come after that belief, not before. If the emotions are your starting point, then your beliefs are arbitrary; because your feelings are purely subjective and (contrary to the lyrics above) don't prove anything. As far as I am concerned, if you believe because of a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach— well, that could be Jesus or indigestion.



The Empty Grave

My friend and mentor Dr. Shields once commented on those same lyrics above, and I felt a sense of relief to know that someone else thought the same way I did. I don't recall that we ever discussed it, but there is another hymn that is more in line with my faith (and his, too, I think). That other one is called "Because He Lives":
An empty grave is there to prove
My Savior lives.
The empty grave, in fact, was the door by which I entered a larger world. Of course, every Christian does; but I mean not just the empty grave, but the knowledge of it.
When I was nineteen and a college student, I began to give voice, now and then, to some of my concerns. I remember a conversation with a man named King Buchanan in which I was railing about the arbitrary, baseless nature of the Christian faith. For some reason, I picked the resurrection of Jesus as an example. "We believe in the resurrection 'just because'— we believe in it because we believe in it." And his reply, almost word for word, was, "I think there are good historical reasons for believing in the resurrection."
I think I must have stared at him for at least a split second with my mouth hanging open. My first inclination was either to snort or to laugh. I was sure that he had either slipped a gear or was trying to pull something on me. I thought he was naive at best.
But he let me borrow an old paperback, a well-thumbed copy of a book called Man Alive! by Michael Green. I was not completely convinced, but my worldview was beginning to be upset. I began to read more and more until eventually my conception of the universe was turned upside down. I had always believed in the resurrection, of course; but I never dreamed it was actually true.
One of the things he let me borrow was a little booklet called "Is Christianity Credible?" I don't recall much about its content, but I do recall that when my mother saw me reading it, she responded with disapproval. She didn't say much, but did want to know: "And what does it conclude?" Since I didn't like her attitude (and since I was nineteen), I only answered, "I haven't finished it yet."
I love and respect my parents very much, and I don't have any overall disagreement with them. But I have never liked the way of thinking that discourages asking questions. How else is anyone supposed to learn?
As time went by, I became enthusiastic about the historical study of the resurrection and about Christian apologetics in general— probably the first time I had ever even encountered the word "apologetic" used in any but the most common sense. I guess I assumed that everyone would share my new-found interest; but I found that many people I talked to were completely mystified, as if I were trying to explain that water was wet.
My friend James must have listened to my comments on three or four different occasions before he finally dismissed them by giving me his own conception of why we should believe in the resurrection. "God's word says so," he told me. "Isn't that good enough?"
I was a little stunned, but there wasn't much I could say. It was obvious we weren't communicating. Later on, I mentioned it to Dr. Shields; and he shook his head, saying, "I would have expected he would be more intelligent than that."
My instinct was to react the same way, but I have noticed that this way of thinking doesn't have a real correlation with intellect. James didn't have any lack of intelligence; he had a perfectly good mind. He started out in chemical engineering and changed to English later; neither was a major for the faint of heart. Yet without being unkind, let me label his attitude as naive faith.
Still later, I mentioned the story to Dr. Henry Farrar, and his reaction was: "If he had stayed in chemical engineering, his faith would have fallen." I thought that was a little extreme, but he may have been correct. I have seen faith fall on numerous occasions, and most of those were majoring in some scientific field as James was. In my experience, naive faith and chemical engineering do not mix well.



"I Never Thought About That"

While I was at the University of Mississippi in the mid-1980's, I met a foreign student named Dong Choon Choi, who was from Korea, if I recall correctly. Dong Choon was a graduate student about forty years of age. It was a little difficult communicating with him, because of his thick accent and limited knowledge of English. Still we managed to have an interesting talk or two during our acquaintance.
He was a little unusual in that he was a former Buddhist priest who converted to Christianity. I had read a little about that religion (mostly from reference works and from Huston Smith's classic work The Religions of Man), so I was fascinated to learn a little more.
As I understand their usual beliefs, they do not necessarily believe in reincarnation, as do the followers of the Hindu religion in which the Buddhist roots lie. But perhaps he belonged to an unusual sect, or perhaps my information is flawed. At any rate, he told me that reincarnation was part of his former beliefs. I believe he meant human-to-human— not including animals, as the Hindus do in their idea of transmigration.
This was very interesting to me, and I told him I had always wondered how people reconciled that belief with the fact of the world's ever-growing population. He didn't understand what I meant at first.
"Well," I said. "A century or two ago, there were fewer than a billion people living in the entire world. A few years ago, that figure hit three billion, and now there are nearly four billion people on Earth. Where are all the extra souls coming from?"
He paused a moment and actually laughed. "I never thought about that," he said.
He had never thought about it? How could that be?
I think that the problem had nothing to do with the fact that he was Buddhist; I think that many Christians are in the same situation. They have a faith that is in some way "compartmentalized" or sectioned off from the rest of their minds.
My friend Beth Howell was talking with me once about her studies in human physiology. I don't remember what course it was; it may even have been psychology. What I do remember is that we were talking about the human brain, specifically about memory.
As far as she was concerned, memory was purely a biochemical phenomenon. Since I dislike answers that I feel are too simple— too cut-and-dried— I protested a little.
But she didn't really give me a chance to make a case; she just took on an attitude of amusement and said, "Well, that's how it works." She seemed to think that I was being naive or that I just wasn't very well-informed.
We didn't finish that conversation, so I can't say how it would have gone. But what I wanted to ask her was how she reconciled that belief with her Christian faith— because she was a Christian, and apparently a fairly serious one.
The conflict I saw was this. If memory exists purely in the configuration of neurons and in complex molecules, then what happens at death, when those chemicals break down and the neurons decay into nothingness? The Christian world view says that there is life after death; is a person in that state only a pure personality, devoid of any memories of an earthly existence?
This didn't seem reasonable to me. Surely one of the main tenets of Christianity is that there is something to the universe besides the material world that we can see and measure. But Beth's professors obviously were not going to tell her that; their world view depended somewhat on the idea that things that can't be seen and measured are not real.
The interesting thing to me is that Beth didn't seem to perceive this conflict. I think that the only explanation is that she was maintaining two separate world views in her head and simply switching back and forth between them. She had a wall built in her mind— a barrier that prevented the conflicting ideas from ever bumping into each other.
More than thirty years ago, J. B. Phillips wrote an excellent little book called Your God Is Too Small, in which he talks about the false conceptions that many people hold in regard to the nature of God. In the passage quoted below, he talks about a conception of God that comes from earliest childhood and remains sadly unchallenged. Of course, there may be many misconceptions carried forward from childhood and never abandoned; but in this case, he is talking specifically about God as the "Grand Old Man"— an elderly gentleman who is rather old-fashioned and behind the times:
...a simple psychological test was recently applied to a mixed group of older adolescents. They were asked to answer, without reflection, the question: "Do you think God understands radar?" In nearly every case, the reply was "No," followed of course by a laugh, as the conscious mind realized the absurdity of the answer. But, simple as this test was, it was quite enough to show that at the back of their minds these youngsters held an idea of God quite inadequate for modern days. Subsequent discussion showed plainly that while "they had not really thought much about it," they had freely to admit that the idea of God, absorbed some years before, existed in quite a separate compartment from their modern experience, knowledge, and outlook.
I recall a conversation with one of my professors, one Dr. Maginnis, who was not a believer. We were talking about a mutual friend, Dr. Waters, a pharmacy professor and an elder in my local church. I teased him a little by reminding him that his colleague was a devout Christian; and he responded, not unkindly but with amusement, saying that he was always amazed that anyone could be "so totally schizoid." In his perception, the only way anyone could be simultaneously a scientist and a Christian was by being schizoid, i.e., by compartmentalizing his mind. I think he made this assumption not based on the beliefs or behavior of Dr. Waters, but on the basis of his experience with Christendom as a whole.
This, then, is another symptom of our modern society. The average person's faith is not only arbitrary and backwards, but it is compartmentalized. It is kept hidden away in a place of its own, nurtured and pampered as if it were some kind of rare orchid in a hothouse. The result is a personality that is fragmented— a faith that is not integrated into the rest of the person's life— a never-ending doublemindedness.



