If you missed last week’s post, here it is for context: On our present sufferings, part 1…
Life can be excruciatingly difficult. Life doesn’t make sense sometimes. Suffering doesn’t make sense sometimes.
So, why believe in God, let alone a good God? This seems like an adequately controversial question with which to begin my rambling.
Perhaps a higher power does not exist. Perhaps my ongoing suffering is just a stroke of universally awful luck in a world based on random chance. Or, perhaps we’re simply not the “fittest” in a survival of the fittest world.
I’m a huge nerd. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit studying all sorts of theories of human existence. I’ll spare you my deep dive into whether or not there is a God and leave it at this Occam’s razor-ish argument…which is admittedly a far-too-overgeneralized and over-simplified summation. Based on the complexity of life and emotion and nature and the cosmos and general human existence, I think it takes more faith to believe there is not a God than to believe there is one. Even if I didn’t want to believe in a creator, designer, higher power, higher intelligence, etc., I have a hard time making that leap, logically. I’ve read and listened to the work of a number of brilliant agnostics and atheists. They make a number of valid points; but, for one, they often lose me when I start to feel bullied or belittled for questioning, doubting, cross-examining, etc. (To be fair, I’m sure they’ve felt the same way when conversing with Christians…which is probably a good lesson in evangelism, by the way.)
”Religion is a culture of faith. Science is a culture of doubt.” — Richard Feynman
Science is supposed to be a system based on questioning and doubt. Certainty is sort of antithetical to “science.” However, it seems to me that many atheist scientists operate from a position of certainty, allowing questioning only to the extent that it doesn’t interfere with their “certainties.” Then, they become rather bullying and pharisee-like in defense of their faith in anti-religious points of view.
I’ll give one example. In the 1960s, 2/3 of leading US scientists surveyed believed the universe was eternal—i.e. the universe has no beginning. (source: The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder, Ph.D.). Many secular scientists of the day dismissed the Bible’s claims of a “beginning” of the universe as foolishness and those who believed it as fools. For what it’s worth, as a child of the 80’s I remember people who held fast to their belief in an eternal universe and derided foolish Christians for believing in the creation account in the book of Genesis. Of course, there’s been a reversal in scientific thinking now that observational evidence of an expanding universe points to a finite age of the universe.
It’s weird to me that, to some, it’s ok to have faith in theoretical ideas but not in the idea that there could be a creator. It’s ok to have faith in the multiverse. It’s ok to have faith that, in a universe of infinite probabilities, a structure like Stone Henge could eventually form and arrange itself. It’s ok to admit that, despite our best and brightest humans trying to figure it out, we still have no idea why the theories of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (arguably two of humanity’s most impressive scientific discoveries) don’t mesh. It is considered intellectually inferior, however, to have faith that there exists a higher intelligence in the universe than we humans…a creator, designer, and orchestrator of all creation.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s intellectually inferior to lack belief in a higher power or to question or to doubt. As Rosemary Clement-Moore says, “Faith isn't absence of doubt. It's belief without proof, not without question.” Plenty of people smarter than I have come to different conclusions about God than I have. That said, I do worry about the long-term consequences for a society that believes that humans or aliens or AI have the highest level of creative power and intelligence in the universe. Why? Among other reasons, that leaves us to argue and fight it out over which human ideas are best. In a world where truth is relative, who gets to decide whose “truth” matters most or even what is moral or good or bad or wrong or right? I find little hope in that universe—particularly during times of suffering. We humans can be prone to monumentally oppressive, murderous, destructive, and terrible ideas in the name of our self-defined “progress.”
When I’m stumbling through a wilderness of hard, hard times, I continue to find in hope in absolute truth, purposeful creation, and a creator who created not only the relativity of time but wave-particle duality and the speed of light…and who created even more complex things like love and emotion and reason and empathy and atonement and justice and peace and joy and hope.
“Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion brings things together to see what they mean.” —Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
To be continued next week…
Thank you, very interesting. For many years I had an atheist (or at least agnostic) friend who often talked about how her faith was destroyed by the suffering she experienced/witnessed as a NICU parent. Or more accurately, she described deliberately eliminating any belief in a God from her life after that experience. In all the time we interacted (this was someone I knew mostly online) I never remember anyone arguing with her about this; I certainly never did. Still, she kept bringing it up over and over again almost as if she *was* arguing with someone.
Eventually, I started thinking about what she was saying and it seemed to me she was actually displaying faith: faith that her particular experience had revealed something true about the universe. How would she have explained the experience of someone who suffered but retained their faith? In other words, an equally valid but opposite experience. She never engaged with this idea.
To think your life and experience have some kind of meaning at all is to me the biggest leap of faith. It also seems to be inevitable: without assigning some kind of meaning to the things you experience, how can you even function?
I never raised any of these questions with my friend, because I didn’t know how to do it without sounding like a jerk (I hope I don’t now).
Well written as usual. I hear themes of Job in your comments which is only logical. Keep writing. I anxiously await your next creation.