Continuing with the subject of faith, there are some details that I want to examine further.
In atheistic circles, particularly scholarly circles, there is it seems, a meagre understanding about what faith in Christ really is. It is true that a man can never really understand about real faith in Christ until he has some experience of it himself. But we should be quite wrong if we thought that there were no other connotations attached to this problem.
Many atheists will claim that religious belief is a mere by-product of something bigger, a Darwinian explanation which brings about an advantage or brings about something that is conducive to greater survival - even if we cannot recognise what it is. But there are two points that ought to be observed. In the first place, this statement does not simply apply to religion; for many people believe in many things that produced the same Darwinian advantage - it has nothing to do with religion at all.
In the second place, even if it were proved that religious belief provides certain Darwinian advantages that were previously unknown to us, is that not what we should expect from our Creator? Surely we should expect that belief in the One who created us is bound to bring about a much better and longer existence; that if He sustains us, we are bound to get more things right than we do wrong. I am not trying to cast aspersions over Darwinian survival methods, I am simply trying to put the conclusion the right way round. It is perfectly obvious that the great majority of us would survive longer and live much better lives if we followed The Ten Commandments and the words of Christ. So it is therefore unsurprising that scientists claim that religious beliefs (particularly Christian beliefs) give the adherent certain Darwinian advantages. But it seems evident that they are not fully understanding which is, indeed, the by-product and which is the original thing.
I heard a good example of this recently when I was listening to Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book Why God is not Great. He was setting a challenge throughout America, a challenge to which he claimed no one had provided a satisfactory answer. His challenge was this; ‘Name a moral action taken or a moral statement uttered by a religious person that could not have been made with equal effect by a non-religious person’. Now straight away there seems to me to be some confusion here, regarding the questioner himself. Naturally we could name good moral actions taken by both religious and non-religious people that have produced the same results, but that does not tell us anything about what is directing the action. It is not the action itself that tells us about a man it is his interior make-up.
And once again, the question of whether non-religious people can do everything religious people can do, is somewhat secondary to the question of whether any of the religions are true or not. This is another example of what I have been talking about in the past two messages - Christopher Hitchens is asking the question with the assumption already made that God does not exist; he is using the statement to substantiate his claim that religion is false rather than showing that it is false.
Furthermore, it has not been noticed thus far that there is, indeed, a sound answer to his question. We only need to look at Christ to find the answer to Mr Hitchens’ question. Nobody else, past or present, could have displayed a true embodiment of God as man; nobody else could be fully God and fully man at the same time; nobody else could create us and then imbibe everything that is human in order to die for us so that we could have a relationship with our Heavenly Father. In Christ alone we can have a full life, for He
is the life.
I wonder how many atheists find it strange that it is so hard to find substantive evidence that Christianity is false, and that so many accusations are set against it. I wonder if it has occurred to them how easy it is, in most other areas of life, to show something is false when it really is false, for false things are usually either self-contradictory or their falsity becomes apparent with even the smallest amount of analysis. Not so with Christianity, for Christ is evidently alive in so many modern men and women. Perhaps the fact that they are in the minority makes them less conspicuous, but go to any thriving church and you will see that Christ is very much alive.
We have seen that the argument for wish-fulfilment is terminally ambivalent, for it can be used equally for both theist arguments and atheist arguments, as can most other objections to Christianity. But we have other modern atheist mindsets which have been driven by the current zeitgeist. Most people have preconceptions about what they will take as evidence for something being true, whether it be a testimony, some form of written proof (including historical and mathematical), an experiment, or, indeed, a feeling. Now it should be noticed that the last one can bring about objections from doubters that the others cannot - but it does not follow that it should be any less true, for we all know many things that occur within our own minds which are evidenced only by that which is inside us. Scientists often use these accusations against religious people while at the same time overlooking the things that they know to be true but are not scientifically provable.
The very idea that scientists believe everything they believe because of evidence and proof and that Christians believe all that they believe because of faith and desire, is one of the biggest errors of thinking in the modern world. I think we can show this by switching it round for a second. If a scientist had an experience which seemed, to him, to be something supernatural, could he expect, in all honesty to analyse it with the same neutrality that he would analyse an experiment involving the two strands of the double helix in DNA? In fact, I doubt very much whether he would feel exactly the same about the DNA experiment as he would about discoveries of the laws of physics, for one would elicit much bigger questions of existence than the other.
