On Being a True Believer
I’ve been thinking of writing this ever since I read Joe Carter’s post Plagued by Certainty, but I haven’t really had the time. You see, while there are certainly many things regarding which I disagree with Joe Carter, I find a certain resonance with his claim of certainty in matters of faith.
This certainty does not extend to the full list, nor has it remained unquestioned throughout my life. Rather, I would call myself a true believer not because I have always been convinced, nor because I have a growing belief, but rather because I have made the maximum effort to disbelieve, and come up a failure.
The way in which I attempted to disbelieve and failed also put the limits on what I am certain about. I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, in a conservative SDA home. Though my parents taught a certain degree of curiosity and even skepticism about ordinary events and stories, the tenets of our faith were not to be doubted. Combining this with my experience of the Holy Spirit, I went into my college years a very convinced believer. The problem was that my convictions were a single structure. What I believed was that the SDA set of doctrines were the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I frequently note that I’m not a theologian, sometimes to laughter from the peanut gallery, but the fact is that in college and Seminary I studied technical Biblical studies. When I had to take a religion course it was something related to Biblical studies. The closest I got to theological reflection was in an undergraduate Philosophy of Religion course. Note that my MA in Religion, concentrating in Biblical languages was a joint affair with the Andrews University School of Graduate Studies and the SDA Theological Seminary. I still regard myself as a rank amateur in discussing theological issues; Biblical studies is where I feel truly comfortable.
Thus I did not examine the details of theology all that seriously, but I examined the technical details with great rigor. Since the structure was a whole, and I found that it was so loosely put together that the slightest breeze would topple it, I naturally rejected the entire thing in a body. I then made a serious effort for around 12 years to be an unbeliever. I was consistent in my efforts. There were two occasions on which I thought I was about to die, and I consciously rejected the notion of prayer, a habit from my youth. I personally don’t accept the line that there are no atheists in foxholes (though my brushes with death had nothing to do with war). I suspect that’s a believer’s quote, imagining that an atheist must give in at times of danger. Presumably it’s related to the almost inevitable stories of death-bed conversions whenever an atheist dies.
Dawn broke for me, in a sense, when I was encouraged to check out religious positions other than the one I grew up with. I found an opportunity to explore within the United Methodist Church. While many of my friends think the church has become too liberal, I have to mention that it was the tolerance of the United Methodist Church that made my experience within it possible, even though I would classify myself as a moderate, certainly in terms of Methodism.
I was able to ask myself what I truly disbelieved, and what I just tried to disbelieve because it went along with those things. Among the things of which I was convinced at that point were Biblical errancy, the historical unlikeliness of many key events in Jewish and Christian history, and an interventionist God (at least on a regular basis). (I had already rejected young earth creationism and accepted the outlines of evolutionary theory before I left the SDA church formally. That was a strain point with the church, and at the time I had no idea how I would integrate it with faith, and was in fact not even giving that issue consideration.)
Once I separated those out as elements testable in a scientific (or at least historical) sense, I could look at what I truly did believe. I believed in God. I believed in a God who communicates with us in some sense, and I believed that this life was not all there was. With a bit more time I found that I was very comfortable talking about that in the general terms of orthodox Christianity, specifically the incarnation and the trinity. Just how literally I would take some of the events was (and in general is) an open question.
While I believe in God, I believe there is also an infinite amount of learning to do about him, not to mention unlearning of false ideas. While I believe Jesus is alive without doubt (You ask me how I know he lives//he lives within my heart), and while I personally believe in the resurrection, I don’t hold the physical resurrection without room for doubt. If I were to reject some aspect of the resurrection doctrine, it would have to be replaced by something else that would support the unmovable (I’ve tried!) conviction that Jesus is alive. While I believe that God communicates, I don’t believe that he does so in any inerrant sense in any form or medium, simply because we have no ability to receive and communicate inerrant communications.
So my list would be different, but when it comes down to it, I’m also a true believer. There’s nothing you’re going to be able to do about that set of convictions. Do I believe other things? Indeed I do, many of them. But all of those have varying levels of conviction, and they are subject to revision.
It seems to me that I have taken a one-way leap of faith. It’s a one-way trip over the chasm, and even when I tried diligently to jump back, I kept landing on the same side, sometimes merely grasping the edge with my fingernails, but always on the same side. Apologetics has done nothing for me here. In general, it provides a way for me to look at how my firm convictions relate to the real world, and whether I hold convictions that conflict with reality, rather than merely being unsupported. It’s a fun exercise, and helpful, but it doesn’t change my beliefs.
So I too have a core of certainty. It’s smaller than Carter’s, but I found the hard way that I cannot sustain doubt of it. It sticks with me no matter what. I think that makes me a true believer.
I have far deeper doubts, but I can relate to your position. I find myself unable to relate in any way to the post you linked to by Cooper. Someone who says they would sooner doubt their own existence than the Nicene creed is, well…is somewhere inaccessible to my thought processes. The Nicene creed was produced by a committee and voted on. A God that intervenes enough to see that a vote gets passed, but not enough to make it unanimous…is a profoundly limited and capricious deity. I see nothing wrong with belief in the creeds and all that, but phrased that way, it makes me wonder who thinks like that.
I have no reason to doubt that Jesus existed; I have reason to doubt the existence of a God that is independent of human experience. I see myself as a believer and a Christian, but I am comfortable with the fact that many people would not see me as a “real” Christian.
I read Joe’s piece, too, and I have a hard time reconciling faith with certainty. For one, I tend to agree with the thoughts posted on a now-defunct blog called dulcius ex asperis (appropriately enough, “sweetness from difficulty”) that there are (at least) two distinct types of faith: cognitive and existential. I know I’ve had plenty of the latter and maybe a bit of the former.
