Skeptical Faith

Just to get something out of the way, some of you may be asking yourselves what this old guy could possibly know about sex. Ok, so I’m no expert, but who is, really? Is it the person who has had a lot of it, say a person who sells sex or who is promiscuous? That’s like saying a typist is an expert on writing. Is it the sex therapist? That’s somebody who fixes another person’s sex problems. It doesn’t necessarily mean he or she knows a lot about the meaning of sex, and I believe sex, like all of human life, has meaning. So I’m not writing about sex as any kind of expert. I’m also not writing about it because I think sex is somehow unworthy of the seeker of truth. It’s because I believe sex is often made into a barrier to the search for God. Studies about the sexual and spiritual ideas of young people show that many who ignore their parents’ or church’s beliefs about sex figure “the horse is out of the barn,” that they’ve cut the cord, that they have by their actions already a...

Photo by Beatriz Botero I was reminded recently while reading an article on baseball that we humans are rarely moved by intellectual arguments. That was also brought home forcefully for me in reading the book, “Predictably Irrational, The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,” by Dan Ariely. The author, a professor at Duke University, has spent decades studying what motivates people, mostly in buying stuff: why we buy what we don’t need; why we turn up our noses at cheap wine but are captivated by the expensive stuff, even though a lot of research has shown most of us can’t tell the difference; why people who have been asked to name the Ten Commandments are more honest afterward than those who haven’t been asked that question. We like to think that we’re motivated by reason. Fact is, many – if not most – of our decisions result from feelings. We’re “feeling” beings. We feel anger, love, antipathy and compassion every hour of every day and act on them. That’s why I have t...

The Aymara Indians with whom I worked as a priest in Bolivia in the early 1970s were decidedly pre-scientific. Many believed, for instance, that illness was a punishment from God. Enlightened gringo as I was, I tried to persuade them that it was more often than not caused by infection from microbes and that God is a loving father who doesn't punish in that way - despite the stories of the Old Testament. I explained that these microbes were "little invisible animals" that crawl around in and on body parts. They were too respectful to say it, but I imagined they were saying among themselves: "El padre cree que hay animalitos invisibles. Father believes there are little invisible animals! Ha!" Though we study biology and other sciences in school, the facts they reveal seldom remain in our consciousness. I recall a book from about the same period called "Life on Man" by Theodore Rosebury. It was about the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands,...

A 2009 Gallup poll, the latest I could find on the subject, shows that only four in 10 Americans believe in the theory of evolution. Not surprisingly, the survey shows that respondents who attend church most regularly are the least likely to accept evolution. Why do religious people reject science and its discoveries? For some believers, it has to do with failure to understand the Bible, which contains a mix of religious myth and historical stories about God's interaction with humans. I intend to write a separate blog about the Bible, so I won't belabor this point. But in my view and the view of the vast number of Scripture scholars, the book of Genesis doesn't attempt to report on how the earth was created, for instance, but uses the myths about creation to deliver a point about God's awesome creative power. By the way, this view doesn't result from an effort to align the Bible with science to avoid criticism by scientists and other critics. It com...