Doubt, Belief, Faith

I got a new book in the mail today: The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith, by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp.  The latter is president of George Washington University, and I don't know anything about him other than what it says on the flap of the book.  The former--Philip Clayton--is a well known Christian philosopher from Claremont University in California.  I've spent a bit of time with him personally, and I always come away from our encounters with new respect for him, though not always agreeing entirely.  He was the main speaker at the conference I recently attended in Seattle, and I went out to supper with him at Thai Fusion, just down the hill from the campus of Seattle Pacific University (on the recommendation of Terry Linhart).  Because of our conversation and the talks he gave at the conference, I ordered the book when I got home.

For Amazon purchases of books that are more than six months old, I often explore the used providers.  Sometimes you get a deal; sometimes you get a book full of blue highlighter.  This time I was not disappointed.  I got a "like new" copy of the book for less than half the new price.  It came as advertised, and I dipped into it this afternoon and this evening.  I may end up writing a series of posts on it as I read through it.  I think it is important.  At any rate, here is one post on it.

***Warning:  If you are a Christian who has no doubts about the claims of Christianity as traditionally conceived, read no further.  Go on with your life and don't bother with books like this or blog entries like this.  Seriously.  It is not my intention to plant seeds of doubt.  But for those who occasionally have some doubts, read on with an open mind.

Clayton--like a lot of people I have met lately--finds himself in an uncomfortable no-man's-land between the fundamentalist-minded folks who hold onto a cartoonish version of faith that is read off the flannel graphs of Sunday School, and the liberal revisionists who seem to throw out the baby with the bathwater in attempting to keep their faith current and relevant.  I think the conflict comes primarily from the fact that the human authors of scripture believed very different things about the way things are than we do today, and the divine author of scripture didn't seem to feel the need to correct them on these matters.  So God's revelation to us comes strained through their worldview, and too often we confuse their worldview with God's revelation.  They believed the earth was the center of the cosmos, that history was not primarily about recounting facts, that slavery was inevitable, that women were not citizens, that demons were the cause of epilepsy, that the earth was only a few thousand years old, that the kidneys were the seat of emotion, and so on.  Some people think that we should still believe some of these things, since they are right there in the Bible.  I suppose that most of those people stopped reading after the warning given above.  If you kept reading, though, you are probably among the group of us who thinks that the modern world has caused us to change our minds about many (if not all) of those things.  So what are we to do?

Clayton thinks that the first thing to do is to own up to the sources of our doubts--to name them and to face them squarely.  And no softening the blow.  Let's acknowledge the strongest case there is to be made that might make us think that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is just wrong, that Richard Dawkins and his ilk are right, and that we've been massively deluded.  Here is Clayton's list of the top five reasons for doubting the core of Christian beliefs from chapter one:

1. Science.  "Over the course of roughly the last three centuries, the modern era has been deeply influenced by scientific methods, results, and ways of thinking" (5).  The world as we understand it today is vastly different than the world that people believed in pre-1500.  Does this cast doubt on the kinds of explanations that Christianity has offered?
2. Evil.  The problem of evil cannot be waved aside by appeals to free will.  Evolution has exacerbated the problem, but it was there long before Darwin.  If you don't think there is any problem with kinds and amount of evil we find in the world, then you're not thinking hard enough.
3. Religious plurality.  When adherents to other religions all lived in far off lands, it was easier to think that they were all just deluded or crazy.  Now that they are in our neighborhoods, it appears that there is roughly the same level of delusion and craziness among them as there is among us.  How can we claim we're right and they're all wrong?
4. The state of the historical evidence.  Here Clayton has in mind the issues associated with taking the Gospels (and biblical documents in general) as historical.  Look at the different accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection.  Obviously the difficulties associated with the reliability of eye witnesses were not exempted just because they wrote under inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  And how were the documents of the New Testament assembled?  Not by unbiased people, but by those who were concerned to advance a particular understanding of Christianity.
5. The claims of resurrection.  Is it really reasonable to believe that Jesus's corpse came back to life, that it passed through walls, and that it ascended up into the sky?

Different people find different of these more problematic.  And even the same person (me for example) finds some problematic some days, and others on a different day.  Clayton's book is not a straightforward evidential apologetics book that purports to show why these aren't really problems.  Nor does he sweep them under the rug and pretend they aren't there.  Instead, he aims to engage these and to show what committed Christian belief looks like in spite of them.

I'm anxious to see where the argument goes.  How about you?  