The Obstacle Course

Many people seem to have the idea that faith is a kind of test by God— that we have somehow been set the task of running a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles are all intellectual in nature. I think that this whole concept is a mistaken one.
At the heart of this concept is the idea that faith and intellect are inherently in conflict with each other. To show how this mind-faith split is perceived in everyday life and culture, let me give a few examples.
I was talking with some friends once about the so-called "Shroud of Turin"— the large linen cloth that many believe was the actual burial garment of Jesus Christ. We were discussing whether it might possibly be the real thing; and one person commented, "I can't see why God would allow a thing like that to survive through the centuries."
At first I thought he was saying that God would destroy a thing like that so that people would not make it an object of veneration or treat it as having undue significance; but as he went on, I gathered that he meant something different. He seemed to be saying that the existence of such an artifact would lend a certain amount of physical evidence to the story of Jesus and would therefore actually negate faith— making it in some way "too easy" to believe.
For another pair of interesting examples, I would like to turn to a couple of authors— first of all to the author Douglas Adams. For those unfamiliar with his work, I should point out that he is a science fiction writer and does not write specifically about "religious" things; and furthermore, his works are primarily not serious fiction, but absolutely outrageous comedies.
Having said that, let me quote a little passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Here he explains about the Babel fish— a little fish that can be inserted into a person's ear and will live there, telepathically communicating with the person's brain and translating whatever foreign language the person hears. This, by the way, is a highly inventive and humorous solution to the science fiction writer's perennial problem— why do all these alien beings seem to be speaking English? But listen to this:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Notice the phrase proof denies faith, which to me is the key phrase here. I think that in his tongue-in-cheek way, he has pinpointed one of the problems in the prevailing world view.
The concept of the difficulty of faith is brought out even more interestingly in another of his books, in which he describes a robot-like entity called an Electric Monk, created by an alien race as a labor-saving device. In the same way that dishwashers wash dishes for you, the Electric Monk had the duty of believing things and saving its owners from the burden of belief.
Before expanding this idea, let me quote another science fiction writer, Neal Stephenson. In his novel Snow Crash, the main character talks about his friend Juanita Marquez, who is a believer.
...Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.
Do you see the pattern emerging here? Willard thought that the existence of the Shroud would remove the need for faith; the Douglas Adams character thought that proof "denied faith"; and Stephenson's character thought that proof would leave "no room for faith."
In a class at church recently, the person speaking asked for a definition of faith. One person answered, "Accepting facts which have no empirical proof." I didn't make any reply, but I wrote it down for future reference. It is neither the best nor the worst definition I have ever heard.
In light of this common thread, I want to examine two issues. The first is the question: How do non-Christians react to this way of thinking? The second (more important) question is: How does this way of thinking tie in with what the Bible has to say?
I think that many unbelievers are very disturbed by the arbitrary nature of the typical believer's faith. In ordinary life, we don't begin with a presupposition and work to support it; we usually form our opinions gradually based on thought and observation. For example, when I leave my apartment carrying an umbrella, it is because I believe it might rain; and that belief is not arbitrary, but is always founded on something. Maybe I looked at the sky; maybe I saw a weather forecast; or maybe I overheard a conversation about the weather.
On the other hand, many Christians not only cannot articulate their faith, but do not even see a need to. This is because we are taught to think in this way— perhaps not intentionally, but we are taught nevertheless.
We are taught to accept ideas without proof. This is because the people who are supposed to be providing answers to questions are either unwilling or unable to do so. If they are unwilling, I consider that to be irresponsible or even reprehensible. If they are unable, what we have is just the perpetuation of ignorance from one generation to the next. But in this case, it should always be acceptable to say the magic words "I don't know." What should not happen (but often does) is for the questioner to be discouraged from asking questions or to be put down with an answer equivalent to "Because I said so."
I am reminded of an article I once read in a Mensa newsletter in which the author was telling a little about his own background. He wrote:
I don't believe in organized religion. While I can't prove that there is not a god, every time I have been in church or listened to a preacher, I have felt like I was being brainwashed. Even as far back as 2nd grade, when my parents forced me to go to church I couldn't believe how everyone could just sit there and accept everything. I once asked a preacher when I was 10 or 11 to explain about dinosaurs and the geologic age of the earth, which he didn't even try to do, instead answering something like, "You must believe in God and the Bible, and not worry about things like that." End of credibility of religion for me.
In fairness to the preacher, I would hate to have to answer a question like that from a precocious sixth grader, especially when some people consider such issues to be controversial or emotionally charged. But I think he handled it incorrectly. Surely he could have at least referred the question to someone else. How could he expect that a child capable of asking such a question would swallow that kind of answer? And even if the child did accept it, how would the preacher have answered an adult asking the same question?
I recall an incident from my own childhood that I will relate here. I was in a Sunday school class taught by a very fine woman whose name I will not mention. I don't remember how it came up, but one of the girls in the class asked why clouds stayed in the air and didn't fall. (I suppose we were about nine years old at the time.) The teacher smiled indulgently and said, "Because it's God's will."
When I went home and complained to my mother, she defended the teacher. I think she even got a little upset with me. "Sunday school is no place for a science lesson," she told me.
It isn't? I think maybe I disagree. If something is true, isn't it true whether you are inside or outside a church building? And surely the answer "because it's God's will" is true on some level; but can't almost anything be explained in such broad generalities? If I take my car to a mechanic and ask why it quit running, I don't want him to say, "Because it's God's will."
Some people favor the erection of a barrier between science and religion. But I think this kind of voluntary schizophrenia is completely inappropriate. The people who have successfully sealed off the different sections of their minds have never inspired me as people of great faith; and furthermore, most people are not able to enforce that kind of divided thinking in themselves anyhow. In most people, scientific belief and religious belief are bound to collide at some point. It can be in a science class or in a Sunday school class or somwhere in between, but it will happen; and I think that we should encourage it to happen in Sunday school and similar circumstances.
Note that in the previous paragraph, I said collide rather than conflict. Two ideas or world views collide when the barrier between them is removed or when they suddenly crop up in the same context for the first time. This raises questions of how the two relate to each other, if at all; but it doesn't imply a conflict. My personal opinion is that anyone who believes that Christianity and science are in genuine conflict has a fundamental misunderstanding of one or the other (or both). Of course, we could spend hours debating the exact meaning of the creation story in Genesis, or similar things; but that is far beyond the scope of my topic here.
In modern Christendom, we seem to place a value on "blind faith." We are taught to accept things without proof; and we have the strange idea that proof somehow "denies" or "negates" faith.
But what is the stance of the Bible on this issue? I offer these three passages first of all:
"When Apollos wanted to go to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples there to welcome him. On arriving, he was a great help to those who by grace had believed. For he vigorously refuted the Jews in public debate, proving from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ." Acts 18:27-28

