Sign up for our
free e-newsletter

Send us your latest local news and events

Answering three common accusations

Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight outlines some responses to three common accusations made against the basis for Christian belief in Part Six of the Spreading the Good News series. 

Here I am going to show you why I think the listener is mistaken and show how the mistake of each preconception can be tackled to show the listener where he or she is in error.  It should be noted that all three accusations are an infraction of my ‘commutative clause’ that we discussed in part two of this series, but I think all three are worth explaining. 

1. The ‘comfort  blanket ’ accusation

Let us begin with the contention that Christianity simply offers comfort in the lives of many.  On the surface this may seem like a reasonable contention, but there is one fatal flaw that ruins it.  Why, if God has not really shown Himself to these Christians, do they continue to believe something that is so often embarrassing to the modern man?  Why do they believe something that many people think is untrue and are likely to ridicule them for such a belief?  Why do they set themselves up for bother on every corner they go? 

If it is claimed that they find all the persecution or ridicule a small price to pay compared with all the wonderful things God says in the Bible to encourage them, they will be equally shocked to find that God, far from stroking their ego, actually tells them that they are sinners; that any goodness they thought was theirs is really God kindled; and that every piece of knowledge and intellect that they possess is a gift from Him.  In contemporary circles, this would not be an obvious method that people would choose to feel good about themselves, thus I think if one can show not only that the belief is rational but that the purposes for having such a belief are noble to begin with, I think we will help the listener overcome the first hurdle.

(For more on this, see my article ‘Are All Religions Just Wish Fulfilment?’ – which can be found on my columns page)

2. The ‘brainwashing’ accusation

Now what of the second accusation - the accusation that the Christian faith is a mere brainwashing experience undertaken by powerfully convincing men and women, intent on removing intelligent thought from the equation in true Orwellian style?  Well it is a lie, and a significant misrepresentation of what the Christian faith is really offering.  Any accusations that the Christian has been ‘brainwashed’ fall flat for a very different reason.  To accuse someone of believing something because they have been brainwashed would involve a terrible double standard - in fact if the term ‘brainwashed’ is used simply to decree a distaste for information passed on in a certain way, then in many cases, every piece of knowledge would classify as a form of brainwashing.  If they can find no ulterior accusation against this particular kind of information sharing then why is learning about Christianity any worse than learning how to use the self-service car maintenance facilities in the garage forecourt?  No, clearly we have an absurdity - it is not information sharing to which they object it is the particular type of information sharing to which they object - in which case they must find something more than ‘brainwashing’ to object to, yet they never seem to be able to when you point out that ‘measure of information passed on’ needs some arbitration barrier.

In actual fact, nearly every piece of information in the vast nexus of transference is given and then processed in judgement with, and with analysis from, all the parts of the complete picture.  Thus, as the book of Proverbs constantly reaffirms, if we continue to enquire rationally, with our reason in tact, we shall know real values of judgement when it comes to our Christianity, the same as we know real values of judgement regarding all other types of information processed - therefore, whenever you hear someone objecting to ‘brainwashing’ ask them how they demarcate the distinction between ‘methods of communication’ and ‘good and bad information’ and you will almost always find that they do not know what they’re talking about or arguing against. 

3. The ‘being tricked’ accusation

And what of the third accusation, that Christians have been tricked into believing Christianity to be true?  This one is a little bit more complex and is going to take some sorting out.  There are, in this sense, two ways that someone can be tricked; one can be tricked into something that is bad or unbeneficial and tricked into something that is good and beneficial (sometimes with overlapping between the two).  Being conned out of £50 could be an example of the first.  Being tricked into going to the dentist when you have a bad tooth but a stubborn resistance is an example of the second.  But notice that the tricking itself is secondary to the outcome; that is, whatever the cause of the outcome, the outcome is still supported by its own empirical content.  It doesn’t really matter how your caring friend or parent got you to the dentist, if his or her intentions were noble, all that matters is that your fears have been allayed and your bad tooth is better. 

