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Joan Ball, author of Flirting With Faith, and William Lobdell, who wrote Losing My Religion, get to the heart of faith in Part 3 of their 4-part conversation. "I embrace a very uncertain faith that many people are trying to make certain," Joan says. "By trying to make our faith certain, one cannot help but box it in and intellectualize it and make it human.
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Big questions are not always easy to answer. Why should they be? Just because something is true doesn’t mean it has to be easy to find out or understand – just ask a mathematician or scientist who has sweated blood over figuring out the answer to a tough research problem. Sometimes truth is simple, and sometimes it is complex; like reality itself, at times it is simple on the surface but reveals increasing complexity when examined closely.
So, at times it is a hard slog to find the answers to these
big questions – and sometimes the big questions have answers we don’t like, or
that we fear we won’t like.
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Skepticism about religious belief, and indeed about the existence of truth itself, is often dressed up as being highly “rational” and “intellectual.” Logic and reason drive the skeptic, not feelings and wishful thinking, right? Well, maybe sometimes. However, skepticism is often based quite firmly in emotional reactions. In fact, skepticism is often a form of snobbery. Take an ordinary Christian, not a pastor or teacher, but just someone who goes to church on Sunday, and who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and that the Bible is God’s Word. Now ask that person to explain why those beliefs are true. There’s a good chance that this ordinary person can’t defend his or her belief, can’t provide a compelling argument for why it is so.
On this ground – on the basis that Average Joe and Average
Jane can’t explain why they believe as they do - the skeptic rejects their
belief.
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“It’s all relative.” How many times have we heard statements like that? “Some people believe in Jesus, and that works for them, but, you know, other people don’t, and that’s OK, because it’s all relative.” Wait a minute! “Belief” by itself is meaningless: what matters is whether the thing we believe in (or not) exists (or doesn’t). If there is something objective that we call Truth, it exists independently of our knowledge of it – it is not a matter of perspective. Thus, if there is such a thing as Truth, we should expect consequences when we act in ways contrary to that truth. I grew up on the East Coast, and now live on the West Coast, so I’m going to use a climactically mixed metaphor involving both a frozen pond (very Massachusetts-y) and a wildfire (characteristically Southern Californian). Consider a pond that has frozen over in the winter. I used to go ice skating on ponds like that as a kid in Massachusetts. Is the ice safe to walk on? The importance of the answer depends on why you want to know. Scenario 1: If you just want to go ice skating, the safety of the ice is not an urgent question. You can err on the side of caution and go sledding instead on the hill behind you. (Or, if you live in Southern California, you can go to the beach.) Scenario 2: However, imagine that a forest fire has broken out on the wooded slope behind you. The shortest route to safety is across the frozen surface of the pond. Now it matters a great deal whether the ice is safe or not. If it is thick enough, you can easily and quickly make your way to safety. If, however, you know that the ice is too thin, you will have to proceed along the water’s edge, a longer and more dangerous route (but necessary, if you are to have any chance to save yourself.) Scenario 3: You are seated at the pond’s edge, and a friend texts you that a major wildfire has broken out in the forest. According to this friend, the fire is burning so rapidly that it will certainly encircle you before you can walk out along the edge of the pond. The only way to safety is to cross the pond, on the ice. We thus have three questions:
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