"After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive." Acts 1:3

"...He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." Acts 17:31
Now, what is the common thread in all three of these passages I have picked out? It is the idea of proof. Apollos proved from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ; Jesus gave his disciples "convincing proofs" that he had been resurrected; and God "has given proof" of the identity of Jesus by raising him from the dead.
Does this sound as though the Christian of that time was called to an arbitrary faith? Does it sound as though these people believed that faith and proof were in opposition to each other? Obviously this is not the case. Of course, it may be worth pointing out that all three of these come from the book of Acts, traditionally believed to have been written by Luke, the doctor. If anyone took a rationalistic view toward faith, surely it would be a doctor.
I would like to point out that the phrases "blind faith" and "leap of faith" are commonly used in our everyday speech, but they do not appear anywhere in the Bible. Some might argue that the concepts are there even if the words are not; but in my reading of scripture, I do not find even the very concepts to be present.
So let's look at another example. These words come from Jesus himself:
"Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves." John 14:11
Here Jesus wants his disciples to believe in him; in the first half of the sentence, he urges them to believe on the basis of their experiences with him over the last three years. This was not a sudden, arbitrary thing. Of course, if they are not willing to believe on that basis ("because I said so"), there is a second half to that sentence: "...at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves."
Does he say, "Believe because of the warm feeling in your gut"? Does he say, "Believe because you're a bad person if you don't"? No; although the disciples certainly had enough reason to trust Jesus because of their long acquaintance and their knowledge of his character. What he actually says is: "...at least believe on the evidence of the miracles."
Does this sound like someone who is asking for blind faith? To me, it sounds like just the opposite. I think that one reason Jesus could demand faith of his disciples was because they had seen the miracles. What about the other Biblical passages— do they seem to ask for blind faith? Do any of them imply that faith is negated or denied by proof?
I would go so far as to say that the purpose of a miracle is to provide evidence or reason for belief. Let me offer a few more examples to try to show this.
When Moses was first approached by God, he was shown a vision of a bush that was on fire and yet was not consumed by the fire. The purpose of this was to draw his attention and make him realize that something highly unusual was going on. This was probably an easier introduction to God than a simple unannounced voice out of thin air.
As a better example, it is recorded that Moses was given the power to perform a small number of miraculous signs in order to help his audience to believe. These clearly served the purpose of answering the obvious questions: Why should we believe you? Why should we listen to you? They served to validate the rest of his message and give an introduction that would guarantee that his audience would take him seriously.
In the second book of Kings, there is a passage that tells of King Hezekiah being seriously ill. When the prophet Isaiah received a message from God that the king would not die but would survive his illness, the king wanted proof:
Hezekiah had asked Isaiah, "What will be the sign that the Lord will heal me and that I will go up to the temple of the Lord on the third day from now?"
Isaiah answered, "This is the Lord's sign to you that the Lord will do what he has promised: Shall the shadow go forward ten steps, or shall it go back ten steps?"
"It is a simple matter for the shadow to go forward ten steps," said Hezekiah. "Rather, have it go back ten steps."
Then the prophet Isaiah called upon the Lord, and the Lord made the shadow go back the ten steps it had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.
This is the skeptic's dream, isn't it? The king demands proof and he gets it. Does this sound as though God were trying capriciously to make belief difficult— as though he had set up a set of unbelievable circumstances and then demanded blind faith? Does this sound like a faith that is arbitrary or unfounded or irrational?
Of course, this raises a host of other questions. Bear with me, and I will try to deal with what I think are the obvious ones.
One question raised by C. S. Lewis was: How can faith be a virtue? If something is true, why does believing it make you a good person? How can belief be a moral issue? Here are his words on the matter:
I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue— what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view...
I have broken off this quotation for now; Lewis will have more to say later on this. But look at his reasoning. Do the hypothetical situations sound familiar? "...If he thought the evidence bad but forced himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."
This reminds me of the schoolboy whose quote opened this essay. It reminds me of Carroll's Red Queen [?] who would, as a mental exercise, believe "six impossible things" before breakfast. And it reminds me of many people I have known throughout my life. I don't want to put them down; but I do want to voice my disagreement.
All right, then. If faith is not in opposition to intellect... to what is it in opposition? If God does not make faith arbitrarily difficult, then where does its difficulty come from?
I would say that it is in opposition to emotion, among other things. This, of course, is the reverse of what most of my non-Christian friends think (and many of my Christian friends). But I stand by this. If you will stop to think, even the things that you know by purely rational means are still subject to assault on emotional grounds.
For those who think visually, as I often do, I would like to show this distinction in a pair of pictures.



