A Question on the Faith
A reader with the valleylike but unkempt name of Glenfilthy writes and asks:
I know there is a God; I can feel it and that is good enough for me. I am up to my ears in the New Testament and working my way through it. It’s slow going; frequent stops are needed for me to go on the internet, and suss out the historical content and confirm the meanings of certain passages. I am starting at ground zero, there are elementary school children that know more about the faith than I do. If I understand you correctly, there was a time that you were in a boat similar to mine.
How do you make the leap of faith – as a reformed atheist or agnostic – to accept the bible? I have no problem accepting the morality and acknowledgement of God. I have big problems with the miracles and mythology of the biblical characters. How do you reconcile that with the underpinnings required for a rational mind? Or maybe phrased better: how do you dispense with doubt?
Let me answer in order:
‘How do you make the leap of faith – as a reformed atheist or agnostic – to accept the bible? ‘
Good question. I did not. I saw a supernatural vision and had a religious experience. My faith was given to me as a gift, not as something I earned. My task was only to prevent irrational doubts from eating it away.
I am a Roman Catholic. I regard the Bible as a closed book, written by those inside the faith and meant to be only for those already inside the faith. No one else will understand it. It is not a book of apologetics. It is not a primer. It is not a book of history, poetry, science, or prophecy: it is all these things combined.
I also do not regard the Bible as meant to be read literally in each and every passage. Some are poetry, some are myth, some are symbolic or apocalyptic writing. Only the books of history are history. John’s Gospel is meant to be an eyewitness account of the facts of the life and death of Jesus. It is meant literally. But John’s revelation is highly structured and symbolic. It is prophetic writing not to be taken literally.
I believe the best place to learn the Christian teaching and the Christian message is not one man all alone trying to wrestle with the mystery of God. I believe the best place to learn Christian teaching is in the Church, in a class on the subject, talking with the people or with a priest, and seeing how they live their lives.
Reading books meant to introduce outsiders to Christ are useful, and are written for that purpose. This includes works that carry the imprimatur of the Church, but also includes popular writings, such as those of G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis.
The Bible is difficult, and meant for people well advanced in their spiritual journey. Much in the Bible is repellent to modern sensibilities, or shocking, or mysterious. You might be better off reading something like GOLDEN LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS or IMITATION OF CHRIST.
The writing I myself found most clear and persuasive was, oddly enough, the modern Catechism. It is logically organized and written in a nuanced and legalistic way that appeals to my sense of reason.
This, unfortunately, is a matter of my personal taste, so I cannot necessarily recommend reading the Catechism first off.
I do suggest books by apologists like Chesterton, Lewis, Jimmy Akin, and Cardinal Newman, or works by R.C. Sproul or Father John Ricardo.
“I have big problems with the miracles and mythology of the biblical characters. “
Do you have a problem accepting the Big Bang theory, that the whole universe, with all matter and energy in the cosmos compressed to a single point smaller than an atom, exploded outward from nothing in an instant? Nothing in the Bible is as incredible as this theory.
Allow me to suggest you read a book that I found both profound and astonishing: FACE TO FACE WITH JESUS (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GHXRNI6/) It is the autobiographical conversion story of Samaa Habib, who earned the enmity of her Muslim family and community by hearing and answering the call of Christ’s love. Scientifically inexplicable events, that is, miracles, intervened to save her more than once.
I will buy you a copy and send it to you, if you agree to read it.
Disbelief in miracles is a matter of philosophical preference. It is an axiomatic belief, a foundational belief, a base belief.
We do not look at evidence and then decide whether evidence supports or denies the existence of miracles. We, that is, all thinking beings whatsoever, decide our base beliefs first, and then use that base as a tool to asses the credibility of evidence.
The base does not sit on a deeper base: it is the base. It is the starting point for deduction. Higher things are built on the base.
This is not because humans are all bigoted and irrational. It is because the way the logic itself works is that evidence cannot be compiled without rules governing the compilation. Evidence cannot be assessed without rules governing how to assess evidence. The jury cannot sit unless there is a rule to establish who and what a jury is and does.
By definition, the rules for how to sift evidence cannot be deduced from evidence. The rules come first.
Likewise here. Evidence for miracles is widespread: one can walk into any Christian Science reading room anyone in the nation, and read daily and weekly reports of miraculous healings running back over a hundred years.
One can read the official French government reports of the miracle healings at Lourdes and see that the scientists call more of the cases “inexplicable by science” than the Catholic Church herself credits as legitimate cases of real miracles.
