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The Will to Believe

Tuesday 08 February 2005 | 1 Comment

The will to believe. Choosing to believe. Avoiding error. Seeking truth.

It all seems so simple from the outside.

I once chose to believe. At a point in my life, I went through the motions, hoping unconsciously that I could cultivate a belief (like a gay friend I had who was vaguely attracted to a girl, a feeling he hoped to “cultivate” into bisexuality) and knowing that I was fooling myself (much like my gay friend eventually admitted to himself).

And I did try. I wrote in my journal about belief and faith and the wonder of God’s love. I talked to friends at university about the marvel of forgiveness and what God did for us through Jesus. I prayed.

In early 1995, I began acknowledging in my personal journal the doubts I was having.

What is this thing, Christianity? It is the worship of a Jewish carpenter who lived two millennia ago. It is a religion based on a book, allegedly written by God's inspiration. Was Christ more than a radical social reformer? Were his miracles more than a fictional construction of the gospel writers?

No matter how much I want to believe, to feel the fervor that others experience, I cannot.

Could Christ be the creation of a codependent society? The ultimate father-figure who provides the love a fleshly father should give?

The lingering adolescence in my writing style aside, I was filled with clichés. Perhaps that was the problem.

Another few weeks passed and a faculty member of the college I was attending died from cancer. During the memorial chapel, I scribbled the following in my journal:

Death -- and my thoughts are again turned to religion. God is such an abstraction that I read about him and never feel him; not even death brings any real, any substantial emotion of which God is the source. The only feeling I get is doubt. Is that from God?

Doubt from God? It doesn’t seem possible, but from a liberal theology, it makes some sense. After all, if we can have Harvey Cox in The Secular City saying that God wants us to outgrow him and the whole “Death of God” theology of the sixties, why not divine doubt? Descartes, turned on his head.

Still later, again from my journal:

I find myself thinking of the whole God issue still. I am frustrated by the whole thing. I sit now in the library and just a moment ago I looked up at Rev. [Smith] and peered at his forehead, wondering what was in his mind, what books, what learning, what lectures. But mainly what beliefs. He firmly believes in God. He would stake his life on it, I would imagine. Yet that means nothing to me. No matter how important God is to him, God is still a mere abstraction to me. He’s a blurred, hazy idea, and little more than that. I can read Barth and Schleiermacher until I'm sick of them and yet it makes God no less concrete. I don’t believe in God. Not in a personal, substantial way. I read theology, talk about Christian ethics and doctrine, yet I don't really believe in the basis of it all. It’s not that I am an atheist. It’s not that I choose not to believe in God – I just can’t believe in God.

Many Christians would read that and respond, “You read only theology? What about reading the Bible?” Indeed – what about reading the Bible? The more I read, the less I found that I liked. &(insetL)I learned in graduate school that “Schleiermacher” means “veil maker” in German. Appropriate, most seem to think.%

Doing produces believing? Yes, and no. From my personal experience, I see that for me it was impossible. But I was “playing” (for lack of a better term) in the Protestant tradition, and there’s not much “doing” there. The “smells and bells” for the Catholic tradition bring all the senses into ritual. Indeed – who can really talk of Protestant “ritual” or “liturgy?” Perhaps that’s why charismatic churches are so attractive to some – full body contact.

Yet the ritual can be without meaning – empty repetitions. Jesus, according to the Gospels, found that in first century Judea.

It does seem to reduce down to the will. People choose to believe often by choosing not to challenge those beliefs. I’ve always found it odd that it seems more non-believers read theistic apologetic than believers read The Case for Atheism. It’s tempting to be smug about that, to say that, “Well, that just shows we non-believers are more open, more willing to challenge our worldviews.”

I’m not sure how I’d explain it, though.

Pascal, Kreeft, and the Will

Monday 07 February 2005 | 2 Comments

Most everyone knows Pascal’s Wager, drawn from a single paragraph in Pensces: belief in God is, in short, the safest bet. ("Read more on the Wager.) It’s interesting that people still apply it in earnest.

Most recently, I’ve heard Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft use it in his 1995 Texas A&M Veritas Forum lecture.

One of the objections is the supposed inability to chose one’s beliefs. Pascal foresaw such an argument:

You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc... But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.

Action precedes faith. Praying, meditating, going to Mass, all lead to faith. Crazy as that might sound, Pascal might indeed have a point. Polish writer Czesław Miłosz made the same point in The Captive Mind:

The Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction. Collective religious ceremonies induce a state of belief. Folding one’s hands in prayer, kneeling, singing hymns precede faith, for faith is a psycho-physical and not simply a psychological phenomenon.