Emotion Intellect
Faith
Emotion Intellect
Faith

One popular view The view proposed here



If you are on an airplane waiting to take off, no amount of intellectualizing will keep you calm if you have a deathly fear of flying. You may know very well that air travel is safer than travel by automobile; you may be acquainted with all the statistics; and you may even be familiar with the engineering details of how airplanes fly or have personal knowledge of the competence and integrity of the pilot. But if you are one of those people with an irrational fear of flying, then this all means nothing. In spite of what you know to be true, you will still have a nagging doubt, and you may have butterflies in your stomach and a racing heartbeat. But it is not your intellect that is destroying your faith; it is your emotions. In fact, your faith is based on your intellect.
If you are interested in truth, you should listen to your intellect, because that is the tool that God has given us for arriving at truth. I am not suggesting that a human being should be some kind of "cold fish," feeling nothing about anything; but I do suggest that we should first be concerned about what the facts are. And the facts, after all, have nothing to do with my feelings.
I can only speak for myself; but I have found that my emotions are more changeable than the weather. They depend on what I have eaten recently; how well I slept the previous night; whether I am taking medication; what the weather is like; how people treat me; and a thousand other things. But no matter how many variables contribute to my emotions, there is no guarantee that they will point me toward anything true. I don't want to decide my view of the universe based on what the weather is like or what I had for breakfast. If I did that, I could reach a different decision every day.
But aren't there people who actually base their faith on things just as arbitrary? As far as the bulk of humanity is concerned, don't we tend to stay in whatever faith we were taught as a child (even if that is no faith at all) until something causes us to change our minds? Whether he is Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or Christian, the average person will not re-examine his beliefs to see whether they are valid until someone or something actually challenges him (and perhaps not even then).
I think that everyone should re-examine his belief system from time to time— even the people I agree with— perhaps especially those people. I think that many Chistian parents are afraid to allow their children to re-examine their faith because they never did it themselves; and also because they have seen that kind of re-evaluation lead to people abandoning Christianity.
But the Christian faith is not some fragile crystal sculpture that can be destroyed by a passing breeze. In some individuals it may be; but these people will in the long run benefit by having that dainty sculpture smashed and the real thing substituted in its place.
I myself used to treat the truths of Christianity as if they were something like that— something I dared not touch or pay too much attention to, for fear that it would all prove to be nonsense and my world would be turned upside down. But when I did dare to touch that structure, I found it to be more substantial than I had thought. And as I tested it more and more, I found it to be firm and unshakeable, quite stonger than my best attempts to disturb it. Far from being a fragile crystal sculpture, it turned out to be something that my strongest sledge-hammer blows could not even crack.
If a person's faith is a fragile and shaky framework, it is not the real thing. I have met many people who, in my opinion, desperately needed to have their faith shaken. My abovementioned friends Keith and Gladys were two, but I could name much more extreme examples.
Perhaps some readers will be surprised that I think anyone's faith should be shaken. What I mean is this: When a person is presented with a new world view, he cannot embrace it without dismissing the old one. A diamond and a rhinestone will not fit in the same setting.
There are many paradoxes in Christianity. We think of sorrow or regret as a bad thing; but the Bible says that "godly sorrow brings repentance." Similarly, in my opinion, sincere doubt leads to faith. I will say that again: Sincere doubt leads to faith. That is why Augustine could say, "Doubt is but another element of faith." Is this so unusual? Questions, properly asked, lead to answers. To quote Jesus out of context: "Seek and you will find."
We take it for granted that doctors try to heal people. It used to puzzle me as a child when occasionally I would hear of a doctor actually breaking a person's bone. Why would a doctor do that? Obviously to undo damage that had been done when the bone knitted improperly. In the same way, I think there are many Christians today who, metaphorically speaking, need to have their bones broken.
Some have protested to me (and likely some readers will protest) that doubt is a bad thing, that God condemns people for doubting. Well, yes and no. Certainly there is more than one kind of doubt; and as for motives and circumstances, we will leave God to judge those.
There are those who look down on others who have the occasional faith crisis— who consider these brothers and sisters to be weak or rebellious or heretical. But I ask these people to look at the apostle Thomas.
It is rather unfair that this one of the Twelve has been stuck with the name "Doubting Thomas," since all of them doubted at one time or another. And, in fact, all of them disbelieved in the resurrection of Jesus until they saw him alive again. Thomas was merely the last one to see him face to face. In American slang, we would say he was "from Missouri"; his attitude was, quite literally, "Show me!" Here is the passage in question (John 20:24-28, NIV):
Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord!"
But he said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."
Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"
Those who are shocked at the idea of doubting— those who claim they never doubt— these should look at this apostle. Thomas doubted. Do these people claim to be greater than Thomas?
In a world where gullibility is rampant and there are alarmists on every corner, I admire people like Thomas— down-to-earth and level-headed. Sinful, too? Yes; all of us are. But Thomas was martyred for the cause of Christ, spilling his blood on the soil of a foreign country. Let us not criticize him too harshly.
You may ask whether I am actually advocating allowing a person's faith to be disturbed. Well, maybe. Why was Thomas the last apostle to see the risen Christ— last by more than a week? If a person's faith is a house of cards, left standing only because no breeze has stirred in the room— well, I am in favor of cracking the window a little. Let a little breeze blow in. Eventually that house of cards will fall; and then it can be replaced with something sturdy.
For another medical analogy, consider the practice of inoculation. When a person is inoculated against a disease, his bloodstream is infected with a small sample of the agent that actually causes the disease. Surely this contradicts common sense! And yet, of course, it really doesn't; because the body is given a chance to recognize the bacteria and start manufacturing antibodies to fight them. Why would we ever allow doubt into a fellow Christian's life? Because he will grow stronger and learn to fight it off.
I want us to think a minute about what happened in the town of Waco, Texas in the early 1990's. There was a cult known as the Branch Davidians, led by a charismatic preacher who called himself David Koresh. I cannot remember all the details of that episode, but we know that it ended in tragedy, with large numbers of men, women, and even children burning to death in the compound in which the cultists had barricaded themselves.
Now, why did these people believe in David Koresh? Was it because of his compelling arguments, his irrefutable proofs, his air-tight reasoning? Somehow, I think not. It seems to me that a cursory examination of their leader in the cold light of logic would reveal him for what he was. In my opinion, these were people whose faith was based on emotion rather than reason; and the result was death and destruction.
Not everyone who thinks that way will suffer such immediate and dire consequences. But I think that every one of these would be better off with a reshaped world view; and I venture to say that if these people had been more like Thomas, the whole tragic incident need never have happened.
When I think of naive faith, one of the things that comes to my mind is Thoreau's story of the Canadian woodcutter (whom he left nameless). He devoted a few pages to the antics of this character, who alternately amused and baffled him. The last time I read this account, these words jumped out at me:
But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. (Walden, Henry David Thoreau)
I assume that Thoreau didn't really intend any disparagement to the Catholic faith; and I certainly don't. But I think his assessment is very telling. "...A child is not made a man, but kept a child." I fear greatly that the world may be littered with Christian education programs which may be summed up in this statement.
Many people will be incapable of anything beyond simple trust and reverence— not only children, but adults with learning disabilities or those who have had no educational opportunities. I am not saying that God will condemn such people; but I am saying that people who are able to think more deeply should exercise that capability; and those who are in the position of teachers and mentors should strive to provide opportunities for those who might not otherwise have them.
Of course, with my viewpoint leaning so heavily toward rationality, someone is bound to ask: "Are you saying that the Christian faith can be proven, then?" And my answer would have to be: Yes and no.



