Hi Matthew. Perhaps you will get a notification for this but I don't expect you to respond. Yours was a great Spirit filled response to Tim. (Matt 11:25 comes to mind) Here's the line that jumped at me: " it's easier to come to faith young." I wonder if you could have written what you wrote to Tim having not been through your "great personal trial"- perhaps born again? (John 3:3 is essential) Think of Saul/Paul- coming to faith later in life ESPECIALLY when he had "much life and pain and as many intellectual defenses getting in the way" Our Father molded Paul to be what he became as it appears He is with you.
just reading this and i also see that your friend Tim passed away. i too hope he rediscovered the mystery and peace of faith in Christ and is with his Maker now. good on you Matt for encouraging him.
I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think? -Andrew Sullivan, author and editor (b. 10 Aug 1963)
I struggle with my faith, mainly doubting that I don't have what it takes. I'm not perfect by a long shot and don't feel like I'm doing what's needed to address my short comings to grow closer to my god. It is good to hear about doubt from others. It gives me the boost I constantly need to stay in there pitching.
Hey, Matt, another thoughtful and thought provoking piece; thank you. For what its worth, I believe that God has the final say on this belief business and when the question gets asked and answered. Not up to me, no matter what the Good Book or anyone else may say. To think any of us can know the mind of God is such human folly. And I wonder sometimes if some people haven’t been walking side by side with the Son himself without knowing His name. That must count for something, if not the whole deal. So, while I took all the required steps, said all the right words, try to do all the right things, I cannot see myself as any different than so many folks struggling to get through this life.
Why believe things for which we have no compelling evidence? The Pascalian argument falls flat on its face. If there is a god and if this god would judge your worth on whether or not you accept his existence on blind faith, why would or should you care? Fear?
In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son, fear is the heart of love, " so I never went back
--- Benjamin Gibbard
The problem when we first accept a proposition without strong evidence is that it becomes easier to accept the next proposition without evidence. When these propositions are ones that we are already predisposed to believe it becomes easier still. At the bottom of that hill lie the ruins of Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany.
Nothing is as consequential as what we are willing to accept as true.
So Gibbard ran into a vicious nun. It happens. (I'm a Prot, btw, so I don't have much use for vicious nuns, either.) And fair enough on your quibbles. But I'll trade you the Death Cab For Cutie quote and the moral certitude of rejecting all uncertainty out of hand, for this one by Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics. This is from his address to the National Academy of Sciences. And it isn't a theological discussion, mind you. It's discussion of science itself:
"The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of uncertainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none ABSOLUTELY certain. Now we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure—that it is possible to live and NOT know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes that this is true."
It is interesting that you quote Feynman but somehow miss its reach. Feynman was embracing the fact that every instance of knowledge includes an envelope of uncertainty. This does not mean that every instance of knowledge has equal value, much less that every claim that can be made meets the bar of being knowledge at all.
Feynman was speaking of physical reality. Everything we (scientists) say we know is supported by evidence. But that evidence is discovered and tested within a certain set of parameters. For instance Newton famously noted that F=ma (Force = mass x acceleration) and this held up pretty well for several hundred years until Einstein said (if you'll pardon the impertinence), "not so fast." At terrestrial speeds Newton's Second Law holds up. At something approaching the speed of light it isn't remotely close.
I won't go spend time going into Popperian falsifiability as your readers' eyes may already be glazing over but the point is that Newton's Second Law was only accepted even provisionally (and all scientific knowledge is considered provisional) because it held up robustly to empirical challenges and adequately predicted the behavior of massive objects <i>under conditions commonly encountered* at that time</i>.
The proposal of the existence of one or more gods does not pass this first bar. There is no empirically demonstrable evidence that they or it exists, therefore there is nothing to test, no predictions to verify. There are no error bars to calculate or estimate. In logical terms it means that the existence of gods is not a hypothesis, it is a speculation. And if you will believe this speculation why not another one?
I am an atheist. I am not certain that there are no gods. I am certain that I have yet to see a testable hypothesis supporting their existence. You may embrace the Abrahamic god. Someone else may embrace Shinto kami and someone else the Zulu Unkulunkulu. How do you judge which of you - if any - is correct? If convincing evidence emerges that Unkulunkulu created the world, I will re-evaluate my position. Until then it is just as likely that the Hindu world-bearing turtle is equally as untrue.
Uncertainty falls on a scale. The absolute speed of light (as one example) is on one end of that scale and ghouls and goblins, angels and gods at the other. Propositions on one side of the scale we accept provisionally, propositions on the other we reject provisionally.
Wrapping this up, Feynman also said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." Don't just believe things. It is too easy to hear what you want to hear. Accept only those things for which there is robust evidence and always with the understanding that absolute certainty is an illusion.
