How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Read online

  In my sophomore year at Glendale College I read Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. The front cover of the book pronounced “AMAZING BIBLICAL PROPHECIES ABOUT THIS GENERATION!” (with “OVER 2,000,000 COPIES IN PRINT!”), while the back cover asked provocatively, “IS THIS THE ERA OF THE ANTICHRIST AS FORETOLD BY MOSES AND JESUS?” My Christian friends and I began reading the newspapers to watch the millennial drama unfold as Lindsey said the Bible had predicted. I recall taking a political science course in which the professor was talking about the possibility of a European Common Market, and comparing his take on this event to Lindsey’s, who claimed this is a reincarnation of the Roman Empire as prophesied in Daniel and the Book of Revelation: “We believe that the Common Market and the trend toward unification of Europe may well be the beginning of the ten-nation confederacy predicted by Daniel and the Book of Revelation.” Following this there will be “a revival of mystery Babylon,” and the rise of “a man of such magnetism, such power, and such influence, that he will for a time be the greatest dictator the world has ever known. He will be the completely godless, diabolically evil ‘future fuehrer.’” Skeptics beware, says Lindsey: “If this sounds rather spooky, bring your head out from under the skeptical covers and examine with us in a later chapter the Biblical basis and the current applications.” I threw the covers off and devoured the book with great credulity. So did millions of others: Through the 1970s The Late Great Planet Earth sold 7.5 million copies, making it, according to the New York Times Book Review (April 6, 1980), the bestselling nonfiction book of the decade. By 1991, notes the Los Angeles Times (February 23, 1991), the book had reached an almost unimaginable figure of 28 million copies sold in 52 languages worldwide. Prophecy sells, especially prophecies of biblical proportions.

  Taking all this fairly seriously, I transferred to Pepperdine University (affiliated with the Church of Christ) with the intent of majoring in theology. I took courses in the Old and New Testaments, on the history of the Bible, the writings of C. S. Lewis, and the historical Jesus. I stayed after class to talk to professors and visited them in their offices. I went to chapel several times a week (students were required to go twice and attendance was taken) and prayed regularly. I even told one coed that I “loved” her—in the Christian sense of loving everyone—but I am afraid she took it the wrong way. (She needn’t have worried—students were prohibited from visiting the dorm rooms of members of the opposite sex, and such sin-provoking activities as dancing were forbidden.)

  A BREACH IN THE FAITH

  There were problems with my conversion from the beginning, however, and I think deep down on some level I must have known it. First, my motives for converting, while sincere later, were not quite as pure at the time—my friend had a sister that I wanted to get to know better and I figured this might help. On reflection, howling coyotes are not exactly unusual, since my parents’ home is nestled high up in the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California where coyotes routinely come down from the hills to rummage through trash cans. More importantly, there were chinks in the armor: Another friend at my high school told me I had chosen the wrong path and that his faith, Jehovah’s Witnesses, was the One True Religion, making me wonder how another religion could be as certain it had the truth as my newfound one did. I was generally uncomfortable witnessing to people, especially strangers. And the normal sexual urges that overwhelm teenagers created intense conflict and frustration.

  There were philosophical problems as well. I recall spending an afternoon with a Presbyterian minister whose deep wisdom I greatly respected, going over and over what is known as the “Problem of Free Will”: If God is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful), then how can we be held responsible for making “choices” we could not possibly have made? If we do have free will, does this mean God is limited in knowledge or power? And if God is limited, what else can He not do? The minister, who had a Ph.D. in theology, did his best to address the problem but it all seemed like labyrinthine word games and obfuscating analogies to me. For example: “Imagine history as one long film, which God has already seen but we, the characters in the film have not, so our actions ‘seem’ free even though they are predestined.” Or: “God is outside of space and time so the normal laws of cause and effect do not apply to Him.”

  Similarly, with one of my Pepperdine professors I grappled with what is known as the “Problem of Evil”: If God is omnibenevolent (all good) and omnipotent, then why is there evil in the world? If He allows evil, then He is not all good. If He cannot help but allow evil, then He is not all powerful. The best book I have read on this problem is Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, but his solution—“God can’t do everything, but he can do some important things”—is not how most people conceive of the “almighty.”