Some Words on Proof

Every discriminating person wants to know the truth. At least, I hope everyone genuinely aspires to that knowledge. Every time I hear someone demand "proof," I have to confess that in the back of my mind I hear a fragment of Paul Simon's song "Proof" (from Rhythm of the Saints, 1990):
Faith,
Faith is an island in the setting sun;
But proof, yeah—
Proof is the bottom line for everyone.
However, I would first like to say that there are at least three different kinds of proof. I will give them "out of order."
First, there is the scientific proof, which is the first one that some people will think of. The tools used are measurement, controlled testing environments, repeatability of observations, statistical methods, and a host of others.
But there are two catches. For one thing, we are making a set of hidden assumptions which may be valid, but which we cannot prove. For example, we assume that an experiment which has the same result ten thousand times will always have the same result. We assume that the "laws" of nature that we see will be the same tomorrow. We assume that these laws are uniform across the universe. None of these things can be proven. The second catch is the extreme lack of rigor in these proofs; to a mathematician, this kind of proof looks like sophisticated guesswork accompanied by handwaving.
This brings us to the second kind of proof: The mathematical proof. This is something we are all exposed to in high school geometry. It is characterized by extreme rigor; every step in reasoning must be cautious and precise and justified according to rules that are specific and fixed. This is probably the best and purest form of human reasoning, and in higher math, it becomes much more advanced and precise than we are used to in high school.
The only drawback to this kind of proof is that it only works "on paper," in a highly abstract world of manipulated symbols. Its principles spill over into science and even into everyday life, and they are useful; but their usefulness in "real life" is limited because of the extreme complexity of the universe in which we live.
The third major kind of proof is what one writer calls the "legal-historical" proof. This is the kind of reasoning used, for example, by detectives, lawyers, judges, and historians. It is frequently confused (or at least associated) with the scientific proof, because the methods and tools of science are sometimes used as aids. This is concerned with the gathering and analysis of physical evidence, but it is also concerned with eyewitness testimony and the reliability of those witnesses, with alibis, with circumstantial evidence, and the analysis of motives and human psychology. It is the most useful in everyday life, but by the same token, it is the most fallible and inexact.
There may be other forms of proof. When in daily life, we demand "proof" of something, it is usually proof of a very flimsy nature— a signature that could be forged, documents that could be fake, photographs or videos that could be doctored, hearsay or other testimony that could be lying or mistaken or distorted.
So if we want to "prove" the Christian faith... what kind of proof do we use? We cannot reduce it to a set of symbols, so we cannot use mathematical methods; though I have seen some feeble attempts. I know of no experiments that can be constructed, nor any instruments that we can construct to perform measurements. That leaves only the legal-historical proof, or something like it.
That, of course, is an entire can of worms in itself. But we will not delve into it now. Suffice to say that as far as "scientific proof" is concerned (which everyone seems to want)— well, we cannot even have a scientific proof of the existence of Abraham Lincoln, much less God. If that bothers you, go and find another universe to live in.
So let us return to the question I asked earlier. Can we "prove" the Christian faith?
In the sense of a rigorous mathematical proof, undeniable and unassailable, the answer is no. But what most people don't realize is that very few things in life can be proved with this level of certainty. In science, we say that things are "proved"; but really we are just piling up evidence to support our position. A mathematician would sneer at that kind of proof. And even in the realm of higher mathematics (higher than anything I personally ever studied), there are even disputes as to whether certain steps in certain proofs are really valid. In fact, if we are searching for absolute certainty, I don't know where we could begin to find it.
I hope the reader will not mistake me. The Christian faith is not subject to scientific proof either.
But in the sense of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt," the answer is yes. The kind of proof I mean does not have the strength of the mathematical proof or even the scientific one; but it is the kind of proof that is used by a lawyer or detective rather than a mathematician or scientist. In fact, it is nearer the kind of proof that we accept in our daily lives on a regular basis.
Am I going to present evidence for the existence of God here, or evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? I am not. That is beyond the scope of my topic; and furthermore, I am pretty unqualified to offer anything but my own opinion and a few references. If that is what the reader wants, an afternoon in any public library will get him started.
The natural question raised at this point would be: If that is true, then why doesn't everyone believe? Surely if the evidence is that strong, it could just be published abroad and everyone who saw it would believe.
In an ideal world— such as Lewis described in the quote above— this would be the case. But Lewis goes on to talk about faith being opposed not to reason but to emotion and things in ourselves that vary from one day to another or even one moment to the next. As I understand him, he is saying that faith is hanging onto the truth in spite of our fear, our pride, our circumstances, or whatever. Lewis ends this section by saying:
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in.
This, of course, runs counter to what many Christians would say. But I think any atheist worth his salt could make hamburger of their logic. For my part, I will side with Lewis.



The Will to Believe

Besides genuine intellectual considerations, there may be many reasons for someone to disbelieve. A person may stand to benefit financially; or he may gain (or keep) the respect of his peers; or he may avoid the issue of justifying the actions he takes in his daily life. In cases like these, a person can always find arguments to support what he wishes to believe.
This ties in with what I can only call the will to believe. It should be noted that William James coined this term, and in my reading I haven't been able to confirm completely that I am using the term in the same way that he meant it.
As I understand this concept, human beings are not purely rational creatures; they are biased by their wishes, their hopes, their dreams, by all kinds of prejudices. Although it is to be hoped that humans will seek the truth, the fact remains that belief is still an act of the will. And furthermore, in the real world, any complex proposition is going to be attended by evidence on both sides of the question, no matter how cut-and-dried the proponents of the respective sides might like to pretend.
This lack of absolute certainty is part of what affords the human will its power. If I have a desire that a proposition be true, then I may have a tendency to be selective in examining the facts or in assigning significance to them. In other words: The human will has ultimate veto power over the human intellect.
As an example, let us look back at the story I quoted previously— the one in which the eleven year old asked his preacher about the dinosaurs and the Earth's history. I sympathize fully with this man (and even more so with the younger version of himself), but I think he was a little unfair. After all, did he really expect his preacher to have expertise in the fields of geology and archaeology?
True, the preacher should have referred him to someone else instead of brushing him off. But once he had been brushed off, look at his reaction: "End of credibility of religion for me." And what is more, this is not just the attitude of the child! Remember that it is an adult telling this story— an adult who, for all we know, never even re-examined any of those issues since the age of eleven.
Surely this is particularly unfair in an adult. The biggest problem I see is that he bases the bulk of his opinions (at least within the context of this story) on his interactions with one particular person on one particular occasion. It is as if I attended one lecture by a high school science teacher and reacted to a mistake on his part by concluding that the man was obviously a complete idiot; that by association all science teachers were idiots; and therefore science was pretty much rubbish anyhow.
I think that another effect going on here is that this man has by now a vested interest in believing that religion is all rubbish. He may even have had such a vested interest as a child, since the benefits of unbelief are not limited to adulthood. At any rate, his will has taken sides in the matter already. Such a person is unlikely to believe or even to re-examine the question; his will has already spoken. But please note that which side of a question the human will lands on is absolutely independent of whether that proposition is true or false.
Of course, this effect is also misunderstood at times. I am reminded of the story of the man who, when asked why he believed in God, replied, "Because I want to." This man was certainly exercising the "will to believe" in some sense, but (as I have said before) I can't condone his line of thinking. The point is not to grit your teeth and bend your will toward your prejudices and preconceptions; rather, it is to be as rational as possible while realizing at the same time that you are only human and are probably incapable of being completely objective. If there is a point in time when the "will to believe" is consciously called into play, it should not be to side with emotion against intellect, but with intellect against emotion.
Once I ran across an especially interesting misunderstanding of this whole concept. In the computer industry of which I am a daily part, the UNIX operating system has played a significant role for many years; and part of the folklore associated with this system is a little program written many years ago called fortune (as in "fortune cookie" or "fortune teller").
This program's only function is to print out at random a short saying much like the one found in a fortune cookie. Over the years, these have come to include jokes, thoughts for the day, quotations, poems, horoscopes, and so on. There is a way for users to add items to the fortune database, so that there may be thousands of entries. Some people have their accounts set up to print out one each time they log on.
So it was that one day at work I sat down to my computer and the fortune program greeted me with this pithy bit of wisdom:
What is needed is not the will to believe, but the desire to know, which is the exact opposite.
It was only a single sentence, taken entirely out of whatever context it had sprung from, and I was unfamiliar with the quotation. But I thought I knew what this person was saying. He was reacting against the people who talk about the will to believe as though it were some kind of imperative or directive to be followed, rather than a simple fact of the human condition. These people favor using the will to subjugate the intellect rather than to supplement it. They believe in God "because they want to" and will have no difficulty believing six impossible things before breakfast.
And yet it saddens me to think that people see a conflict between the will to believe and the desire to know the truth. After all, the will to believe is also a will to disbelieve, depending on the individual; and what is more, everyone from time to time exerts his will in order to resolve an internal conflict. It is to be hoped that we exert our wills in the direction of what is really true, rather than in opposition to the truth.
And yet the odd thing about truth, as I already said, is that it is uncertain— uncertain, that is, to human minds that are finite and fallible. There are cases that can be made for both sides of any issue, so that human perception of it is rather like a lump of Swiss cheese, at which we stare and try to determine whether it consists mostly of holes or of cheese.
The clincher, of course, is that we have the option of focusing on the holes or on the cheese, and so we may convince ourselves of whatever we wish, independently of the actual facts. That is my understanding of the "will to believe" which we human beings exhibit; and it is both our glory and our shame.



