Skeptical Faith

In the movie, Life of Pi, a writer comes to visit Canadian Piscine Molitor Patel, who is named after the French word for swimming pool. The writer says he was told Piscine “will tell you a story that will make you believe in God.” Piscine, nicknamed Pi, replies: “I will tell you my story. You can decide for yourself whether to believe in God.” Pi proceeds to tell a fantastic parable about growing up in India where his parents owned a zoo. Forced to leave India , his parents packed the family and the zoo animals – including a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker – onto a ship bound for a new life. The ship is wrecked in a storm, his family is lost and Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with Richard Parker. After an excruciating eternity afloat, where he endures more storms and attacks by Parker, Pi survives to tell his story. Whether Pi’s story had any effect on the writer’s faith isn’t disclosed, but the religious theme of the movie is undeniable. One of its main points see...

Since my college days, I've considered Franz Jaggerstatter, an Austrian who was among the millions killed by the Nazis in World War II, one of my heroes. Jaggerstatter was a farmer and miner, born out-of-wedlock to a peasant family at about the time many of our grandparents or great grandparents were born. Said to be on the “wild” side in his youth, he had an out-of-wedlock daughter himself before marrying and settling down. He underwent a religious conversion, and when the Nazis invaded Austria and set up a sham election to gain the forced acceptance of Austrians, Jaggerstatter – recognizing the great evil posed by the Nazis – was the only one in his village to oppose it. He was drafted into the Nazi army and with no special education or training came to conclude – contrary to the views of his bishop and priests that counseled him and bucking criticism from fellow Catholics who had joined the army  – that joining the fight on behalf of an evil regime would be morall...

My daughter, Maureen, has a Puggle named Lola. I’m undoubtedly biased about my “grandog,” but she’s a wonderful little creature, and there’s nothing more marvelous than seeing her performances when Maureen arrives home each day. Lola goes crazy with what can only be described as pure joy. You dog owners have undoubtedly seen something similar: Lola jumps, runs in circles, cries with happiness. You can only watch it with envy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to feel and express only a fraction of that kind of joy? And that brings me in a roundabout way to this question: Why should you embrace faith when it appears to provide so little happiness or joy? The exhaustive study of attitudes toward faith and religion among people 18-29 years old, “Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults,” by sociologist Christian Smith, found that many young people are turned off by the gloominess of religion. Religious people are perceived as grim and bereft of...

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about belief is also the most obvious: It provides no certainty. Let’s say you’ve given up on God and religion. You’re busy with your life. You have all kinds of daily concerns and little time or inclination to study religion or the “great questions.” You have opinions on issues that appear to be unacceptable to religious people and much of what religions teach doesn’t make sense to you. You’re bored with religious services and many religious people. So, why should you embrace faith when it provides no certainty about God, the universe, your fate and that of those you love? These hard questions, which I addressed in a recent blog, spawn another: What does provide certainty? Science? It may provide provisional certainty, but its proper function is continual probing, making today’s “certainty” tomorrow’s abandoned hypothesis. Science provides only relative and provisional certainty. Apart from faith and science, I can’t think of othe...

I’m reading a book called, “Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults,” by sociologist Christian Smith. The research Smith has done is a mine of information about people aged 18-29. The findings, however, would not surprise most people. “The features marking this stage (of life) are intense identity exploration, instability, a focus on self, feeling in limbo or in transition or in between, and a sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope,” says Smith. “These, of course, are also often accompanied…by large doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, disappointment, and sometimes emotional devastation.” One thing that occurs to me about this group is that, like the rest of us, they didn’t choose to be born and grow up when they did. Like every generation, they must take the good with the bad and make the best of the cards they are dealt. While many in other generations may have found joy an...