All sceptics who claim that Christians have been tricked in some way are usually using the proposed tricking itself as a pretext for denial.  They do not really know how this proposed trick is supposed to work; they presume it has an effect on Christian believers. 

Let me offer you an illustration to show more clearly what I mean.  Suppose that two men, we shall call them A and B, are being interviewed for a lecturing position at Oxford University.  Suppose further that A has a personal feeling based upon evidence for the following compound proposition:  B is the one who the University is going to employ, and B has some dirt on the shoulder of his suit jacket.  A had inferred from the rapport between the interviewer and B that he was second favourite for the position.  A is faced with the first proposition that B will get the job (call it proposition X) and thus, a second proposition - the person who is about to get the job has a dirty mark on his shoulder (call it proposition Y).  A could wrongly infer that his supposition was a subject-predicate fact, or he could, as he very obviously should, keep the two separate until further conclusions were reached. 

Now let us suppose that A has been mistaken about the first fact all along, that in fact, his interpretation of B’s relationship with the interviewer was flawed, and that actually A himself was about to be offered the job.  Also unknown to A was that his suit jacket has a similar, in fact more noticeable dirty mark than B’s.  Here we see a simple example of how the second proposition (proposition Y) is still accurate even though the first proposition from which it was inferred is inaccurate.  A is justified in thinking what he thinks based upon his observations and perceptions, but genuine belief in something does not necessarily tell us knowledge of the facts. 

It is quite easy to see from this one illustration that the truth and falsity of religious belief is dependent upon facts, not perceptions - for misperception will lead us into all sorts of corners, even if reason is stimulating it at every step of the way.  So how then do we know when we are right?  Well, one must follow the ‘axiom’ formula; that is to say, we can know something is right if, say, T = truth is correct; A believes T only if T were true.  If T proves itself to be incorrect then A abandons his thoughts of T = truth.  This is an example of what St Paul was referring to when he said that our faith is futile if the resurrection never happened (1 Corinthians 15:14).  In the same way, A did not know about the dirt on his own jacket, only that of his counterpart’s, so X in this formula was never truth, it was only perceived as being true.  We must get in all the facts before we establish what is true; that is why subjunctive knowledge only really tells us about perceptual things, not about truth itself.  It is, of course, useful in providing enquiries; in adjacent and subjacent cause analyses, but by itself they tell us nothing about absolute truths.  The accusation that we have been tricked fails because of this.

(For more on this see my article ‘Is Christianity Just a Trick of The Mind’ – which can be found on my columns page)

Staying on course

Contemporary atheists are under the impression that Christianity should move with the times, but they do not really know what they say; for in fact, Christianity has survived the times better than anything else - it has outlived the thoughts of all its detractors.  The core is still there, despite some peripheral changes.  And we can see with this, as with other things, a man’s desire for something to be untrue, if at all abstract, can lead him into a comfort zone that no amount of persuasion will remove.  And it is quite easy to see how so many people are, in this day and age, confused about ultimate realities.  Human cognition is largely abstract, particularly at the period of time when the non-mechanistic types of thoughts are occurring.  It is no wonder that the very idea of truth and falsehood contains within it an abstraction that is scarcely recognisable beyond the present moment, particularly when so many people fail to find the right balance between right brain and left brain approach (something often discussed on Network Norwich threads). 

Both knowing God and not knowing God are only explainable by the emotions that they produce, but certainly it does mean that the person who knows God can claim an experience beyond that of he who does not know God.  And notice that when the sceptic claims it is just the mind playing tricks on you, he fails to realise the same instances occurring within his own mind.  When he experiences, say, jealousy for example, he can only relate that feeling to the instance which is causing jealousy to occur.  We are not dealing with a certain reality; only an emotion that exemplifies a certain past feeling.  And this type of dilemma usually presents itself with other things as well.  If we pine for another person, we do not, at the precise moment of pining, have full access to other emotions regarding that person.  If we locate the access to other emotions, we can no longer, at that present moment, pine for her. 