Two Faces of Doubt

There is thus a difference between what I call "sincere doubt" and "stubborn doubt." If a person has genuine intellectual concerns about the validity of the Christian world view, I call that sincere doubt. If he is merely seeking to justify his own behavior, or he simply enjoys playing devil's advocate while he evades the issue— I call that stubborn doubt. This distinction explains why Tennyson (in his poem In Memoriam) could say:
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
When I told the story of Hezekiah and the shadow on the steps, I called it the skeptic's dream. And yet, it could also be the skeptic's nightmare, could it not? To the person whose fervent wish is not to believe, such a thing can only be met by horror and denial— or by a change of heart.
There is a story told in the Bible which underscores this. In this passage from the book of Acts, Paul is speaking to a large group of strangers in Rome:
They arranged to meet Paul on a certain day, and came in even larger numbers to the place where he was staying. From morning till evening he explained and declared to them the kingdom of God and tried to convince them about Jesus from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets. Some were convinced by what he said, but others would not believe.
They disagreed among themselves and began to leave after Paul had made this final statement: "The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when he said through Isaiah the prophet: 'Go to this people and say, "You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving." For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.'" Acts 28:23-27 (NIV)
To me, it is worth noticing that this translation says "...others would not believe" (emphasis mine). I don't wish to read too much into a phrase that was not originally written in English; but the rest of the passage also seems to indicate that the unbelievers' attitude was characterized by a refusal to believe— a "will to disbelieve," if you prefer. Paul even invokes one of the more biting quotations from the book of Isaiah, saying in its sneering tone, "...they have closed their eyes."
Let us return to the subject of miracles. A natural question, to me, would be this: Why would God produce miracles on some occasions and not on others?
For example, Jesus did not always perform miracles. In the gospel of Matthew, the folllowing interchange is recorded:
Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said, "Master, we want to see a miraculous sign from you."
He answered, "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah...." Matt 12:39-39 (NIV)
Yet on more than one other occasion, he said that the purpose of the miracles was "so that you might believe." Why the inconsistency?
Hezekiah asked for a miracle and got one; Herod asked (in Luke 23) and did not. The masses of the sick and blind asked for miracles and got them; the scribes and Pharisees asked and were called wicked and adulterous. Other examples could be cited. Again, why the seeming inconsistency?
One answer is that miracles are acts of God and are at his discretion, and he does not always reveal his thoughts to us. I believe, though, that we can attribute differing reactions by God to differing circumstances. It seems clear to me that in one situation, the person approaches God with an attitude of honest questioning and submissiveness, and in another situation, with insincerity and belligerence. There are factors in every situation which we as humans are not able to examine. What is the real condition of the person's mind and heart? Would a miracle be useful or helpful or appropriate? Would the person respond to a miracle even if one occurred?
Another answer (not a very satisfying one) is that miracles are by nature rarities. If they occurred as a matter of course, with frequency and regularity, they would cease to be worthy of comment and would likely be regarded as natural phenomena rather than miracles. In fact, the very existence of the universe is in itself a kind of miracle— one which is ignored on a daily basis.
I once read the autobiography of Alan Jay Lerner, an American songwriter popular a few decades ago. As I recall, his search for God occupied a single brief paragraph in the book. He asked God for a sign to show that he existed. He got nothing. Once he saw a cloud shaped roughly like a face, but nothing else.
Is this fair? I can't comment on that issue. I do think that there is something a little wrong with the idea of a God at the mercy of the slightest whim of every human— a God who must suspend natural law on demand. In this scenario, it is the human who has become God, and God has been reduced to the role of a trained poodle in a circus.
I would also like to observe that I have known people who would reject any miracle they saw. I am reminded of a story Jesus told of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Here the rich man speaks from the depths of hell, and Abraham answers:
"...I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment."
Abraham answered, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them."
"No, father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent."
He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not listen
even if someone rises from the dead."
The irony here, of course, is the same as in the verse about the sign of Jonah. Jesus is making a reference to his impending resurrection. In truth, someone did rise from the dead, and there were those who disbelieved; and there still are.
What is sufficient to make a skeptic believe? What could God do that would be so spectacular that no skeptic would have a leg to stand on?
Has it been too long since the resurrection of Jesus? Would it help if there were one resurrection per century, or one per generation? What about geographical remoteness? Would it help to have one resurrection per generation per hundred square miles? Would it be enough to have a team of doctors and scientists attest to each death and resurrection, or would each skeptic have to witness the events in person?
I submit that if a person truly wishes to disbelieve, nothing God could do (short of sheer force) would convince him otherwise. As long as humans have the choice of believing or not, there will be some who will find the option of disbelief to be more palatable, comfortable, or convenient.



The Dichotomy Revisited

Having expanded a little on the paradox of faith, on the nature of naive faith, and the emotion/intellect gap, I want to re-examine the structure of the split between Types A and B. To begin with, I will present a table of quotations and references which illustrate the stances of the two groups.
I cannot stress too strongly that the division here is an artificial one which I myself have imposed. I hope that the reader will agree with my conclusions or at least find them justifiable; but my presentation of this dichotomy must be viewed as my personal opinion.



Type A Type B
Miguel de Unamuno: "Faith which does not doubt is dead faith."

Galileo Galilei: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

Tennyson: "There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds."

Browning: "You call for faith:/ I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists./ The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,/ If faith o'ercomes doubt."

St. Augustine: "Doubt is but another element of faith."

George Buttrick: "Genuine doubt is the reverse side of genuine faith."
Voltaire: "Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding."

Martin Luther: "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but— more frequently than not— struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."

H. L. Mencken: "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

Douglas Adams: The Babel Fish; the Electric Monk

Neal Stephenson: Idea that proof leaves "no room for faith"

The anonymous preacher: "I believe in God because I want to."



Please note that side A is entirely Christian while side B is predominantly non-Christian. Have I "stacked the deck" in some way? I don't think so. In the first place, a major part of my thesis is that a Christian belongs on the left-hand side of this chart. Furthermore— and this is more important— I think it could be argued that any non-Christian who found himself on the left-hand side would eventually become a Christian anyway. As I said before, sincere doubt leads to faith; questions lead naturally to answers.
In light of what we have just discussed, I am presenting a comparison of these personality types in table form.



Type A
 Type B
Harmony of faith and proof Conflict between faith and proof
Faith as an ending point Faith as a starting point
Faith sides with intellect against emotions Faith sides with emotions against intellect
Integrated faith Compartmentalized faith
Embraces the Paradox Rejects the Paradox
Sometimes doubts Never doubts

Is not afraid to ask for proof

Never asks for proof

Palpable doubt Impalpable doubt
Emphasizes objective pole of faith (?) Emphasizes subjective pole of faith (?)
Stronger faith (?) Weaker faith (?)



