On Faith and Reason
by Jimmy Hogan
It's interesting to me that I find myself more and more surrounded by really smart people who believe the opposite of what I do in many ways. It has caused me to question my views and to consider the fundamentals that led me to where I am today. As for me, I'm a pretty smart guy... not nearly as good at the trivia games that many of my friends and I enjoy but I usually remember best only those things that are of interest to me. I did muddle through a degree in Mathematics and I typically score in the high 140's or more on IQ tests; plus I've made a reasonable life for myself and family through some adversity at times balanced with some good luck at other times. On whole, a pretty typical life for a middle class American.
Where things tend to diverge now, though, is on matters of faith. I spent a large part of my life being what I'll now call an unprofessed atheist. I had no belief in God nor did I have any contempt for him either. I thought it to be a perfectly reasonable position. Along the way though I noticed I was missing something others around me had, a sense of peace and inner strength. I observed that those people who had fundamental religious beliefs were happier regardless of circumstance; but based on my outside view of their world I could never understand this position. So I set about to reconcile this making some very important discoveries along the way. Mainly my world wasn't as well explained as I was taught that it was.
Any reasonable person walking through the woods who stumbled upon a clearing of 10 rocks evenly spaced in a straight line would come to the obvious conclusion that someone put them there. Many, at the same time though, would argue that 3 billion bits of positionally dependent data somehow organized itself into our DNA, the blueprint of life. And that’s not the whole of it, that DNA blueprint repeats itself in every one of the trillions of living cells in the body... each cell a miniature specialized self-replicating factory more complicated than anything man has ever created yet small enough to fit on the tip of a pin. Though the enormous complexity of all of this is really interesting, no science teacher ever pointed this out to me along the way.
I also discovered that for all of the cosmic tumblers to line up for there even to be a universe of matter to support our life in the first place is almost a statistical impossibility. Roger Penrose, a highly respected British mathematician and Physicist (and agnostic), put the odds at 10,000,000,000 to the 123rd power to 1 for a universe to exist to support matter in the way our universe does. That's 1 followed by such an astounding number of zeros that winning the lottery every day of your life is a statistical certainty by comparison.
And then we coast around our little star at just the right distance, with just the right tilt, with this great force-field of an atmosphere surrounding us, protecting us from cosmic radiation and meteor impacts in such a way that Captain Kirk would be envious. Interesting.
These statistics and other observations in quantum physics have led theoretical physicists to devise the Many Worlds theory that states for every possibility of an occurrence a new world is created where each of the possibilities eventuates (happens).
There's a very large portion of the scientific community that believes this because it's the best logical solution so far to the scientific observations. If you ask me, though, Many Worlds is more far fetched than Job's Leviathan, the sea-serpent / fire-breathing dragon that predated Harry Potter's adventures by 4000 years. (in fact Many Worlds necessitates that Job and Harry Potter did or will occur in some chain of infinite possibilities and consequences). In any case, this theory is certainly much more far fetched than the record of Jesus preaching peace to the descendents of Abraham 2000 years ago.
At the biological level the steps of evolution are obvious to any observer of the evidence; but one must also make some very large leaps of faith that things we have found in the fossil record are a long and unbroken thread dating back to the day life supposedly bootstrapped itself out of the mud in a seminal event that man has yet to recreate even in controlled lab circumstances. No mention of any of this during all of my education, however. In fact most people I meet believe that man has created life from scratch in a laboratory.
And even if we, as intelligent beings, do recreate this event and are able to map all of those large gaps in the evolutionary record best described by, 'then a miracle happened'; we still find ourselves back to the place where it could just as well be, as the Catholic Church contends, an increasing revelation to us of God's divine works.
Any person reading this far might rightly conclude that the point I'm trying to make is that we simply don't know. Every answer we have tends to lead to 10 more questions and anyone who says that the science is converging in its disproof of God simply has not given the science a good honest look.
I've read the people disputing the points I have made and, believe me, the articles and books on the subject are numerous. I know about 'God of the Gaps' and how the span of time and the vast number of interactions serve to offset statistical improbability, and how our exact life form is the result of the universe we have; not that the universe is specially suited to us, but the point is that there is no more evidence to refute a creator than there is to prove Him. My observation of the facts leads me to believe that it's tremendously unlikely that all of this just happened by accident... a point given little credence anymore in today's world.
The fact is that science gets us only so far as agnosticism, not knowing if there is a God or not. From there we must make a leap of faith to believe that there is a God; and an even further leap of faith to believe that God is consistent with the teachings of a particular religion. Yet, particularly in the presence of a mountain of statistics to overcome; an atheist must also make a leap of faith to conclude there is no God. Since almost none of the evidence either way is first hand; our beliefs usually depend, not on facts, but upon the beliefs of the people, institutions, and media sources who have influenced us and that we deem to be credible.
When you dissect the work of the preachers of atheism like Richard Dawkins though you find an interesting pattern. First of all you are an idiot for questioning their obviously superior position even though it is they who don't acknowledge or even see that atheism is a leap of faith from agnosticism just the same as Christianity or any of the other major faith based religions. And second, they use the acknowledged faith and traditions of their opponents to build a straw-man against which they incorrectly juxtapose their own views... not subjecting their own to the same absence-of-evidence rigor that they impose on the faithful.
It's a common debate tactic... go on the offense instead of defense. Yet when you pick apart, for example, the growing 20,000 word essay on Wikipedia attacking the idea of Intelligent Design you find that their main case is 'guilty by association' with people of faith. They repeatedly dismiss ideas that can stand wholly outside of any theism simply because people of faith find these ideas as supporting to their belief system.
