Why I Wish I had Monstrous Metaphorical Leaping Legs

         The other day my friend and I were doing a survey with a girl on campus about her spiritual thoughts. She was an atheist, born and raised, and found no evidence that a Creator or God exists. She told us that last year she came to an event that RealLife (Cru at OSU) and other Christian ministries held, where a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Cullen Buie, came to talk about why he is a Christian. Her response was, "I thought it was very interesting but I don't get how he rationalized his beliefs. It seems like religion should be something you feel or experience, not rationalize."

         This is a thought that I've heard frequently in conversation with college students. Another really pervasive thought in our culture is that no belief system that an individual might hold is wrong or less valuable than another. This sounds like a great thought, but I frequently ask, "Do you think there's a way to determine which belief system more accurately describes the world?" Unanimously, I've heard the response, "No."

         How confusing! This means that most people would say that since every person has such different ideas about the world, there is no reliable way to decipher reality. And further, most people would say you should not or cannot use rational thought to determine personal beliefs. So why hold to any belief system at all if everything is arbitrary?

           The thing is, even though people say that this is how they think about spirituality, I don't think anyone practically functions that way.

      
My Thoughts

          I agree that regardless of which belief system to which someone might hold, it requires some leap of faith. But I know that there are ways to test the world around us to determine what is true of our reality. As an exaggerated example, if someone were to say, "I believe that I am dead," there are ways to test whether or not the person is dead based on their vital signs (or, like, the fact that they're speaking). We can discover beyond a shadow of a doubt whether or not that person is dead. If they are not dead, we can say definitively that that person's belief that they are dead is wrong. It might offend them to say that they are wrong, but such is life--sometimes what we believe is wrong.

         What about the questions for which we cannot test to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt? How did the Universe begin? Does God exist? If God exists, what is he/she/it like? How do we know what is good and bad?

          For these kinds of questions are we resigned to randomly pick and choose what we want to believe, maybe based on how we were raised or where we live? Can we base our choices only on how we feel or are there real evidences on which to base them?

        Here are my thoughts on determining reality in pictures...


Pretty Pictures

        Take two contradictory beliefs. My favorite example is God exists vs. God does not exist. 

       The square in the middle represents a person who is probing the world for truth. The dots represent different evidences that exist in the world, in the culture, on the internet, etc. that either suggest that God exists or suggest that God does not exist.

       Over time, the seeker will collect pieces of evidence within their reach and begin to build bridges either in the direction of belief that God exists or belief that God does not exist. Some evidences are better than others, and based on a person's influences, scope of seeking, and culture, their bridges will be different in size and reach.

         Ultimately, when it comes to the question of God's existence, no one has proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists or that God does not exist. Some people have very short metaphorical faith legs and require a lot more evidence to build their bridge before making that faith leap. Some people have monstrous metaphorical faith legs and make decisions of faith without requiring much of a bridge at all. And ultimately, based on our will, we can leap in either direction regardless of the size of bridge we've built on either side.


Mustard Seeds

          I have legs the length of mustard seeds. Faith is hard for me. I searched far and wide building bridges in both directions before I made a faith decision and my goal was to require of myself as little faith leaping power as possible. And even today I spend a lot of time sifting through the evidences with which I've built my bridges, breaking them down and building them back up. But I've made my faith decision and I truly understand now what Paul meant when he said, "If Christ has not been raised... we are of all people most to be pitied." I am all in and if it turns out I'm wrong, then nothing I've done up to this point in my life makes sense.

         There is a tiny bit of truth in our culture's idea that "any belief is legitimate". The truth is that we can never be 100% certain with no shadow of a doubt what is true about the questions for which we have no proof. However, it cannot both be true that God exists and God does not exist at the same time--reality exists objectively some way and it is up to us to discover what that objective reality is. I think it would be a tragedy to live all of life floating in the middle. If God exists it has pretty wild implications for our lives. If God doesn't exist, it has pretty wild and different implications for our lives... the directions we leap determine the trajectories of our entire lives.

         My personal diagram looks like this:

          I could make a pretty decent argument for atheism, but overall I think there is significantly more and better evidence that God exists than that God does not exist, so that's the direction I leaped.

Here are a few of the pieces that make up my bridge:

• The Anthropic Principle and ubiquity of fine-tuning in the laws of physics
• The Big Bang
• The origin of life
• The life and marriage of my parents
• The Cambrian Explosion
• Answered prayers
• People from different cultures that I've seen making a faith decision in the same direction even though they did not grow up being taught as I was
• The webbed nature of the metabolism
• The pervasive existence of morality in human history
• The pervasive existence of religion in human history
• The historicity of the Bible
• The method by which the Bible was translated
• The life, claims, and death of Jesus
• The gospels providing historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection
• The life and martyrdom of Jesus' disciples
• The durability of the Christian church
• The selfish nature and desire for good in people
• The contrast in the lifestyles and overall satisfaction in life between people who believe in Jesus and those who don't along with Jesus' claim to provide life in abundance
• Experiencing peace during times of situational pain
• Human desire for relationship

Which direction do you leap?