The Four-way Split

We have seen that there are two types of believers; but I will argue that there are also two types of unbelievers. In other words, the line between Types A and B is not parallel to the boundary between believers and unbelievers; rather it is at right angles to it. For now, I will call the two types of unbelievers (as you may have guessed) C and D.
Type C is the counterpart of Type A. He is rationalistic and logical; but his rationalism has led him to a different conclusion.
Likewise, Type D is the counterpart of Type B. He is guided more by his feelings than by his reason; and like Type B, he is very sure of what he believes but may not be sure why.
The confusing part is that not all the groups perceive the existence of all the others. The Type A is likely to be unaware that Type B exists. This is evidenced by the occasional speaker who will make reference to the father of the sick boy (in Mark chapter 9) and will make a comment like, "Of course, all of us have felt that way at times." Well, apparently many people have not. But the Type A who is ignorant of this fact will perceive the struggle between believers and unbelievers as being between A's and C's.
Type B may be unaware of the existence of A's and C's. He may think that the shouting match between B's and D's is the whole of the battleground. Worse than that, I think there are many who perceive the primary struggle to be between B's and C's— in other words, they might associate reason or intellect with unbelief.
It seems to me that many C's will think the same— that there is a connection between faith and emotion, or that faith and intellect are at odds with each other. And D's will often see themselves in opposition to B's— possibly being ignorant of the world of A's and C's. Type D may even (on the other hand) see himself as a Type C.
In view of all this, many people are going to perceive the major split here to be the B-C split— they will see a correlation between the two variables "belief versus unbelief" and "emotion versus reason." This is the most dangerous perception of all; it implies that emotion-oriented people will be believers and reason-oriented people will be unbelievers.
Of course, I claim this is not true; I say just the opposite. In fact, the four-way split I am proposing could only exist if the two variables are independent of each other.
I will state that again: These two variables are independent of each other. This idea is expressed in visual form below.



Belief Unbelief
Reason
Type A
(Reasoned Faith)
Type C
(Honest Doubt)
Emotion
Type B
(Naive Faith)
Type D
(Stubborn Doubt)



The Bridge

Imagine that you are a traveler who approaches a wooden bridge across a chasm— a bridge that is either sturdy or is not. To cross that bridge will mean you will either reach safety or you will die.
Suppose this wooden bridge is strong. One person will use his knowledge of carpentry and woodworking and engineering to make that determination and will then cross. Another person will cross because he feels lucky, or because the bridge is painted a nice color, or because of what her horoscope said, or because of hearsay, or for whatever reason.
Is it "fair" that both people reach safety? Well, I can't comment. But if you want my honest opinion, the first person is better off than the second. I can understand and sympathize with the first person and can condone his actions.
For one thing, I believe as Galileo did that intellect is a precious God-given thing, and I do not believe that God is fully pleased when people remain childish in their beliefs— not when they have the capability and opportunity for more. (And some will have the capability but not the opportunity.) Secondly, a faith that is based on fluff is in danger of crumbling when it is tested. Most of these people survive only because their faith never is tested. Thirdly, the discriminating non-Christian will be singularly unimpressed with his encounters with the "type B" Christian; and God will not be glorified in those encounters.
Let me change the analogy— back to the way I first heard it, in fact. The point is that faith has a subjective and an objective pole. The subjective aspect in the person's mind— whether his faith is weak or strong; the objective pole is the external reality— in this case, whether the bridge is safe.
Ultimately, weak faith in a strong bridge will save you; strong faith in a weak bridge will kill you. So it is ultimately outside of us. That is the best I can say for the "other" type of Christian.



Skepticism, Proof, and Objectivity

This piece of writing is addressed primarily to believers. I think, though, that it would not not be complete without speaking to a few issues that the skeptic would bring up. After all, I have been claiming that faith is rational and reasonable, and many people today are saying it is not.
Much of what follows was taken from a letter to a friend of mine, in response to her arguments and protestations. If the tone appears a little casual and unpolished, it is likely because it was originally written in a completely informal context.
Most people pride themselves on being objective. At the extreme end of that spectrum are those with a scientific bent. I am not criticizing; I think objectivity is good.
However, I also think it is a myth— an unattainable ideal. The human mind is a bizarre complex of prejudices, preconceptions, wishes, hopes, denials, dreams, fears, and biases. We are led astray by emotion, by ambition, by rebellion, by fatigue, by delusion, by a hundred other things.
If you have ever assisted with a psychology experiment, you may have noticed that they don't usually tell the subjects the real thing they are looking for, because it will influence the results. The interested reader can read about the Hawthorne Effect or about the research of Elizabeth Loftus back in the 1950s. Why are half the patients in drug testing given placebos— and why do some subjects even respond to them? It is because human beings are complex organisms.
Why do scientists perform double-blind experiments, and why do they check each others' work so closely? It is because they cannot trust even themselves.
No human being lives in an intellectual vacuum. Every person is subjected to outside influences from the earliest age, and even the people who prize rationality the most have had "pre-rational" influences. In short, everyone believes something. There is no neutral ground on which to stand and judge all viewpoints equally.
Objectivity is a worthy if unattainable goal. Let's continue to aspire to it, but let's realize it's not entirely possible.
The atheist has much to gain by his atheism. By his surgical removal of God from the universe, he has freed himself to act however he chooses at any time. He has removed divine authority and evaded responsibility for all his actions. In addition, he has escaped human law; for after all, if there is no divine authority, then human law is just one human against another. It becomes a matter of not getting caught, like a sneaking criminal; or a Darwinian struggle for supremacy, like a Hitler. Is our ideology better than Hitler's just because we won the war? Is it really not "better" at all?
The atheist is free to enjoy rebellion against the theistic authority figures of his past or his childhood. He is free to give himself airs of superiority over theists and thus pamper his own ego. He is free to pursue power, money, violence, sex— anything at all.



A Lesson from Geometry

Most of us are first introduced to the idea of an actual "proof" in high school geometry (as I said earlier). But in my class at least, I do not think that we spent any real time on the foundations of the subject; I didn't learn these until later.
You might think of proof as being the heart and soul of geometry, and in a sense you would be right. But the real foundation of Euclidean geometry is the set of five postulates (or axioms) propounded by Euclid.
In case you have forgotten, a "postulate" is a statement that is accepted as being true without proof; in fact, it is regarded as unprovable and even not needing proof. It is like an assumption.
Euclid was able to build his geometry on five of these; and all of his later work is derived from them. The Fifth Postulate was the black sheep of the family, not possessing the elegance and simplicity of the others; so he tried to prove it using only the other four, but to no avail.
Now, mathematicians were dissatisfied with this state of affairs for a great many centuries (Euclid lived over 2000 years ago— exactly when, I am not sure). Everyone wanted to prove the fifth postulate and thus dethrone it from its axiomatic status. It was in the nineteenth century when people started with this tactic: Replace the postulate with some form of a negation of it, and start looking for an inconsistency in the ensuing theorems.
The catch was this: No inconsistency could be found. Apparently the non-Euclidean geometries discovered by (as I recall) Lobachevsky and Riemann were just as good, just as valid, just as "true" as Euclidean geometry.
Suddenly geometry looks a great deal less valid than it used to. Not only can we not prove the five postulates— not even the troublesome one— we cannot even prove which geometry is the "right" one!
Now, please don't get me wrong. I am not saying that the assertions "God exists" and "God does not exist" should be treated as axioms and then used to build competing world views (though that might be an interesting exercise). But I am saying that some of our most cherished beliefs in the mathematical world are simply unprovable. Proof has to start with something; therefore, there will always be some things that are unprovable.