No one would expect the scientist to feel the same way about his putative supernatural experience. It would be time for a very different analysis, one which would involve the scientist thinking about things in the same way that the Christian does. Of course, there may be several outcomes, but the point remains the same; we should not exaggerate the difference between the two sets of beliefs.
And this, of course, leads us to the real truth about faith in Christ. I have said before that atheists presuppose religion is false and then postulate opinions as to why people are still religious. It is here that we come across something rather interesting, for a Christian very often takes the opposite approach; that is, having established in his own mind that Christianity is true, he then proceeds to postulate reasons why all objections must be invalid. And it should be admitted that he often does this even when he is not sure why a particular objection is invalid - he just knows that it must be. This seems like a shocking statement for me to be making, but there is a perfectly good reason why this must happen.
Perhaps the best way to explain it is to imagine some situations where the opposite is occurring, where we are demanding faith of something else outside of Christianity. A good example is this: when we start driving lessons, the instructor is asking us to put our faith in him - faith that he can help us become a competent driver. He is asking us to trust him, despite our initial feelings of fear and apprehension when we first enter the car. This is a little bit like what God is doing when we enter into the foray of Christianity. And this, by the way, also explains why faith is not always concomitant with reason.
From past experiences, reason tells me that when I go to the dentist for a check-up and polish that I am not going to experience any pain. But even after he has told me that my teeth are fine and is about to insert the polisher into my mouth, a slight feeling of fear and unease comes into my cognisance. This is clearly not based upon my reasoning because I know perfectly well that there is no logical need for apprehension.
When we ask someone to put their faith in us, we are very often asking them to believe something contrary to evidence. And if they doubt us, we are asking them to believe in the teeth of intelligence and reason. The dentist is asking me to believe that something which sounds and looks dangerous will actually give me no pain at all. And similarly, when a child goes to the doctor’s surgery for his injections, the doctor is asking the child to believe that causing him pain with the needle will stop him experiencing greater pain and sickness later on. As children, guided by our parents, we are trusting that the doctor is a good man who has our best interests at heart. If we had let our apprehension become a lack of faith, and refused the injections, we would have almost certainly become quite ill and infectious later on.
It is perfectly obvious that no scientist would think I, or anyone else for that matter, were foolish for becoming apprehensive in the dentist’s chair; no sane man would accuse me of departing from reason, much less criticise me for going through with something which seemed to conflict with my reasoning. To have real conviction with what you believe, that is, to solidify your faith to the extent that it sometimes seems irrational is not so different to what we have just been talking about. We are to God what the driving instructor, or dentist, or doctor is to us, only to a much greater extent. Therefore we Christians must continue to rely on what we know to be true (that God lives inside of us) even in those moments when our faith seems a bit woolly.
If this seems illogical, it is not. I am not for one second claming that anyone should go ahead and believe in something regardless of any evidence that appears to falsify it. This is not what I am talking about when I describe Christianity, for the evidence of the Spirit living inside us is already there. But if God, who knows our thoughts better than we do, created this universe, then it stands to reason that sometimes it will appear, with our limited understanding, that the way He is doing things is not always the most sensible way. This, by the way, should encourage all Christians who know they have experienced Christ inside them but cannot shake off the niggling doubts that seem to be impeding their faith. It is not so unnatural as it seems; although if too much doubt is at any time impeding our faith, we should certainly be wise to pray for some elucidation.
And this is where faith comes into the Christian faith - it is not merely something which all good scientists should scoff at - it is not that we are being asked to believe in something with no evidence for such a belief. No, we are being asked to trust God even in those times when it seems like everything around us is not making much sense. It could be a moment or period of suffering, or a moment or period of profoundly honest doubt. Either way, God says that if we remain faithful to the end, we will be blessed. Christ said that even the elect might be deceived by powerful things (Mark 13:22). He did not say this to convince us to carry on believing something that He knew was untrue; He said it because He knows the powers of deceit that the Bad One possesses - and He knows that our biggest struggle is not against material opposition, it is against the spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12).
Christ must have known that such a statement - about remaining faithful - would cause the sceptics to say, ‘Yes, but He would say that if he wanted you to carry on believing something that were not true’. He said it with full knowledge that those who believed His words, already had the Spirit inside of them and, therefore, already knew it were true. We trust God, not on a blind whim, but because we know Him, because He lives inside of us. Each of us knows Him uniquely and individually, but in Christendom, or in each individual church, you will see that we all know Him, observably know Him, in the same way that we can observe familial knowledge around the dinner table at Christmas time.