It is not very scientific at all, really. These ideas about the finely tuned universe and irreducible complexity are not easy to dismiss sans the association they retain with their implications to faith; so any challenge against the unacknowledged faith of atheism is ironically quashed by attacking the acknowledged faith of the religious.
To be so big on biological evolution in the first place, it seems strange to me also that the purveyors of the atheist faith are so quick to dismiss the advantages of social and societal evolution.For some reason the particularly militant atheists insist that the many forgotten lessons sewn into the fabric of western society and rooted the Judeo/Christian faith now need to be abandoned and undone due to their failure to meet their test of scientific purity. It's like, "let's take the only thriving and surviving cultures over the past 2000 years and gut them of their traditions, rituals and mores because we know better". Their actions are in direct contrast to where their seeming pure and superior reason should take them.
As with anything so powerful as religion, tyrants have used it to their advantage in evil ways. People are quick to point to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials and the political misdeeds of the Church of England and the Catholic Church of Rome as examples of Christianity gone wild; and any reasonable person would have to agree with this. The blind spots the same people seem to have for the disastrous attempts to purge societies of religion in the French Revolution, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and other atrocities of more recent vintage that resulted in mass genocides of the bloodiest forms seem lost to a confirmation bias that borders on delusion.
So, maybe things just didn't happen by accident... but how does a rational person jump from theism, a belief in a creator, to Christianity? Well, that's easy for me. If you believe that God created man and that man didn't just bootstrap himself out of the mud then it's a simple step of faith from there to believe in divine revelation, This puts much of the bible into perspective. If some grand being set all of creation in motion how hard would it be to also communicate with that creation in ways understandable to the people of their time? How hard would it be to plant the seeds of all of this into the immense complexity of life from the beginning?
How much of the bible is fact? How much is instructional parable? How much is history? How much is poetry for the soul? That's debated by everyone and it's for everyone, I think, to discover on their own; but the Gospels speak to me. The basic tenants of Christianity feed my soul and I see no logical reason to dismiss this any more than we should ask young newlyweds to dismiss their ideas of love for one another.
I look at the long relationship between God and mankind as that of a father to his children. When civilization was a child it was best to be the boss, authoritarian and in control of its well being. I see no reason that if God created man that he could not also communicate with him as described through the prophets of the Old Testament; much of which is based on the old verbal histories that are consistent with almost all the world's major religions.
After this, as civilization approached adulthood, I believe Jesus was sent with the instructions about how we were to proceed as an adult society. Then we were kicked out of the nest... with His teachings as passed on by Him through the Apostles and the Holy spirit to guide us from that point forward... just as the bible reveals in the Gospels.
That's what I believe because it suits me and I see it as a reasonable scenario under the circumstances... and it's consistent with the teachings of the bible... and by my reckoning, it's as good a way to look at it as any. As I noted, if creation makes more sense than bootstrapping ourselves out of the mud then divine revelation is a piece of cake after that.
Is there a problem with the modern church? Well of course there is. The main complaint I hear is intolerance and hypocrisy and that's certainly an issue, not in all but, in some churches. For example, Jesus is never recorded saying one word in the bible about homosexuality yet it is the emphasis of a some Christian preachers to beat up on gays. Paul in Romans criticizes gays (yet in Chapter 2 Paul follows with the perils of human judgment of one another). Back in the old law in Leviticus you can find homosexuality's condemnation along with all manner of perversions and decadence; but such emphasis on this one behavior contradicts the whole thrust of what Jesus taught.
If you look at His teaching, Jesus affirmed the Top 10 list (with reasonable exception against what was taught by the strict orthodoxy of the day), He added the golden rule to treat others as you would wish to be treated, and He said above all else, love and worship God with all your heart. How some Christian churches can lose focus of this and elevate the issue of homosexuality over another like divorce (which Jesus did decry) is astounding to me and things like this push a large population of the people away from Christ, I think.
But as God's word must be translated into all languages, I believe it also speaks in a way to gain the attention of all personalities; so verses that don't speak to my heart may in some way influence and touch the hearts of others. So I try not to judge what I might not yet understand. As my dad often says, 'the more I learn, the more I learn how little I know'.
The individual hypocrisy of some Christians is another thing critics focus on when looking from the outside in... but the question arises, if one chooses to try to live by a tight moral standard and moral code and encourages others to do so as well; but then that person comes up short... is he a hypocrite or a just a failure?
The media seems to revel in the hypocrisy of professed Christians for failing to live up to the high standards they try to set for themselves; yet having no such standard in the first place is somehow more righteous? And I know so many people who just seem to follow along with this lead and pile on. Usually it's natural in society to have some sympathy for people who fail. Yet it seems when a professed Christian fails or comes up short, society lines up to mock or criticize him.
It's another one of those things that looks very different to people on the outside looking in, I guess. As a moral failure in many ways myself, I still try to live a Christian life in the way Jesus would have us do and I see no reason why society should have contempt for me encouraging others to do so as well even though I often come up short myself.
Anyway, It's not my intention with this writing to convert anyone to spiritual faith of any sort. What I do hope to accomplish is to explain how reasonable people can logically hold what, at first to many people, may seem to be some very unreasonable views. In an odd twist, I guess, a person of faith is asking those of the realm of logic and reason to have an open mind.
The worlds of faith and reason are not exclusive of each other. They can, in fact, be very complimentary. Using, however, the worst examples and distortions of the realm of faith as a way to confirm its lack of necessity or harmful nature is like starting a science experiment with the end result in mind. You often find only that for which you are looking.
Music, theater, art, dance, love... all are somewhat irrational if you think about it; but what a hole our society would have if this historically proven nourishment of the soul was abandoned to pure reason. John Lennon imagined there was no heaven and found this to be liberating. I imagine there is a heaven and find it quite fulfilling.