Science and Truth

I am in favor of a healthy respect for science. I believe that many today don't have that. I am also opposed to an unhealthy respect for science.
A few days ago, some friends and I were having a discussion about faith and reason, and I brought up X-rays— which cannot be seen, felt, heard, etc., but must be known very indirectly through reason (which requires some faith). One person pointed out that most people don't believe in X-rays for rational reasons anyway— they have never performed any experiments, never examined any evidence, never constructed any equipment to generate or detect X-rays.
In short, they take X-rays on faith. They are willing to do this because someone told them that this phenomenon is part of "science," which they have more faith in than in "religion." In other words, they have too much respect for science.
May I point out that science and truth are completely different things? This should be unnecessary, but in our society, I think it is all too necessary.
Science is not truth. Science is a systematic approach to the attempt to discover truth. The universe (or reality or nature) is the thing studied; science is the study itself. Today the phrase "laws of nature" is no more common than the phrase "laws of physics"— maybe even less common; and I saw an article the other day that commented casually, "The universe moves by physics."
The universe does not move by physics. Does he really mean to say that until the so-called laws of physics were formulated, those phenomena did not exist? I don't believe that. I believe that gravity worked before there was a "law of gravity" formulated— in fact, before there were humans around to observe the phenomenon.
Here is the scary part— the part that made me dizzy when I first learned it: Science is a human invention. I think I was probably an adult before I ever really realized that.
The scientific method comes purely from human minds— the concepts of hypothesis and experiment, Occam's Razor, the concept of parsimony, the Law of the Excluded Middle, the Law of Large Numbers, all of those things and more— people made all of it up, every bit of it. Occam's Razor is only a rule of thumb; it emphatically cannot be proven, and I don't think anyone has ever tried. Yet everyone uses it.
I once had a short discussion with a professor in the physics department at my university, Dr. Mumtaz Dinno. He was very interested in the ultimate building blocks of the universe, the "smallest" of all the subatomic particles. He explained the desire to describe all particles in terms of one fundamental particle. I asked him, "But isn't that just a human prejudice? Aren't we in a sense imposing our wishes and expectations on the universe when we think that way?"
For an instant he looked at me as if uncertain whether I were saying something profound or just blindingly obvious. "Certainly," he said. "There could be seventeen fundamental particles." But the last I heard, he was still looking for one.
Let the reader recall my conversation with Tobin Maginnis, who thought that a simultaneous belief in science and Christianity was "schizoid." If I were going to address that issue, I think I would take a stance exactly opposite. If there is no Mind behind the universe, why should we expect it to be orderly and regular? If the universe is a purely non-rational phenomenon, why should we attempt to use rationality as a tool for analyzing it? That, in my opinion, is schizoid.
Bertrand Russell once said, "I am an accidental collocation of atoms." On the intellectual level, he purported to view himself in a sheer materialistic way; but in his daily life he did not act like a random collocation of atoms, but like an entity with purpose and meaning in life. He brushed his teeth like everyone else, took his place in society, communicated in speaking and writing, and demanded rationality of a reality which he claimed was non-rational. That, I submit to you, is schizoid. His intellectual beliefs, in my view, are more consistent with the gibbering maniac who is no more rational than the physical world which accidentally produced him. I would expect such a person (if behaving consistently) to be more likely to behave in a manner that was random, chaotic, meaningless, and purposeless. I would expect him to be the person who goes on a killing spree culminating in suicide, or perhaps the person who obliviously sits in the corner all day and honestly believes himself to be a potato.
Many people today would like to marry materialism to humanism. I suggest, however, that materialism finds an infinitely more compatible bedfellow in nihilism or existentialism. But I have digressed.
It is a good reality check to remember that science's "official answers" change fairly often, and they do not always converge, but sometimes reverse themselves more than once, almost as if science were subject to fashion trends. The geologists and astronomers have leapfrogged each other more than once, occasionally resulting in an embarrassing situation in which the "best figure" for the age of the universe was less than the "best figure" for the age of the Earth. (I am not drawing any conclusions from that. I believe one number or the other was flawed; but I can't prove that belief.)
There are scores of embarrassing incidents one could dig up in the history of science. It was in the late 1700's that the most esteemed scientific body in the world denounced the ridiculous notion "that stones can fall from the sky"— never mind that people had been observing meteors for all of human history. People had also witnessed plasma discharges (or "ball lightning") throughout history, but these didn't "officially" exist until the mid-twenthieth century. I vividly remember reading a quote from the president of the American Chemical Society (in 1908, I think) in which he talks about atoms as a useful theory but reminds us that they are not really real, that their truth is "symbolic."
Let us not forget: Science is not truth. It is only an attempt— a feeble, human attempt— to discover truth.



The Bounds of Human Knowledge

It is frightening to realize that there are limits to what we can know. It has only been a few decades since Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was formulated, but it is firmly entrenched in modern physics.
But that is "only" science, which mathematicians know is not very rigorous in the first place. What about mathematics?
The reader, if he wishes, can read about Kurt Goedel and his Incompleteness Theorem. The math is over my head, and I have read differing accounts of what the implications are; but it seems clear to me that whether we turn to physics or math, we are haunted by the ghost of the unknowable.
Let's go back to things that are a little less abstract and a little more comfortable. Never mind the abstractions. Never mind the things we can only experience indirectly. What about the things we can see and experience directly? If I point to something to demonstrate its existence, saying, "See, here is a tree"— surely that is a valid proof?
Well, yes and no. In the first place, people can always find ways of rejecting something they want to reject. I recall with amusement a conversation with my atheist friend Nigel, who told me that even if I prayed and God appeared in mid-air, he wouldn't say, "Oh, now I believe"; he would say, "How did you do that?"
After all, if I show you a tree, you still don't have knowledge of the tree— only of your perception of it. This is a big difference.
How many ways can the human senses be fooled? Almost without trying, I can think of these: a. Hallucination from mental illness or fatigue; b. Drug-induced hallucination; c. Optical (or other) illusions; d. Dreams; e. Hypnosis; f. Psychological preconceptions (refer to Elizabeth Loftus); g. Natural filtering of information by the brain; h. Physical limitations of human senses; i. Sleight-of-hand, trickery, and hoax; j. Fallibility of memory; k. Incompleteness of sensory data.
Occasionally, I have had dreams in which I suspected I was dreaming. Two of these stick out in my mind because after examining my hands, my clothes, my body, and my immediate surroundings, I laughed at myself and decided I was being silly— of course it was real. A few minutes later, I woke up; but in the dream, I was not only completely lucid, but completely certain— as certain as I am right now— that I was awake.
For all I know, I could be dreaming right now; or I could be lying on a couch in a state of hypnosis; or I could be having a delusional fantasy of sitting and typing on a computer. Do I believe any of these to be true? No; but I cannot prove it.
Human senses are fallible. I am speaking not just in the physiological sense, but in the philosophical sense.
Suppose I look at a tree. I do not have direct knowledge of the tree itself, but only my perception of the tree— the result of my brain's processing of the signal sent from my eyes. Suppose I then look away from the tree— now I don't have even the perception, but only the memory of the perception! Not even a ghost, but just the shadow of a ghost.
Oh, but if I go and touch the tree, surely then... No. Tactile sense is just another sense. We cannot know the tree is there.
Socrates pursued this line of reasoning to its end, saying finally, "All I really know is that I know nothing." In short, we do not know that the outside