I read a fantastic blog by comedic genius Ricky Gervais about why he is an Atheist (I suggest you read it too to make your own conclusions). I say fantastic not because I agree with his conclusions, for I am not an Atheist, but because I understand where he is coming from. Not only can I entirely appreciate why he is an atheist, but I think he raises an important question that any Christian should not be afraid of, but embrace: Why do you believe in God?
One of his main points is that Christians and other Believers often put Atheists on the defensive asking why they do not believe in God. His response: “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence….” He defines God as “a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe” and concludes that “the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe.”
Well, he is right, isn’t he? There is no scientific evidence to prove God exists. Try it. You’d be wasting your time. And where does Jesus tell us we need to spend all of our time trying to prove God exists anyways?
As for the “supernatural creator and overseer of the universe” being a “logical impossibility in this known universe”, I’d be willing to engage that one, but he does not actually offer any argument to support that statement. If he means “semantically” logical, however, logicians have debated the existence of God(s) logically for as long as there have been logicians and I don’t even want touch that debate). However, I am assuming he means “scientifically” logical, which is basically repetitive of his main point.
Since there is no scientific evidence to prove the existence of God, Gervais argues that the “burden of proof” should be on the believer since the believer is the one posing some extra-ordinary idea. So he turns the question around. It should be “why do you believe in God?” I agree. It is reasonable that the “burden of proof” should be on the believer. And anyone who knows the New Testament also should agree (a phrase – always be prepared to explain the reason for your faith – comes to mind).
In response to the question, Gervais says the typical responses he receives is “it’s faith” and “it’s true to me.” To that list, I would add: “it’s just what I believe,” “because the Bible says so,” or “that’s what I was taught.” These answers are the most simple, and disappointingly, Gervais chooses the most simple answers (not to mention the worst traits of believers – citing killing, stoning, etc. in the name of religion) to hold up against science at its best as he describes it.
At worst, these simple answers reflect insincerity on the part of the speaker, their lack of thought about their faith or a lack of theological education. Gervais says that at the root of the question “Why don’t you believe in God” there is often insecurity in the asker’s own belief. This is because the asker might not have ever thought about why they believe what they do and in the face of a well reasoned explanation of why science and reason disprove faith, they are unable to counter it.
At best, however, these simple answers are honest and the reason for such a response is that the speaker simply does not want to get into a debate with someone who they feel does not want to listen to what they have to say anyway.
Whatever the reason for the response, if I was asked why I believe in God and I simply said “it’s just what I believe,” or “because the Bible says so,” it would not do much to answer the question since someone without “faith” and does not believe in the bible would entirely dismiss that as a non-answer. But that is not the problem for a Christian. There is a deeper problem. As a young Christian, when I was asked why I believed in God and all I came up with was the simple answer, it never really “shook my faith” so much as it shook my confidence in the people who had been teaching me about Christianity. Why hadn’t anyone ever taught me a better answer to this question? It turns out that smart people had been thinking about this question for a long time and coming up with better reasons than those mentioned by Gervais (“it’s faith” and “it’s true to me”). Perhaps he just has not been asking enough people why they believe in God.
One of my favorite responses to such a question was given by Blaise Pascal in the mid 17th century. Known as “Pascal’s Wager,” his argument relied on a statistical argument. Basically, the argument is that statistically, if you chose to believe in God and you’re wrong, the worst that can happen is that when you die, you simply cease to exist. The best that can happen is that you spend an eternity in paradise. But if you choose not to believe in God, the best that can happen is that you cease to exist, and the worst that can happen is an eternity of suffering. So statistically, the biggest potential reward comes from believing in God.
This is my favorite response to the “why believe” question not because I agree with it, but because it goes to show you that you can find a rational basis for a belief in God. However, trying to use reason to appeal to someone to believe in God undermines the purpose of faith and sets up the misguided debate of trying to show that faith is more reasonable than reason.
The other problem with this “wager” is that it leaves out other factors. What about the costs and benefits of how you live your life? For many people, their faith causes them to be better people and it makes their lives better, along with the lives of those around them. But for others, their religious beliefs are used as a crutch for awful behavior, horrible actions, alienating others, and at worst for persecuting and killing those who disagree with them. Gervais states that he does not mind believers who believe in something that helps, but says he has a problem when people use their beliefs to harm. I agree on this point, and I think most believers of good will would also agree. But that some might use their religious beliefs as a reason to harm is not a valid reason to categorically reject Faith. Should we likewise reject economic beliefs because some have misused their faith in free market capitalism to the harm of those who are unfit to compete? But that is beside the point…
I think that Gervais misses an important underlying issue. This issue is embedded in the dual questions about believing or not believing. This issue is at the core of the culture war debate between science and religion. The issue is that the people who typically engage most loudly in this debate treat this as an “either-or” question. So the subtext of the question is really whether one believes in science and not God, or in god and not Science. This is the way Gervais puts it, as a rejection of religion in favor of science. I do not criticize him for taking this stance. If I had been presented with belief in God as a choice requiring the wholesale rejection of reason, logic and fact, I would’ve rejected it too. I do not blame Gervais for his choice. The true blame lies with generations of outspoken Christians who have tried to counter science with faith as though they were even competing for dominance in the same sphere, as though faith in God requires faith despite the clearly observable events and processes of nature around us.
This polarization of the viewpoints ignores the fact that there are those who have embraced both science and religion as mutually inclusive for centuries. At its most basic definition, science is the pursuit of knowledge about the universe through observations, repeatable tests and provable facts. That is not the realm of faith. Faith is the belief that there is more than what is simply observable. The biggest disservice that Christian teachers have wrought upon the worldview they claim to support is in pitting it unnecessarily against science.