One can read Machiavelli, who is surely one of the more skeptical and cynical of writers in the West, but who nonetheless credited miracles, signs, and portents. After listing a number of these presumably known to all his readers at the time, he comments:
“It may be, however, as certain philosophers maintain, that the air is peopled with spirits, who by their superior intelligence foresee future events, and out of pity for mankind warn them by such signs, so that they may prepare against the coming evils.”
One can read any history written before the modern age, and see that historians record miracles, signs and portents attested by no more and no less evidence than the mundane events also recorded. The historian knows of the death of Caesar only because of the writings of Plutarch and Livy and other ancient writers. No modern historian doubts that Caesar died as described, stabbed to death in the portico of the Senate of Rome.
But the ancient historians also recorded the prophetic dream of Caesar’s wife, the omens of the soothsaying warning Caesar, and mention the appearance of Caesar’s ghost to Brutus before the battle of Philippi. The same historian reports both events. The modern historian believes in one and not in the other, even though both are known from the pen of the same witness. Why the difference?
But if one has a base belief that no miracles do exist because no miracles can exist, the conclusion must follow that all reports of miracles (even those surrounded by other evidence of accuracy and good faith, even those reported by ancient writers whom are trusted on all other topics) nonetheless are myths, mistakes, deceptions, or lies.
Base beliefs by definition are never based on evidence. Now, to the limited and stupid modern mind, this sounds like we are saying that base beliefs are based on emotion, bigotry, or mental sloth. This is because modern philosophy is a rubbish heap. Real philosophy holds that base beliefs are deduced from first principles, and we can tell true first principles from false by logic. A statement that contradicts itself is self refuting hence false: a statement that, merely by the fact of it being uttered, proves itself true hence is a self evident.
Now, as a philosophical proposition, the idea that nature arises from the supernatural is no more nor less logical than the idea that nature is defined as all that exists. Again, the idea that mind produced matter, or that a lawgiver produced the laws of nature, is no more nor less logical than the idea that matter with no mind behind it produced mind, or that the laws of nature are descriptions of reality, not legislation.
In either case, the idea that miracles offend or override the laws of nature is false. In the first case, when the governor of, let us say, West Virginia, pens an official pardon for a prisoner on death row, even if the prisoner was tried and convicted according to the most scrupulous adherence to the law, that governor’s act is lawful and does not break the order established by law. It is, however, a sign and a wonder. It is, from the point of view of the criminal process, like a miracle: an unexpected mercy.
So the parting of the Red Sea does not break the laws of nature any more than the rising or setting of the red sun in the sea. The governor pens a pardon for Moses and the Hebrews who otherwise would have been cut to pieces by the chariots of Pharaoh. Since the event has not been repeated, no one is in a position to discover what material causes and effects, if any, led to that event.
In the second case, even if everything in the universe is merely the needle in a record groove, and all events are prewritten and preordained in the same way the notes on a song are imprinted on a phonograph track, neither you nor I nor any mortal being knows what note is coming next, even if we think we know the basic mathematical rules governing chords and octaves and so on.
Even if there is no God, and this material world, as a grinding machine grinding out false hopes, despair, disease and death, we simply do not know where every wheel and gear is positioned, or what clockwork birds or figurine are set to pop out of little doors when the clock strikes the hour. We only know what we have seen in times past.
Physics only studies repeated and repeatable events: the ticking of the minutes and seconds caused by weights pulling wheels against escapements and so on. What happens when the clock strikes noon, no creature who has dwelt inside the clock for less than an hour can possibly say.
” How do you reconcile that with the underpinnings required for a rational mind?”
By having a proper conception of God.
Suppose you found a man named Mr. A who believed in the laws of mathematics. Mr. A believes in the commutative, associative, and distributive laws of mathematical operation. Mr. B walks up to him and says, ‘how can you reconcile belief in these laws of math with the underpinnings required for a rational mind?’
Mr. A is, at first bewildered. He does not see any conflict between reason and math. Indeed, he believes math is nothing more than reason applied to symbols representing numbers.
He discovers, upon questioning, that Mr. B has been taught his whole life that math is unrelated to physics, that is, unrelated to empirical reality, on the grounds that math leads to conclusions of perfect certainty, whereas statements about empirical reality can never obtain perfect certainty. From this he concludes that math is unreal, hence arbitrary, hence irrational.
Now, Mr. B’s opinion is not irrational, but it is a base belief. No discussion of the commutative law will convince him one way or the other. His belief that math is irrational cannot be swayed merely by showing him math proofs. One has to address the causes that led him to the conclusion that math is irrational. It is a question of epistemology.