Every Mass Catholics cite the Apostles’ Creed in one voice:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth:

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; He descended into hell; on the third day He arose from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and life everlasting. Amen.

“I believe; I hear my neighbor beside me state that he believes; I am aware that my neighbor in front of me believes – we all believe. We all support each other in these beliefs.” That’s what I hear behind the words.

In that believing environment, which must be at least similar to Pascal’s environment, willing yourself to believe seems not only possible, but almost inescapable. Even as a “staunch” non-believer, I feel sometimes that tug toward belief, that desire not simply to fit in for the sake of fitting in, but to have what the parishioners around me seem to have.

There are two kinds of views on religion, wrote William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

  1. Seek truth
  2. Avoid error

For those who seek truth, the choice is obvious – bet on God. I’ve always been more the type to avoid error.

Got Soul, Part II

Wednesday 15 December 2004 | 0 Comments

Regarding my recent post on the soul, Isabella commented,

What loaded questions. That nobody can answer. I don’t know if you’re a reader of fiction (heck, I barely know you at all), but your entire post reminds me of an SF novel – Terminal Experiment, by Robert J Sawyer. I don’t think he’s a very good writer, but he grapples with some very interesting ideas, starting with the 21 grams that leave the body when you die.

Twenty-one grams that leave the body when you die? I'd never heard of this. Being a skeptic, I immediately thought, "Urban legend," but I thought I'd poke around on the internet a while and see what turned up.

In an article entitled "Soul Man", I found that the the 21-gram idea can be traced back to an early-twentieth century physician, Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts. He did a relatively crude experiment in which the beds of six terminally ill patients were put on scales to check for weight loss at the moment of death. He claimed to have accounted for evaporation of any sweat that might be on the patients skin, and reasoned that the effect of bowel movement or urine elimination would be negligable because it would remain on the bed. His results were far from uniform, but they indicated some weight loss at death. (The full text of the 1907 AMA paper is here.)

From this, it's safe to say:

Urban Legend.

But were the questions I asked really "unanswerable?" That depends on what we mean by "unanswerable." Science is not usually about "definitely" answered questions, and after all, it is science than can answers this question for us while we're still alive.

All bets are off once we're dead, though.

The saddest part about not believing in a soul, though, is that we're right, we'll never know.

Got Soul? (Or “Where do we hang the thing?”)

Sunday 05 December 2004 | 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about the idea of the soul lately, and I keep coming back to one question: what is the soul? Christian theology teaches us that the soul is the “real” us, the software, and that our bodies are just “temporary dwelling places” – the hardware. The “real” me is not something physical, but something spiritual.

But what is it? Where can we hang the soul in the body? The soul is synonymous with consciousness in many ways, but consciousness and all it entails (memories, emotions, personality, etc.) is merely a load of very complex chemical reactions going on in our brains. Brain imaging is mapping more and more of what we traditionally associated with the soul and showing these things are just that – physical things.

Furthermore, if the real “I” is a soul, how can things that seem to be so basic to the real “I” (personality, sense of humor, emotions, etc.) be affected by physical things? When someone gets drunk, their personality usually alters a bit; when one takes an anti-depressant, it changes an emotion; and of course, there are plenty of other examples. If the real “I” is a soul, then how does this happen?

A related question would be when the soul enters the body. Catholicism says it’s at the moment of conception. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, writes,

Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. Where is the soul during this interval? Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the “moment” of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours (225).

And what about fertilized eggs that split and become twins? When does that extra soul enter into the picture? And what of the phenomenon when two fertilized eggs merge into one embryo which, as Pinker writes, “develops into a person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one genome, others have another genome.”

I posed this question on Catholic.com’s discussion forums, but I didn’t get any satisfactory responses.

One individual responded quoting F. J. Sheed’s Theology for Beginners:

Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space. Neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call it nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world—unless love is, which spirit also produces.

The soul is like an idea – you can’t measure the color or size of an idea, so the argument goes, and so it’s immaterial. Not quite.

What is an idea if it’s not remembered, recorded somehow? If I have the idea, it’s recorded in my brain in a sequence of proteins and such; if I write it down, it’s recorded on paper; if I tell another person, it’s protein sequences in her brain. But it always depends on something physical. An idea must have a physical medium to survive, else it ceases to exist in a practical way.

This is the same analogy Chuck Missler uses when he talks about humans, hardware, and software. He asks, “How much does a piece of software weight?” He points out that you can load a floppy disk or CD with data, weigh it, and it still has the same weight as it did empty. This is intended to prove the non-material nature of software, which of course is the soul in humans, according to this analogy. But it suffers from the same problem as the “color of an idea” analogy. Software also depends on something physical – a magnetized plate of metal called a hard drive; radio waves as its transmitted from a wireless modem; the scrap of a napkin on which the programmer scribbled a particular algorithm.

