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 other ways of knowing that might lead to certainty.
But isn’t certainty itself illusional? The cliché is that
only taxes and death are certain, but in reality only death is a sure thing.
And for believers in that most difficult of Christian doctrines, the
resurrection, even death isn’t permanent.
No basking in certainty
No, if you’re searching for certainty, neither faith nor science is your
thing. Faith is an ongoing search for God, even for us doubters who have
embraced it. The true believer can never bask in certainty, and that’s what God
may have had in mind by requiring faith. At least for me – and I believe for
millions of others, even though some may not want to admit it – faith is always
accompanied by doubt.
So why believe? As all skeptics will tell you, the reasons
are not entirely rational. Karl Marx, the inventor of Marxism, is said to have
called religion “the opium of the people.” He saw it as a drug that allows
people to avoid acceptance of what he believed to be the human condition: residence
in a cold, impersonal universe where a lifetime of struggle is followed by
death and oblivion.
Who wouldn’t want to avoid accepting that? Most of us want
to believe in a benevolent, divine father/mother who is in ultimate control. We
want to believe that “God so loved the world that he/she sent his/her only
begotten son.” We want to be comforted by a loving heavenly parent and believe
that all of us are brothers and sisters. What’s wrong with those desires?
Nothing, especially when we see evidence that God exists.
Some atheists say we’re conditioned to see such evidence. Believers say
skeptics can’t see the forest for the trees, that exaggerated skepticism, or
cynicism, won’t allow an objective examination of reality.
But what is real? I believe there’s as much evidence for
belief as for unbelief, and for what I have found to be good reasons, I prefer
to believe. Traditionally, Christianity teaches that faith is a gift, and I
have no reason to deny it even though I can’t confirm it rationally. But there
are other reasons to believe.
Goodness and kindness
As much as some social scientists would deny it, humans are
full of inexplicable goodness and kindness. As a reporter, I once did a story
about an old man whose wife of over 40 years had Alzheimer’s disease. Feeble
himself, for years he did virtually everything for her. He took her to the
bathroom, bathed her and fed her with a spoon. He carried an old-fashioned
wind-up clock around in the pocket of a worn, tweed sport coat. It rang every
four hours, 24 hours a day, to remind him to give her her medication. After
giving her her pills, he would rewind it and place the bulky thing back in his
pocket. At night, it rang on his bedside table. He never complained, saying he
did it because he loved her.
Some see nothing special in this. Animals go to great
lengths to care for their offspring, they say, though I’ve never seen evidence
they will go to such lengths for a lifetime partner let alone a stranger. But incredible
sacrifices for strangers are an everyday occurrence for humans. To me, humans
have what I would describe as a “divine spark.”
There’s also the evidence that people have believed in a god
for as long as history has been recorded, and that belief has evolved through
the centuries. Then there’s the need for a “first cause” as the origin of the
universe. I heard or read someone say that believing that the “big bang” was the
random event that randomly resulted in life as we know it is similar to
believing that a giant printing press could explode and randomly result in the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Faith is rational, but rationality is not the whole
enchilada. As I’ve mentioned in other blogs, emotion is an important, and
legitimate, component. For me, the rational and emotional combine to make the
search for God worth the effort.
“Faith,” said Martin Luther King, “is taking the first step
even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
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