You and I stand in the same relation as Mr. A and Mr. B. You have some base belief, which you have not here stated (and which you may not be consciously aware) that tells you that the historical account of the Jews you are reading in the Bible is not reconcilable with reason.
Now, look at things from my viewpoint: I cannot see how the human mind, through abstract reasoning about things like symbols representing numbers can reveal true and reliable information about the enigma called the cosmos unless the same Creator both created (1) the supernatural part of us called the soul where reason lives and (2) created the realm of nature.
Now, even without cracking open a Bible, cold logic says that nature cannot be created except by a supernatural creator, and it says that the human mind cannot be created except by a superhuman mind. The idea that the human mind can arise from the unintended natural motions of blind matter contains a paradox: if the tools in our minds, such as the conscience, or the faculty or reason, arise from non-mind unintentionally, then they are not tools at all. A tool is an object designed for a purpose. If our faculty of reason arose through blind evolution, it is not a tool, and is not meant to serve any purpose. We merely use it as a convenience for our own ends: but we have no reassurance that it works as we think it does.
If the blind forces of nature created our minds which create our thoughts, then our minds are blind, that is, the human mind is not intended for any purpose, neither to achieve truth in reasoning, nor to serve our self interest, nor anything else.
I apologize if this is too philosophical and too abstract, but I am trying to point out what my conclusion is. Even if I cannot explain my path clearly enough in a short column, I want you to know where I have ended up.
From my viewpoint, the first cause of all causes and the first truth of all truths, the creator of the human mind as well as the creator of the laws of nature and the laws of morality which the human mind contemplates and comes to understand is God; and that God is itself the underpinning needed before any reasoning takes place, or regarded as reliable.
In short, outside faith in the God described by St. Thomas Aquinas, belief in reason is not rational. One is left with three options.
First, one might be something like a Buddhist or Quietist, who regards human reason as illusion, as mere chatter inside the mind.
Second, one might be some shade of secular nihilist, naturalist, materialist, or Leftist, who regards human reason as a meaningless; reason is a by-product of unintentional natural or social processes; reason is a merely one narrative among many; reason is merely a psychological mechanism of the passions to sate themselves.
The third option is to be pragmatic, after the fashion of Confucius or the Stoics, and simply not address the question of how reason is to be trusted: as a practical matter, one must trust reason even to ask the question of why one should trust reason.
All three options lead to a philosophical halt state. They are a thought that stops thought. The pragmatic man simply does not think about the abstract question; the nihilist adopts hypocrisy; the Quietist, seeking a mystical union with nirvana, halts the process of though on this as on all topics.
Now, as a philosopher, the prospect of refusing to think about the matter is shameful. As a warrior regards cowardice in battle do philosophers regard retreat from wrestling with weighty questions.
Hence my conclusion is this: without belief in God, belief in reason is irrational.
Now, imagine how odd it is to me, whose conclusion is this, to be asked how I reconcile belief in God with belief in reason.
Science does not prove miracles do not take place. It says nothing whatsoever about miracles one way or the other, any more than its says anything about taste in art or justice in a law court. Science deals with repeated and repeatable experiences and experiments, and with how rules deduced from those regularities relate to non-repeatable observations in realms like biology or astronomy. That is the realm of science.
Science reads the book of nature. Science, for example, reading the sonnets of nature can detect that sonnets are fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter. Science cannot say anything about the themes or matter of the poems it reads. It only studies that repeated and repeatable elements of the poem of nature. It cannot tell you why stars are beautiful or why eagles are majestic.
Science says nothing about the author of the book. To say that science somehow can study the book of nature and conclude that no author exists in nonsense.
Again, to say that the unexpected rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, or variations from strict sonnet rules that we call miracles are signs that the rules of poetry have been broken is, again, merely nonsense. The idea that if a poet bends or breaks a rule of sonnet making in order to make a great poem, that this means he is an inferior poet lacking in forethought is nonsense on stilts.
Philosophy says that books only arise when written by writers. Likewise, stars might arise by a natural process of gravity and fusion, but nature cannot arise by a natural process, only by a supernatural one.
“how do you dispense with doubt?”
Ah! Now this is a very interesting question indeed, more for the unspoken assumption behind the question than the question itself. The unspoken assumption is that doubt favors the theory of atheism, when, in fact, doubt favors theism.
Allow me to answer in words wiser this:
“The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.”
I hope this answers the question and I hope this length does not weary your ears. If not, I perhaps could answer more clearly if you were more clear as to what your question is.