  To this day I have not heard an answer to the Problem of Evil that seems satisfactory. As with the Problem of Free Will, most answers involve complicated twists and turns of logic and semantic wordplay. One answer, for example, is based on a fundamental assumption of logic that no set may have itself as its own subset—God cannot create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it. Likewise, God cannot be encompassed in the subset of evil. Evil, like heavy stones, exists independently of the larger set of God, even though remaining within that set. Another riposte involves explaining specific historical evils, like the Holocaust, where one answer is that “humans committed these evil acts, not God.” But all this avoids the problem altogether: Either God allowed Nazis to kill Jews, in which case He is not omnibenevolent, or God could not prevent Nazis from killing Jews, in which case He is not omnipotent. In either case God is not the plenipotent Yahweh of Abraham, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords Sovereign of the Universe. Or, in explaining the death of innocent children from cancer or automobile accidents, one rejoinder is that “God has a bigger plan for us and we shall grow and learn from this experience.” The problem here is that no matter what happens—good things or bad things—God’s intentions can be inferred. Everything that happens is attributed to God, and this just puts us back to where we started with God either unable or unwilling to take action or prevent the evil.

  At Glendale College I challenged my philosophy professor (and now my friend) Richard Hardison, to read The Late Great Planet Earth, believing he would see the light. Instead he saw red and hammered out a two-page, single-space typed list of problems with Lindsey’s book. I still have the list, folded and tucked neatly into my copy of the book. Hardison took no prisoners. For example, where Lindsey writes, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken,” Hardison notes that this creates an “inevitable precision, since we disregard those prophesies that don’t occur.” On page 40 Lindsey explains that when reading the Bible we should “take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning,” yet on page 50 Lindsey says that “the bones coming together and sinews and flesh being put upon them” really means “the regathering of the people into a physical restoration of a national existence in Palestine. Isn’t it fascinating how graphic this physical analogy is?” Lindsey cannot have it both ways. On pages 55—56, Lindsey commits another logical fallacy: “Peter considered the certainty and relevance of the prophetic word to be the most important thing. He even warned that in ‘the latter times’ men posing as religious leaders would rise from within the Church and deny, even ridicule, the prophetic word (II Peter 2:1–3; 3:1–18) If you pass this book around to many ministers you’ll find how true this prediction has become.” Hardison notes that “denial of Lindsey’s position is thus impossible without proving oneself to be among those misguided persons that Peter warns about. This becomes a device to make Lindsey’s position nondisprovable.” Hardison concluded his analysis with this biting statement:

  Of all Lindsey’s statements, the one I most want to quarrel with is found in the introduction: “There are many students who are dissatisfied with being told that
the sole purpose of education is to develop inquiring minds. They want to find some of the answers to their questions—solid answers, a certain direction.” I think I can offer some possible explanations for this “egregious” development. But even more, I feel impelled to propose that such a student is dead.

  Hardison’s analysis shook me up. I did not want to be a “dead” student in only my second year of college. So I continued reading what the great minds in history had to say about God. It was an illuminating experience that got me thinking about the concept of “believing” in God. What does it mean to believe in God or not to believe in God? Are these great questions about God’s existence answerable from a scientific perspective? Can reason alone help us arrive at solutions to the moral dilemmas of our lives? In short, does religion present us with soluble problems to be analyzed with the tools of observation and logic, or are these questions too subjective and too personal for us to come to a collective agreement on a solution?

  THE ART OF THE INSOLUBLE

  The British Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar once described science as the “art of the soluble.” “No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence,” Medawar opined. “If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble.” If science is the art of the soluble, religion is the art of the insoluble. God’s existence is beyond our competence as a problem to solve.

  This is what Thomas Huxley meant when he coined the term agnostic in 1869: “When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist … I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. They [believers] were quite sure they had attained a certain ‘gnosis,’—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.” In the now-classic 1966 Time magazine cover story, “Is God Dead?,” the editors came to the same conclusion after spending a year conducting more than 300 interviews with leading theologians from around the world:

  For one thing, every proof seems to have a plausible refutation; for another, only a committed Thomist [a follower of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas] is likely to be spiritually moved by the realization that there is a self existent Prime Mover [a first being that moves all others but itself does not need to be moved—see Chapter 5]. “Faith in God is more than an intellectual belief,” says Dr. John Macquarrie of Union Theological Seminary: “It is a total attitude of the self.”

  One either takes the leap of faith or does not. Faith is the art of the insoluble.

  There are many positions one can take with regard to the God Question (see the Bibliographic Essay at the end of this book for suggested readings on both the theist and atheist positions). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), our finest source for the history of word usage, defines theism as implying “belief in a deity, or deities” and “belief in one God as creator and supreme ruler of the universe.” Atheism is defined by the OED as “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God.” And agnosticism as implying “unknowing, unknown, unknowable.” At a party held one evening in 1869, Huxley further clarified the term agnostic, referencing St. Paul’s mention of the altar to “the Unknown God” as: “one who holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind material phenomena is unknown and so far as can be judged unknowable, and especially that a First Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which we know nothing.” Belief in God is the art of the insoluble.