And so this is indeed not a proper analogy for the soul, for the soul is not supposed to be dependent on anything physical. Ideas and software are dependent on their storage mechanisms. The soul isn’t supposed to have a storage mechanism.

Blinded by science? Most likely not — probably just not interested in questioning a taken-for-granted belief.

Reading Strobel

Tuesday 31 August 2004 | 0 Comments

I began reading The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel this week. My parents brought it to me in addition to the two books I’d requested. I’d read some reviews of it on Amazon, and the common complaint against it is that it doesn’t present the other side of the issue. There is a short chapter on the issues raised by the Jesus Seminar, but that’s about it other than occasional objections raised here and there by skeptics. I’ve no problem with this in a way, for the book is The Case for Christ and not Christ on Trial. In other words, even in the title it makes it clear that it’s presenting one side of the story.

One thing I do have a problem with is how much of the argument is based on something being “reasonable” or the alternative being “unlikely.” For example, “Given that Jesus’ followers looked upon him as being even greater than a prophet, it seems very reasonable that they would have done the same thing [(i.e., record his words accurately)]” (41, emphasis mine).

It’s often just conjecture. For example, concerning the casting of the demons into the swine, Strobel points out that Mark and Luke say it happened in Gerasa, with Matthew putting it in Gadara. After the scholar (Blomberg) suggests that one was a town and the other a province, Strobel adds, “Gerasa, the town, wasn’t anywhere near the Sea of Galilee.” Blomberg responds:

There have been ruins of a town that have been excavated at exactly the right point on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The English form of the town’s name often gets pronounced ‘Khersa,’ but as a Hebrew word translated or transliterated into Greek, it could have come out sounding something very much like ‘Gerasa.’ So it may very well have been in Khersa — whose spelling in Greek was rendered as Gerasa — in the province of Gadara (46, 47).

Goodness — proper understanding of the Bible requires knowing how people could have transliterated or misspelled words! Isn’t the Bible of divine origin? How could this happen?

This issue of divine origin comes up again when discussing the consistency between the gospel accounts. Blomberg says,

My own conviction is, once you allow for the elements I’ve talked about earlier — of paraphrase, of abridgement, of explanatory additions, of omission — the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it’s fair to judge them (45).

The only standards? How about the standard of them coming from a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient source? Of course, apologists like to conjecture that if there was perfect consistency between the gospels, that would be suspect in itself. Perhaps, but there is such a level of inconsistency on basic issues (who saw the resurrected Jesus first, for example).

In some ways, the book is strangely persuasive. I guess it comes from this strange, nonsensical desire to believe again. A childish desire, I suppose — and Christians wouldn’t deny that. “Unless you become like a child” and all that.

Faith

Monday 29 March 2004 | 0 Comments

What is this thing, faith? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately. It seems that in the twenty-first century, it is, among other things, faith that science hasn’t figured it all out and won’t, and that will leave room for demons, souls, and other metaphysical entities. It’s a trust that you can believe the Bible, even though there are scores of contradictions in it, and it’s clearly rooted in archaic thinking.

Take demon possession, for instance. In the New Testament, there’s a lot of exorcisms going on, and most of it seems for things like epilepsy:

Just then a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”

Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.”

While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father (Luke 9.38–42).

Today we look at this and think, “Very clearly the boy had epilepsy.” But that’s not what the Bible says. So we can take a liberal interpretation and say, “Well of course Jesus, even though he knew, would not have said, ‘Your son has epilepsy,’ because no one would have understood him or believed him. He simply healed the boy, and explained in language they could understand.” The other extreme is what my father said once: most of the people in mental hospitals today probably just have demons.

There’s also the question of the soul, which eventually could be shown to have very little to do with our personality and very little room in which to do it. Of course you can’t prove there’s not a soul, and scientists are not out to do that. What you can do, though, is show that all the things formerly associated with the soul—personality, memory, etc.—are in fact chemical reactions in the brain and nothing more.

It’s the question of faith in what, also. I know if I went through the motions, if I pretended to believe, I might eventually believe. But is that “the spirit working in me,” or a result of psychological and sociological phenomena?

Circumcision and the Bible, Part 2

Friday 19 March 2004 | 0 Comments

Suddenly spring arrives in full force. The snow has just about all disappeared—all that remains is the big mountains of it. Birds are singing outside, and I’d forgotten how the first birds of spring sound. I just lay in bed this morning for a little while listening to them.