Silence

I finished rereading Shusaku Endo's Silence last night (the first time I read it was in 2005). This strikes me as a very important novel--which probably doesn't mean anything more than, "I really like it."

Probably most of us have thought about what we would go through for our faith. Would we be able to die for what we believe? Would we go through torture and be martyred? As we see in Silence, those are the easy questions...

At the next level, would we allow others to be tortured because of our own faith? And, what does it mean to apostatize? Is there a difference between some external action that has always been associated with relinquishing one's faith and the internal commitment? How do we respond to God's seeming silence and indifference?

And perhaps most profoundly, what is the cultural garb of our faith?

I know that a few of you out there have read and appreciated Silence. I'd be interested to hear your takes on it.

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

The good Dr. Haas took some exception to my recent post on coincidences as signs of God. He left a series of posts on my Facebook page into which this blog dumps (found here if you have access). I take it that the gist of his concern is that interpreting circumstances as messages from God is an inherently private action, and so removes the controls of a believing community centered on the Word of God and opens the door to all kinds of wacky things which are immune to falsification.

I continue to wonder, though, whether the kinds of experiences I alluded to have some legitimate place in the life of faith. Remember first of all that it's a pretty rare occurrence in my life that something dramatic like this happens (in a life approaching four decades, I'm still counting them on fingers (with several leftover)). Next, most of these incidents were not remarkable in their immediate contexts (with the exception of the radio song I mentioned), but have become more so as larger stories of my life unfolded. The historian will have fun with this, I'm sure: they are the interpreted "facts" (and I'm not sure there are any other kind) around which I've made sense out of some of the things that have happened to me and the choices that I've made. I'll continue to contend that my faith has a role to play in this. I believe in, trust in, and am committed to (these three attitudes classically constituting faith) seeing the hand of God at work in my life. This is always easier in retrospect and (I'm willing to concede) in community.

You'll not catch me claiming infallibility with such things, but I think it defensible that God does work through circumstances and impinge on the natural order of things. I think we can learn to hear his voice (though we need to be careful here not to think God just dictates to us what we should do in certain situations--thus rendering free will superfluous). These are components of my faith in the kind of being that God is.

Such a topic could hardly be treated with integrity without appeal to the Five Man Electrical Band classic:

"Whoaaaa signs, signs, everywhere a sign;
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind.
Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the signs?

VP No More

One of the nice things about taking six months off from blogging is that you have a lot of topics waiting in the wings to be blogged. One of the categories I'll be interspersing here is "Catch up on my life" Probably the most momentous thing that has transpired during this time period is my decision to step down from my administrative post at Bethel. At the close of this academic year, I'll no longer be the Vice President for Academic Services.

I still have some major reflecting to do on this move. Coming to the decision was tortuous, but even if nothing else good comes from it, it was a worthwhile process because I heard from God. I suspect that most of us have times fairly frequently when there is a nudge or quiet word in our lives that provides direction. But I have a list that I can count on my fingers of the times when there was something more dramatic in the way of divine communication. I've never been one to hear audible voices or see skywriting; but God has worked powerfully and unmistakeably (at least to my lights) through circumstances--like the time that I asked if I was going to marry the girl I was dating and God "answered" through the song on the radio. This time it was through the timing of a telephone call. Perhaps I'll speak to it again in the future.

For now, I'll reflect a bit more on coincidences. There is a concept that has some traction from the Intelligent Design movement called "specified complexity". Essentially it is an event that has a very low probability of happening (complexity) AND shows unmistakable signs of intelligence (specified). When I lived in Illinois, the license plates had three letters then three numbers to them (unless you ordered a custom one--which was free in IL at that time but I chose not to do for aesthetic reasons). The one that we got was RCF 337. Getting that specific license number has a probability of 1 in 17,576,000. That's pretty rare, but I when we got it in the mail I didn't respond with, "Wow, can you believe we got that one??!!" However, if I had gotten JBS 711, which has exactly the same probability of appearing on an Illinois license plate, I would have been incredibly shocked and I doubt if you could have convinced me that something wasn't fishy somewhere (because that happens to be my initials and birth date).

In the same way, many of the "God things" that have happened to me had incredibly low probabilities as well as having the unmistakeable mark of someone standing behind them. I'm aware of the possibility that they could have just been random; but I choose to view those events as purposeful (and would argue that it is the better explanation of the facts to do so). I think that being committed to viewing the world in such a way is at least part of what it means to have religious faith.