The other thing that bugs me is that I’ve struggled off and on with certainty, but the one constant for me is that I keep coming back to the beliefs I hold (although they are sometimes modified, especially as I grow older and more reflective). I think this has been valuable for me because it tests what I believe, and my beliefs come out the stronger for it.
Rather, I would call myself a true believer not because I have always been convinced, nor because I have a growing belief, but rather because I have made the maximum effort to disbelieve, and come up a failure.
Can I just clarify: is this “come up a failure” in the sense of being psychologically unable to disbelieve, or in the sense of finding disbelief intellectually untenable?
If the former, I’d be interested to hear the effects on you of trying to disbelieve (since it’s something I’ve never had to do – as far as I can recall I’ve always been atheist). If the latter, I’d be interested to hear your logic.
I’m trying to catch up on responding to comments. Last week wasn’t good in that department.
Good question. I have to slice and dice it a bit to answer, so first let me give the short answer. The issue was psychological, but the struggle was really both to understand why I did believe certain things, and second to distinguish what I did believe from associated ideas that I knew to be false.
I’d divide things in which I might believe into three categories:
1) Those that I know to be false. I know, for example, that I cannot pray that I be made lighter than air and then jump off a cliff, floating safely to the bottom. If I psychologically believed I could, and still had the rationality to examine that belief, I would reject it, and get treatment for the condition.
2. Those I can demonstrate objectively to be true.
3. Things that do not contradict existing reality but for which I have insufficient objective evidence. Belief in God falls into this third category. I don’t believe my concept of God contradicts any objectively knowable facts, yet I cannot present you or anyone else (or myself) with sufficient evidence to believe this as, for example, I believe that if I jump off a cliff I will fall.
So the more equivocal answer is that there was a great deal of introspection involved, examining my thinking, but this did not involve discovering that disbelief was intellectually untenable. In fact, from an intellectual point of view I think I understand quite well the intellectual basis for being an unbeliever.
I, on the other hand, have made a leap of faith that I think is probably a one way street. If you’ve really made it, you will almost never go back from it. I don’t make any effort to snare you into my belief system, because I don’t think there is any means to do that. It’s an intellectually unsatisfying answer, I know, but it’s what I have.
I would also note that my morality didn’t really change during the time I attempted unbelief. I am able to express my moral positions from either a theistic or an atheistic point of view, thus I don’t accept the notion many theists have that atheists will be immoral. Note also that my moral believes are not part of that “true belief” that I described. The core that I found I inescapably believed in was simply that there is a spiritual realm and that there is more to life than this physical life. All details about that fall into three categories: 1) Language that we use to encapsulate spiritual experience, 2) educated guessing based on my belief (i.e. if my belief is true, what then?) and 3) Speculation.
As you can see I don’t make a great evangelist or apologist.
I hope in all that rambling I answered your question.
Yes, that answers my question – actually far more honestly than I expected. Thanks for being so open with me.
A couple of follow-up questions, if you have a moment:
1) What were the circumstances surrounding your leap of faith? Or is it more of a product of upbringing? Do you feel you had a choice about making the leap, or was it something that happened without your conscious control?
2) In general, do you feel that the ability to make leaps of faith is a good or bad thing? Or does it depend on the circumstances? If so, under what circumstances is it justifiable?
3) Is there any possible set of evidence that could dissuade you of God’s existence? Feel free to get very very hypothetical here (aliens landing, discovering you’re in the Matrix, etc).
My view on question #2 is that leaps of faith are usually a bad thing – they lead too easily to Jonestown and similar malarkey. However, I can imagine circumstances in which they might be justifiable. I’m also aware that some Christians feel their belief is imposed on them by something out of their conscious control – they just can’t help believing.
I think I had made the leap by the time I reached college, but I’m not certain precisely when I would say I completed it, and I’m not sure just how much choice I had in it. There was some conscious effort involved, but an objective observer would lack the facts, and while I think I have most of the facts, I’m not an objective observer of my mental processes.
I think leaps of faith can be extremely dangerous under many circumstances. If I decide that I can fly as a leap of faith, I’m likely to end up smashed on some rocks somewhere.
The best test from my point of view is simply to ask if this contradicts my best efforts to understand the physical world. If I say that God is the ground of all being, it becomes an organizing principle for my philosophy, but it doesn’t suggest I have to ignore physical reality in any way. On the other hand, there are those whose leap of faith results in them believing that God will heal all their diseases and thus they need not go to the doctor. They pay the penalty.
So I see some danger, but I don’t see much more danger than there is in being human and error-prone in the first place.
The problem here is that no set of evidence made me believe in God in the first place. There’s a difference between realizing after the fact that a certain concept of God will not conflict with reality as I see it, as opposed to looking at all the things that don’t conflict and calling them evidence for the existence of God.
I’m not so certain we aren’t living in the matrix. I don’t have any evidence that we are, so I don’t sit around and worry about this sort of thing. I’m guessing, however, that a well-made matrix might be much harder to perceive than the one in the movie was. I imagine it may be possible at some time in the future to create a virtual world in a super-duper-computer in which processes believe themselves to be physical beings in a physical universe, and have no way of detecting that they aren’t.
So off hand I can’t think of any set of physical evidence that would convince me there was no God.
There is such a thing as a spiritual experience that seems overwhelming. Personally I don’t think I’m forced into it, but as I mentioned, lacking an objective observer to sort out the details, I cannot be certain of that. I probably do believe I’m more rational than I am. Most of us do, I think.