And because our mere feeling happens to take sinuous twist and turns, we find that the present moment is usually quite opaque.  We can lack a type of knowledge by being inside it as well as outside of it.  After all, nobody really knows the true pleasure of being in love while they are thinking about the state of being in love.  Often the clearer our thinking becomes, the further we are away from the thing we are thinking about. 

So how does all this fit in with the doctrine of Christianity? 

It is helpful for us to notice that much of our thoughts about Christianity work in the same way.  God tells us that we need to repent and turn to Christ, but we cannot really think properly about self-surrender while we are most in need of it.  After all, we usually feel such a need when we are experiencing something else, or when our true feelings are focused on a different issue.  At no point can you really know about your desire for God unless you start analysing the desire in times when its identity is not clouded by other things.  And we find that these times are not usually the times when our own epistemic longings are most obvious to us.  And if your mind tells you that all the historicity is inaccurate or that the Bible is simply mythology, then you might not, straight away, feel the need to continue analysing your innate desire to know Him. 

So we continue enjoying our negative hypotheses because it is then that we come closest to experiencing something we regard as true by making an abstraction of what must naturally be, in our minds, false.  You may reply here that you never attached any meaning to things that your brain thought were false, but you should remember that you were never, in the past, looking for something you thought false to be true.  You may have once wished that a woman’s feelings for you were as strong as yours were for her, but you never wished that a feeling you had was in any way different from what it was.  Do not misunderstand me here - you may, if she did not requite your love, wish that you did not have such strong feelings for her, but you did not, at any point, wish that the emotion of ‘feeling love’ was any different to what it was.  You cannot allegorise something so true to your own self.  What you were feeling was, in fact, something that occurs in all men and women, and has done throughout much of the recent history of time. 

The moment we admit this, we are admitting to certain principles of which we cannot in any way make abstractions.  It is only when we experience the feeling, the hunger, that we know all thoughts about its existence are perfectly valid.  What occurs in our minds is not truth but reality (truth is always a thing that pertains to something axiomatic, whereas reality is the very thing of which truth and falsehood are both parts).  Therefore every time a man thinks that his desire for God is about something else (he cannot think the ‘desire’ itself is not real), he could quite easily see that this type of mistaken identity can quite often be attached to some different truth on some very different level; just as when we are hungrily waiting for a meal in a restaurant we have the irrationality of wishing the chef would cook it quicker but know really that the wait is very necessary if he is to cook it properly. 

To put it a different way, illogical thought (when it is attached to a desire) is simply the feeling which connects rational thought to a momentarily unobtainable fact; that is, what would be known under rational thinking becomes unobtainable due to error.  And it is quite easy to see that until a man fully understands the face of his own thinking, he will be no closer to knowing Christ.  That is why the Devil likes lazy-thinkers, because they spend their lives living ‘everyday’ lives, living life for the things that are in front of them and little else.

Regarding the above, to be a true Christian we must do two things; 1) assent to that which is ultimately true of our very existence and 2) we must, through recognition, receive into our cognisance that which is part of God’s plan for us.  And periodically we find many men trying hard to do the first thing without any belief for the second.  We would do well to show our sceptical friends that the first cannot be accomplished without the second any more than a man can get fit without exercising. 

When faced with a man that thinks any of the following; 1) that you are merely a comfort seeker who has no respect for true and false analysis; 2) that you have been brainwashed; or 3) that you have been tricked into believing what you do - I should like to say it might seem like you are up against it - particularly bearing in mind that a great many atheists with whom you discuss the good news will probably be of the opinion that one or more of the above applies to you.  But this is where recognition of the problem also provides the solution, for as soon as you can point out the infelicity in all three of these objections (as I have just done in this message) you will hopefully do three things: 1) help your interlocutor snap out of his initial mistaken position, 2) cause him to question his initial premise a bit more carefully, and 3) help him see that how important is to avoid hastiness and presuppositions before a proper assessment has been made. 

Next week we look at how all this ties in with the political and sociological aspects of ministry.

Email me when someone replies to this topic.