Searching for God
In this post I want to explore a very specific objection: is it delusional to believe in God on the basis of personal experience?
First, what does it feel like to have personal experience of God?
This experience may vary widely, but I think the internal thought process goes something like this:
Imagine overhearing someone say:
“I love my unicorn Billy. He is the best imaginary friend! He always encourages me when I’m feeling down and he makes the rainbow shine so bright. Billy is the best unicorn friend ever!”
Clearly, this is a delusional set of beliefs and it sounds simply crazy. Why? Because Billy the Unicorn does not exist. Unicorns in general do not exist. Neither do Flying Spaghetti Monsters. As Richard Dawkins explains:
Earlier this week a student at Harvard asked a great question in a small group meeting: How should a nihilist behave? When asked for the context, he said he had just had lunch with another student, who had proudly proclaimed his dedication to nihilism. The summary of the other student’s position? “There’s no purpose, no meaning, no morality, no God: I can do what I want to do and that sounds great!”
As the group processed the question of this rough-and-ready nihilism, we all agreed: if you are a true nihilist, it is foolish to announce this to the world. Everyone felt that they would be far less likely to trust someone who was so proudly selfish and fundamentally unconcerned about basic claims of morality. If your nihilism is a means of justifying selfishness, you’d do best to keep that to yourself. If nihilism is true, what’s the problem with shrewdly deceiving others and manipulating them to do your bidding?
One of the common attacks on the reliability of the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, is the idea that “people back then were a lot more gullible about things like miracles and people rising from the dead.”
A commenter on a BBC internet thread put it like this, “Were the disciples just gullible? Aren’t the followers of all religious leaders?”
Or as Rudolph Bultmann offered, in regards to our own comparative enlightenment,
It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.
So that is our question: were the disciples of Jesus gullible?
The following is the transcript of a talk given at Church of the Cross during the “Dealing with Doubts” series on August 19, 2012.
Today we are going to look at perhaps the most difficult question that any human can face: the problem of evil and suffering. The problem of pain.
This is a problem that everyone has to resolve. Christians agonize over how to think about the recent shootings in Aurora, CO and the wildfires that swept the state and affected Colorado Springs. This past week, my wife and I have had to wrestle with this question due to some painful injustices we have experienced in regards to our housing situation.
One of the most honest and heart-wrenching objections to Christianity that I’ve ever heard goes like this:
“I would absolutely love to believe that Christianity is true. The idea that I am unconditionally loved, that I will live forever in paradise after death, that an all-powerful God will hear my prayers, that someone good is looking after me, and all the rest… I would love to believe that message is true. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. It sounds like wishful thinking, and I’m too realistic for that.”
The other night, while I was at an outdoor cookout, I got into a very interesting conversation with a friend of a friend. Her outlook on life was quite different from my own, which led me to ask a number of questions to better understand where she was coming from, how she saw life, and what was important to her.
Overall, we were having an engaging, lively conversation about a wide array of topics.
Does moral relativism make sense? Are all ethical theories equally good and deserving of our respect? Can a moral code be wrong? Should we always tolerate people and cultures who have different moral standards than we do?
One way of examining these questions is to compare two very different versions of the Ten Commandments. We will look at Richard Dawkins’ version and then the Ten Laws of Camp 14 in North Korea. And finally, we will consider the legitimacy of moral relativism in light of these contrasting systems of morality.
About a year ago while I was at Harvard, talking with one of the students I regularly mentored, it happened that two of his friends walked by and stopped to say hello. We began to talk about their perspective on life and it quickly became clear that they were staunch atheists with a strong aversion to Christianity. Out of curiosity I asked them, “So, what’s your biggest objection to Christianity?” One of them immediately responded, “Your god commanded the genocide of the Canaanites. How can you worship a god like that?”
The following talk was given at Boston College Law School on March 19th, 2012, through a partnership between the Christian Legal Society and Telos Ministries. We are grateful for the partial funding provided for the event by Tactical Faith!