Last week I finished by making a distinction between two different types of perception. The distinction I am making is that you get one experience of a thing when you are outside of it and another when you are inside of it. Different perceptions and different observations will tell you different things about something, but in order to have a proper understanding, one should draw real perceptions from both positions. It seems very evident that much of modern day thinking is fixed upon analysis from the outside; thus, it is common to use A to find out about C instead of using both A and B. 

 

We would not think a man very wise if he claimed to have a true understanding of the nature of love by simply reading Shakespeare alone - for we all know that he must also, as a matter of fact, step inside of love for a proper understanding. And notice that both positions combined would usually give him a better advantage than either one would by itself. In other words, he would learn plenty of things from literature that would help him in his discovery and he would learn plenty of things from a relationship that would reveal to him the true feelings of love. He would, of course, learn a great deal more from the latter than he would the former, and it is also true that inside experiences can have as much of a negative effect as they can a positive one, but that is secondary to the point; a real analysis which considers outside perceptions and experiences inside analysis will always engender the most lucid judgements.

 

It is always true that if you want to understand something you must step inside for a better understanding as well as perceiving it from the outside. Judging things from the outside without stepping inside is mostly the basis of the specifically contemporary type of thought, and it is not a very sensible basis. Very often people prefer knowledge of books rather than anthropological studies; they prefer to believe atheist writers rather than investigate religion for themselves; they prefer mild indifference to rational enquiry. But we can have no true analysis of something unless we first know what it is that we are analysing. If there is no knowledge of experience, we are merely explaining something of which we have never stepped inside. 

 

It is true, of course, that we can infer from the centre of one experience about the probability of another experience being true or false. If I have had the experience of a doctor inserting a needle in my arm, I can naturally conclude that I will feel pain if a dentist inserts a needle into my gum. If a man has been unreliable in the past, I have every reason to suspect that he might be unreliable again the in the future. In the same way, Christ claims that the only way to the Father is through Him, thus my experience of Christ living inside of me is enough for me to conclude that, say, Buddhism does not offer us a way to the Father, or that, say, Scientology does not give a true account of what human beings are really like. 

 

And of course, the experience of Christ combined with the experience of exploring other religions gives me an even better idea than if I had just believed in Christianity without exploring the other religions. I have tried (as best I can) to step inside other religions to form a proper analysis of them. Much modern analysis, however, is not like this - for it is quite often based upon explanations of things without very much knowledge of the things themselves. Most of the analysis is done from the outside. And it is not always noticed that modern men’s preconceptions of things percolate into other areas of their analysis. For example, nowadays the word ‘believe’ so often pertains to things that we are not really sure about - thus when we ask the question ‘Do you believe in God’, we are often evoking negative connotations. In common parlance, if a man says he believes something he is very often expressing an element of doubt. 

 

Consider two different answers to this question: “Have you heard the weather forecast today?”

 

“They said it was going to rain, I believe,” said Malcolm.

 

“They said it was going to rain,” said Frank.

 

We would all feel more confident with the second answer than we would the first. After all, we do not say we ‘believe’ something that we are sure is true. We do not say that we ‘believe’ five and five is ten; we do not say that we ‘believe’ the sun is the nearest star to earth. And this, I think, is where people who believe in God are treated unfairly; for the word ‘believe’ when used in its positive sense is taken to mean ‘I have some doubt’ - whereas ‘believe’ in the negative sense is taken as a much greater claim of certainty. And that, I’m afraid, is what I think (subliminally) conditions a lot of modern day thinking. I can say that ‘I believe with all my heart and with all my mind that Christianity is true; that God created the universe, and became a man and died so that we could have a relationship with Him’ - but aligned next to a comment such as ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ - it is easy to see which comment evokes greater feelings of doubt. 

 

The same applies to the word ‘faith’ - it is seen as a very negative thing. But it is a big misconception to think that faith means believing something that we know is not true, or even believing something that we doubt. Before I examine faith a bit more, I do want to say, in all fairness, that science has sometimes had to face the same accusations. People will say, the theory of evolution is just that ‘a theory’. This is true, but so is the contention that the earth orbits the sun. It is a theory, but a very well corroborated theory. 

 

Scientists very often have enough humility to say that all their statements and contentions are just theories (despite being very certain of their efficacy) - thus, it is not always fair for people to capitalise on that with derogatory remarks about theories that have a good weight of evidence to support or verify their validity. There is, naturally, less evidence that macro-evolutionary theory is true (although still very good evidence that it might be true) than there is evidence that the earth orbits the sun - even less evidence that spontaneous origination of living organisms could naturalistically form directly from lifeless matter - but the point, I think, remains. 

 

When Christians say they believe in God, they are very often expressing it in the same way that a scientist says he believes that the earth orbits the sun. Of course, atheists will claim that there is much more evidence for the latter and the Christian will probably claim that there is sufficient evidence for his or her belief too - but the overall point is that we should not be taken in by the negative connotations which are attached to words like ‘believe’, ‘theory’ and, to some extent, ‘faith’.

 

There are many ‘beliefs’, ‘theories’ and, indeed, ‘faiths’ that are demonstrably strong, and because of this strength we see no reason to doubt them despite no evidence of certainty. In fact, when a man considers his love for his wife, he has more evidence in his own mind than he could possibly obtain from any scientific experiment. And when I talk about evidence for my belief in Christianity, I prefer to talk, not about historical evidence or archaeological evidence (although both are excellent), but about my own experiences and the experiences of all the people I know. If there were demonstrable evidence that the only people who subscribed to religious belief were fools and demonstrable evidence that all atheists were either very clever or very indifferent, then there might be grounds for a much bigger enquiry into the minds of Christians. 

 

But this is very far from being true, for many men and women of supreme intelligence have been religious believers, in fact, one might say, they have, for many years outnumbered the unbelievers. Now I have heard sceptics say that they were all rather naïve and that after Darwin explained the true reality of our existence, we need not invoke a Creator into the proceedings. It is certainly much easier to be an atheist in this contemporary age, but it does not follow that all sensible people are unbelievers - far from it. 

 

If we can see that there is no pattern regarding intelligence, we could thus conclude that religious belief is based upon two things; the first is very bad and the second is (usually) very good. The first is the type of belief that we were talking about last week - the belief that has been indelibly stamped from the cradle, a belief which the child has little chance of avoiding. This is one explanation as to why there are so many religious people. But there is another kind, which occurs in adult converts; people who have thought it through with reasoning and logical enquiry, and also people who claim that God has revealed Himself to them at a certain stage in their life - what you might call a ‘Road to Damascus moment’. If this were occurring in one or two foolish people we might have grounds for suggesting that they are mistaken. 

 

But, in fact, it has occurred, and is occurring, in millions of people all over the world, with very different backgrounds and very different cultures; both rich and poor, and educated and non-educated. Many are philosophers, many are scientists, many are evolutionists, many are of powerful minds. It seems to me that the most sensible explanation is that Christ really is revealing Himself to all these people; that He is as alive and active as the Bible claims, otherwise we are faced with an absurd form of analysis which is almost wholly detached from objectivism.

 

Next week I shall take a closer look at what faith really is.

 

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