I love science. I enjoy learning about nature, the natural world, space, quantum physics, and evolution, to name a few. But I do not believe in science. It is not necessary for me or anyone to “believe” in science, in fact, because the things science seeks to prove are often readily observable or have been proven to a statistical certainty through repeated tests. Is it necessary to believe in gravity, rocks, bones, etc? No. They just are. The more complex and unobservable a scientific theory, the more scrutiny it must face before it is accepted as a scientific theory. It is not necessarily to believe or disbelieve these theories. They have either been proven to a degree of certainty or not.
Despite what many outspoken Christians say about the incompatibility of the Biblical idea of the Creation and scientific theories such as evolution, they do not represent the whole of Christian thought on the idea. If God is the omnipotent creator of the universe, and if science is an explanation of how the universe operates, it seems that science is merely describing how God’s creation works. This is not an idea of my own creation, but one shared by many denominations, the Roman Catholic Church, for example. Faith does not rely on science and science does not rely on faith, but neither do they compete. I accept science for what it can tell us about the world around us, and my faith is the basis for my beliefs about those things beyond mere fact. I think it is arrogant and inconsistent for Christians to say they believe in an omnipotent God but then claim that God could not have possibly formed the universe through the methods theorized by scientists and could not have created life through evolution.
At this point I’ve probably lost all “Biblical literalists” because I have claimed no qualms with science and have implied something less than biblical literalism. But not all Christians are biblical literalists. To understand the bible as it was written requires understanding that the Bible was a series of letters, histories, mythologies, stories and prophesies, and not all were meant to be read literally. But that is another subject. I’ve also likely lost those who reject any scintilla of faith since I suggested that science as observed may be part of God’s design. But if you choose to keep reading, Thank You.
So, why do I believe in God? I’m glad you asked, Ricky.
I believe in God because I believe in truth. Truth encapsulates scientific fact, but as Gervais said, facts are limited to what is supported by factual evidence. But I (and I am not alone in this), believe that there is more to life than what is merely observable and provable by fact. This belief in something more is rooted in my own personal experiences when I have experienced God. People experience God in many ways, across many cultures and from many different faith backgrounds, and these experiences cannot often be replicated in a lab. They are experiences in the present.
I have a scientific explanation for that, you may say! Chemicals and neurons doing things in your brain creating the sensation of a divine presence, feeling of transcendence, etc. which serve an evolutionary purpose of comforting and encouraging to overcome fear and anxiety in trying situations…. True – and that is how God made us. Recent scientific studies of the brain, using brain scans, have shown that people who believe in God are using parts of their brain when they pray and meditate on God that people who do not believe in God never use, even if they are told to try to imagine God and try to pray to God.
Gervais also poses the argument that Christians are selectively a/theistic since they choose to believe in only one of the 2,870 gods recorded in history while not believing in the other 2,869. This oversimplifies a bigger question. From a Christian perspective are each of those 2,869 other gods false gods? Or are they simply the attempt of God’s creations to describe the Truth of God’s creation? Most of the people who formulated these gods did so in an attempt to describe the world around them, the creation, did they not? So they identified them as different gods, but are these not only early stages in the development of an understanding of the Truth about God’s creation? To attribute nature to the divine speaks of a general human understanding of a Creator. So then, I see this as 2,870 ways that humans have described God over the millennia.
Gervais uses the universality of certain virtues as a reason he does not need God: “Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that is exactly what it is…a virtue. Not a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven.” Why have Christianity when you can be good without it? In fact, he continues, “spirituality really lost its way…(w)hen it became a stick to beat people with.”
I see it the opposite way. The fact that many of these virtues (kindness, forgiveness, etc.) are universal is attributable to the fact that they are, in truth, the best way to live. Add to that Justice, Compassion and Mercy and you have some of the principle virtues taught by Jesus Christ.
I believe in God because I believe in truth as taught by Jesus. Despite what many people convey, Jesus did more than birth (Merry Christmas, by the way), death, and resurrection. He talked a lot and interacted with people (often the type of social outcasts that too many Christians shy away from today. And based on the scriptural accounts of his life, he taught none of the things that Gervais complains about, and he was also critical of the same thing Gervais seems to be critical of. Jesus never said to (metaphorically or otherwise) beat people with the “stick” of self-righteousness. And when Christians do that, we are not acting in the spirit of Christ. Jesus saved his anger and contempt for the religious elitists, who claimed that they knew they only way to be “good.”
While I agree that Christianity does not have a monopoly on forgiveness and kindness, the reason I believe in God is because I am attempting to follow Jesus’ teachings and example. It is his model of virtues I accept. You don’t need to accept Jesus to follow those virtues, but it is a standard to try to live by, and without a standard, can’t we just pick and choose? Well, most Christians do that anyway, selecting their favorite sin to target (usually the one that stands out the most or the sins of others) and ignoring the others. I also fall into this trap, but I am working on it (by aiming to not be self righteous and judgmental about others and by “working out my own salvation” (oh no, I hope I am not being self righteous about not being self righteous!)).
Many non-Christians claim to like Jesus, Gervais included. He describes the reasons why Jesus used to be his Hero: “Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But he was my hero because he was kind. And he was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy.” But when Gervais rejected his belief in God, he seems to have rejected his hero too. But for all the reasons Gervais
says Jesus was his hero, I am a follower of Jesus.
Just like Gervais, I also reject the god, entirely of human creation, that expects us to give up our God-given intelligence, curiosity, “imagination, free will, love, humor, …liberation, and dignity.” Any god that is not life affirming, life giving and makes you and the people around you better for having believed, is not God.
I believe in God because the more I learn about science, the more people I meet and talk to, and the more life, beauty, nature and love that I experience, then the more I believe that there is more to life than what can be proven as scientific fact.
Mike,
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas from one "logical impossibility" to another.
xo mOm