  To clarify this linguistic discussion it might be useful to distinguish between a statement about the universe and a statement about one’s personal beliefs. As a statement about the universe, agnostic would seem to be the most rational position to take because by the criteria of science and reason God is an unknowable concept. We cannot prove or disprove God’s existence through empirical evidence or deductive proof. Therefore, from a scientific or philosophical position, theism and atheism are both indefensible positions as statements about the universe. Thomas Huxley once again clarified this distinction:

  Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as, in matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

  Martin Gardner, mathematician, former columnist for Scientific American, and one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement, is a believer who admits that the existence of God cannot be proved. He calls himself a fideist, or someone who believes in God for personal or pragmatic reasons, and defended this position to me in an interview: “As a fideist I don’t think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. Even more than that, I agree with Unamuno that the atheists have the better arguments. So it is a case of quixotic emotional belief that is really against the evidence and against the odds.” Credo consolans, says Gardner—I believe because it is consoling. Fideism is the art of the insoluble.

  As for my part, I used to be a theist, believing that God’s existence was soluble. Then I became an atheist, believing that God’s nonexistence was soluble. I am now an agnostic, believing that the issue is insoluble. Ever since I made my position known in the pages of Skeptic magazine many years ago, I have received a large volume of correspondence, much of it from atheists who accuse me of copping out or being wishy-washy in using the term agnostic. One wrote: “I, sir, am a plain unqualified atheist. Would you like to hear my reason? Okay, ‘there is no God.’ That’s my reason.” Most skeptics and atheists would agree and argue that there are really only two positions on the God Question: you either believe in God or you do not believe in God—theism or atheism. What’s this agnosticism nonsense, they ask?

  If by fiat I had to bet on whether there is a God or not, I would bet that there is not. Indeed, I live my life as if there is no God. And if the common usage of the term atheism was nothing more than “no belief in a God,” I might be willing to adopt it. But this is not the common usage, as we saw in the OED. (And we would do well to remember that dictionaries do not give definitions, they give usages.) Atheism is typically used to mean “disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God” (not to mention its pejorative permutations). But “denial of a God” is an untenable position. It is no more possible to prove God’s nonexistence than it is to prove His existence. “There is no God” is no more defensible than “there is a God.” The problem with the term agnostic, however, is that most people take it to mean that you are unsure or have yet to make up your mind, so the term nontheist might be more descriptive.

  Belief or disbelief in God is clearly a decision of considerable personal importance. But making this decision is not a science. For thousands of years the greatest minds of every generation have worked diligently to prove the existence of God, and for thousands of years equally great minds have produced valid refutations of those proofs. The problem may be in the meaning of the word prove. Drawing upon the OED once again, to “prove” means: “to make trial of, put to the test.” How could you possibly put God to the test? There is no conceivable experiment that could confirm or disconfirm God’s existence. There comes a time in the history of an idea when it seems reasonable to conclude that the problem is beyond the human mind to solve. God is insoluble.

  WHAT IS GOD?

  Although it is almost certainly not possible to define God in any concise way, it would seem remiss not to at least try in any discussion such as this. Studies show that the vast majority of people in the Industrial West who believe in God associate themselves with some form of monotheism, in which God is understood to be all powerful, all knowing, and all good
; who created out of nothing the universe and everything in it with the exception of Himself; who is uncreated and eternal, a noncorporeal spirit who created, loves, and can grant eternal life to humans. Synonyms include Almighty, Supreme Being, Supreme Goodness, Most High, Divine Being, the Deity, Divinity, God the Father, Divine Father, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Creator, Author of All Things, Maker of Heaven and Earth, First Cause, Prime Mover, Light of the World, Sovereign of the Universe, and so forth.

  Many scientists, however, feel that such discussions about the nature of and belief in God are meaningless, tantamount to asking, as anthropologist Donald Symons did, “Do you believe [fill in any three letters] exists?” Symons explained:

  You have to know more about what’s in the brackets and how its existence or nonexistence might be determined or, at /east. what kinds of evidence might potentially bear on the question. If you find out that the questioner has essentially no ideas about the characteristics of the [ ] (such as, for example, whether it is made of matter), and, more importantly, states that no conceivable observation could have any bearing on the existence/nonexistence question, then to me the original question is meaningless, or incoherent, or empty, or some similar concept.