Okay, I'm back. Sorry I didn't save you any Korean beef bowl. I have two growing boys who clean their plates before I can set them down. (Monsters.) I defer to your scientific bona fides, and will not attempt to undo you in that department. But I do think you're misreading my reading of Feynman. He had a lot of interesting things to say about faith and men of science. Here's a nice deep dive on it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/11/richard-feynman-science-religion/ But I would raise two minor objections. First, this "evidence" you speak of is often subjective. As in, the very "evidence" that people of faith point to while saying: "There has to be a divine architect to all these million happy accidents" relies on the same reality surrounding us that atheists often discount as evidence at all. I.E., we're here. And having abstract discussions about a material world. And we're having them on on a modern miracle like the internet, which didn't exist at all a few decades ago, but which now we take as our birthright, and which we inhale as un-self-consciously as we do oxygen. Science absolutists - i.e., those who think there is nothing more to the world than the immediately observable - are willing to accept a million happy accidents, without accepting any divine architect. Which is fair, from a pure scientific observational basis. Except for one problem. If I see a car in front of me, I assume there is a car manufacturer behind the car. Not so, with all the rest of creation in atheism's case. As it is often said, both believers and atheists are people of faith. It's just believers have faith in God - whatever God may be - and nonbelievers have faith in processes they can't explain the origins of. In other words, we both have a lot of explaining to do, and can't, from a pure scientific purview. Second, people who only place faith in "the natural" and disallow all supernatural considerations (which by definition, even if supernatural stories are just fables we tell ourselves, exist outside of observable nature) still have to reckon with the fact that over and over again throughout recorded history, things that were accepted as immutable scientific laws were later shown to be fables we told ourselves, too. Maybe there is no such thing as an infallible God. But "science" certainly isn't even a close stand-in. That's what Feynman gets at: science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it. It is the very definition of seeing through a glass darkly, to pinch the biblical phrase. As I've written elsewhere, and I'm ripping myself off now: As Lewis Thomas, the physician, scientist, and poet, wrote in Discover: “Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”
And as I've also written elsewhere: "As the Science Channel recently detailed, if you believed in the science of the day as an ancient Greek, you were convinced that the liver circulated blood, instead of the heart, while also believing that the heart circulated 'vital spirit.' Similarly, it took Copernicus and nearly 1,400 years after the un-fact to disabuse 'science' of the second-century astronomer Ptolemy’s assertion that Earth is the center of the solar system. And even as late as the 19th century, doctors felt that washing their hands was unnecessary before surgery, since contagions were attributable to 'bad air' and disease was a result of the imbalances of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.) All of which is to say if you were a science-absolutist of the day, back in that day, you’d have a bit of yellow bile on your face now. And that’s just a small taste. You can say the same of everything from Maternal Impression (the belief that mothers’ thoughts create birth defects) to Spontaneous Generation to phrenology to Hollow Earth Theory."
So where on the "scale of uncertainty," as you put it, did all that fall? And how certain should we be of the uncertainty that everything from the plays of Shakespeare to the music of Otis Redding to the sublime poetry of Auden merely exist because of a big inexplicable explosion or cells emerging from the primordial soup, whatever that consisted of, and wherever the soup came from...... I think the difference between us is that I allow that my "religion" could be a delusion. I.E., I could be wrong! Even if I've chosen to believe in it. Whereas you keep putting absolute faith in your religion - science - even if your religion has proven faulty time and again. According to the scientific method itself, science is bad religion. You keep asking us to put faith in answers that are never the final answer, as though what is only testable through limited human understanding could be the only reality and final authority that exists. (Natural vs. supernatural.) None of which really explains the spirit or the soul, if those things do in fact exist (I'm pretty sure "soul music," which I love, is speaking to something other than the Popperian falisfiability in us. Tell me if they find a way to test what makes Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me" connect to the deepest part within.) I'm not saying that all science is wrong. Science is a gift. The best microscope we have. I'm just saying that it's consistently amended often enough to prove to be as faith-based, in many respects, as religion, leaving just as many questions unanswered. Certainly, all the big ones.
Not that I'm anti-science. I love science. (So long as I'm not getting tested on it in a classroom situation.) And I'm double vaxxed, and don't burn Anthony Fauci in effigy in my backyard, you'll be pleased to know. Science is the best photograph of reality we often have. Even if it's a smudgy Polaroid. It is an answer. But I'm not convinced it's The Answer. Not by itself.
Again, it is a successive approximation engine, two steps forward, one step back. And that is why your assertion here misses the mark so widely: <blockquote>if you believed in the science of the day as an ancient Greek, you were convinced that the liver circulated blood, instead of the heart, while also believing that the heart circulated 'vital spirit.' Similarly, it took Copernicus and nearly 1,400 years after the un-fact to disabuse 'science' of the second-century astronomer Ptolemy’s assertion that Earth is the center of the solar system. And even as late as the 19th century, doctors felt that washing their hands was unnecessary before surgery, since contagions were attributable to 'bad air' and disease was a result of the imbalances of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.) All of which is to say if you were a science-absolutist of the day, back in that day, you’d have a bit of yellow bile on your face now. </blockquote>
In the first place science as we understand it today did not exist at the time of Hippocrates and was only beginning to take shape at the time of Copernicus. In the second, how do you imagine that we ever moved on from humors and miasmas? Did a god whisper the truth to us? No. Science did that.
