Skeptical Faith

Skeptics may ask what reading a book that’s at least 2,000 years old could possibly have to do with their lives. The mindset of the authors of the books of the Bible was so different from ours that little of what they have to say would be relevant or useful to us. It’s like reading Shakespeare. He may have been a great writer and all, and there may be useful messages in his work, but we don’t have the time or inclination to decipher the language or understand the context. Besides failing to recognize that the Bible is “the Word of God in words of men,” I believe this is part of a bias we have against dead people. I know that sounds weird but think of how we smile knowingly when we consider the customs and beliefs of our grandparents – to say nothing of the lives of people who lived centuries ago. I recall the hilarious Saturday Night Live skits with “historical” themes. One was about the overconfident and self-satisfied medieval barber/physician, Theodoric of York, pla

I’ve always been mildly interested in “near death” experiences. I approach them with my usual skepticism, but I’m not convinced they are easily dismissed as purely biological phenomena. If, of course, you start with the assumption that there is nothing but biology – that there is no such thing as the spiritual and that all human experience is strictly limited to the human brain – then it would be hard to see these near-death experiences as anything but biology in action. If you’re open to the spiritual, you would have a different view. As a newspaper reporter, I did at least one story on the subject, interviewing three Iowans who claim to have had a near-death experience. I found two of the three to be believable. I was unsure about the third – both about whether something extraordinary occurred and about whether he really believed it to have happened. I also recently read the popular book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander.

Two key related questions for many skeptics are, “If God exists, why is he/she silent?” A related question is, “Why faith?” For many atheists, the question of God’s silence is the clincher in their rejection of faith. God is just not there, they say, and there’s no way to get around it. If he/she were, you’d hear from him/her. So grow up, get over it, get on with it. Learn to live your life without God and you’ll be much happier. For me, an important similar question is, “Why faith?” Why would God design things in a way that requires human beings to believe in him/her instead of knowing him/her directly? Why require an intellectual and emotional struggle about faith? If he/she is so smart, couldn’t he/she have come up with a better design? For believers, of course, God is not silent. They see him and “hear” him in others, in nature, in the Bible, in their work, in science, literature and art. But for the skeptical searcher for God, I have no entirely satisfactory

Listening to the TED Radio Hour on my phone recently, I heard an interesting description of how the slums of the world’s great “third world” cities slowly but surely organize themselves. Residents come together to provide basic forms of sanitation, to promote education, to control crime. Invariably, resources are pooled, people hired and bureaucracies formed. Yesterday’s slum becomes tomorrow’s middle class neighborhood. I thought about this recently when I heard someone decry the bureaucracy that exists in organized religion. “It’s all man-made,” it was said. Yes, it’s “man-made,” with the emphasis on “man.” Historically, women have had little input in the organization and development of the world’s great religions, even though women are among their most ardent supporters and operatives. The same could be said of almost all human organizations, including governments. We all know the history. Women were, to put it mildly, not taken seriously in