Returning to the quote from Romans above: “The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.” When I read that, I think, “You know, Armstrongites have a point: it wasn’t just all love this love that.” And further I wonder if Christians (Catholics included) don’t just pick and choose the things they want to obey.

The problem is in the Bible itself, for after having made such a big deal out of keeping the law, Paul writes in Romans:

Do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to men who know the law—that the law has authority over a man only as long as he lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress, even though she marries another man. So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God (7.1–3).

This is the kind of stuff that the new WCG points out to the old Armstrongites and says, “See, the law doesn’t count now!” And yet the author of this had just finished going on and on about the law. So the problems arise from people trying to interpret a faulty book that contradicts itself at every turn.

Later, we find this:

What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead.

Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.

So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.

All I can say is, “What the hell is he trying to say?!” Paul is supposes to be this erudite but this is just nonsense. “Through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful?” Has he personified sin, like he personifies death sometimes? That’s like saying, “So that black might become utterly black.”

I swear, I try to read the Bible with an open mind, I try not to take preconceptions to it, but it continually shows itself to be nonsense.

Circumcision and the Bible

Tuesday 16 March 2004 | 0 Comments

I was reading this morning, of all things, the Bible. I found an interesting passage in Romans:

Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. If those who are not circumcised keep the law's requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.

A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man's praise is not from men, but from God.

What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? Much in every way!

First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God (2.25–3.2).

It is very clear here that Paul is not talking about starting a new religion but expanding an old one. Judaism is a religion passed on by blood with the surrounding culture—there aren’t many converts and there’s no effort at proselytizing. But here’s Paul, out converting people not to anything called Christianity (when did they get that name, anyway?) but to be Jews!

Second, he mentions that Jews are the ones who “have been entrusted with the very words of God.” No mention of anything that would eventually become the New Testament “words of God,” and here is a good opportunity at least to mention the oral traditions, if not the gospels if they were being circulated in some fashion. Proof? Of course not—and proof of what? That the gospels were written later? That’s widely acknowledged. It’s simply indications of the ordinariness of Christianity, of it’s non-divine nature.

And I didn’t set out looking for this—I just decided to read for a while, as I drank my coffee.

Marriage and Faith

Monday 08 March 2004 | 0 Comments

“Efekt konicowy.” That’s what Kinga’s dad is always talking about, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s any way I can get baptized without lying and saying I believe this and that.

And I find myself asking, “Why does anyone believe in the first place?” What does it give them? Then this morning I read something I’d taken from the internet some time ago:

Once I learned this way of making an examination of conscience. At the end of the day ask, What things did Jesus and I do together? For example, when I called that person who needed to hear from me, it was Jesus acting with me and thru me. But then later, I brushed someone off. Face it, I was acting on my own. Our life is a constant struggle to allow Jesus to take more authority, to extend his rule further in our hearts. (Secularism and the Authority of Jesus)

In this case, Jesus is simply—or even “just”—an ethical ideal. And I think, “Why not just ask yourself, ‘What good things did I do?’” And the answer from this priest would clearly be that “I, of my own accord, did nothing good. The good comes from Jesus.” I find such an attitude insulting to all those people who are not Christian and yet manage to be decent people.

More on Will and Belief

Sunday 15 February 2004 | 0 Comments

Peter Kreeft was talking at KC about the logical impossibility of religious pluralism, that all religions are true. “Either Mohammed was a prophet of God or he wasn’t,” he reasoned. I find it increasingly difficult to believe that he said that. As a Catholic, he believes, for example, that even though the host looks like bread, tastes like bread, feels like bread, and would be shown under scientific tests still to be bread, that it’s actually the body and blood of Jesus. That Jesus can be completely two different things.

It’s a question of faith, and I read an article on a Catholic website that took this even one step further. The author argued that only Jesus’ disciples — those who believed — could have seen him after his resurrection. In other words, if Jesus had appeared before Pilate, Pilate wouldn’t have seen him because he didn’t believe. That sounds suspiciously like willful self-deception.

Recall that Pieper writes that the chief obstacle to belief is the question, “Why should man be dependent upon information which he himself could never find and which, even if found, is not susceptible to rational examination?” Exposure to religion is a cultural experience, and it’s not something various individuals have independently worked out as they tried to figure out what this weird Unknown is that they’ve been experiencing. In other words, the seed is sown by cultural exposure to the idea of a crucified and risen god.

I wonder why that Franciscan bloke never wrote back. Perhaps he didn’t receive the email? Perhaps he thinks there’s no point? Perhaps he realizes that there’s no hope for me?