Which brings us back as I promised it would to your imagining that Feynman somehow despaired that "science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it." That display of limits is the very core of science, it is the hard edge of epistemology: this is what we know and this is what we don't. It isn't a bug it is a feature.
Matt, you can go through life holding belief and knowledge as having the same epistemic weight. That is how we justified witch trials and the ownership of other human beings. Drawing a sharp line between what we know and what we don't serves a couple of critical functions. First, you can't learn something without first recognizing that you don't know it. Second, while what we know is always provisional (because new information can always emerge) what we don't know is always purely speculative. Another way of saying that is that there is always a (generally) small bit of uncertainty about what we know, but a huge chasm of uncertainty in what we speculate.
"Whereas you keep putting absolute faith in your religion - science - even if your religion has proven faulty time and again."
No, faith is not a part of science. And again that faulty time and again part is specious. Science never lays claim to absolutes. Religions tend to be much less self-reflective that way. The object of science is ever improving granularity of our understanding of reality.
"None of which really explains the spirit or the soul, if those things do in fact exist"
You might read some of Daniel Dennett's work, to name just one doing interesting work on consciousness. But let me address your point in another way. Art does not explicate reality. Art explicates our place in reality and our relationships with our fellow man.
I was at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo a couple of months ago to see Michelangelo's three pietas. While there I wandered into another room and came face to face with Donatello's Magdalene. It's funny, the gallery with the three pieta was jammed (understandably, it is a remarkable exhibit) but I was alone with the Magdalene. I'd seen pictures of it but never the sculpture itself. I had imagined it smaller but it is life size. It brought quite literally tears to my eyes because it so powerfully communicated a sadness beyond words. It communicated nothing about physical reality but much about the human condition.
The same can be said for Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. I'm a particular fan of Tedeschi Trucks and Keb' Mo' and the late, great BB King (I flew home from Shanghai a few years ago to see King and Etta James perform near my home, but that is another story for another time).
All of this to say that physical reality is one thing and human feelings are another. Science can say quite a bit about all that shaped the human psyche but art speaks to how we experience it.
This has gotten very long and lacks the focus that I would have like to have brought to bear. I will summarize this by saying that my epistemology <i>believes</i> in nothing. There is that for which we have evidence and that for which we have none. All evidence is couched in a limited envelope of uncertainty and one of the functions of science is to shrink that envelope and improve our granular understanding. And finally one will never have all the answers and one will never have perfect certainty. One must look one's ignorance straight in the eye, confront it, shrink it where one can and understand it where one can't.
Hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to significantly shorten my rebuttal to your rebuttal to my rebuttal, or we could be running around this dog track until we’re both collecting Social Security. But a lot of what you’re saying, I’d submit, is a willful misreading and/or recasting into other words what I already said. Things that are not entirely in disagreement with what you’ve said. Or not to impute bad motives - maybe you just misunderstood. When I said evidence is subjective, I meant that what many people of faith take as the “evidence” that surrounds us everywhere (i.e., look around at our magnificent and mysterious surroundings) is evidence of an intelligence and an architect that people who are merely concerned with explications of the “granularity” you speak of often dismiss out of hand. (As you admit, even our first stirrings are still an unknown.) And whatever they can’t test, they often can’t consider the possibility of. I totally get that impulse, but it still discounts the fact that even knowing what we don’t know is often unknowable. (See my Martin Amis quote in one of the comments below when he was breaking in on my old atheist friend, Hitchens.)
And yes, we agree that those are the limits of science, and that the whole point of science is constantly pushing and testing these limits. A good thing. I wasn’t saying that as an attempt to discredit science’s utility, but to point out that the accepted science of the day frequently changes, and therefore scientific discoveries or outcomes often are, in practice, faith-based in the moment. As in, you have faith that this is the right answer, even when led to it by available evidence, until another scientist comes along and proves how wrong the scientist who preceded him was. And you dismiss my grafs on that with a wave of a hand, but as you surely well know, you don’t have to go back to Hippocrates or Copernicus for that to be so. Despite your insistence of today’s scientific rigor, it still happens all the time, constantly. If you read any health science at all, what we think we know seems to change about every five minutes., and is often in conflict with each other. Hell, I can’t even keep it straight. And this has been quantified, somewhat. See the Atlantic science writer David Freedman’s book, citing the work (it’s much cited) of Stanford’s John Ioannides (who I realize has become something of a COVID controversialist, but this was many years before we knew COVID existed.) He undertook the arduous tasks of studying the studies and found that two out of three times, it takes only a matter of months-to-a-few years, on average, until studies in well-respected peer-reviewed journals, are either fully refuted or need to be walked back.
In other words, hard-science-alone fetishists see their epistemological lines changing all the time, no matter how self-congratulatory they are for being pure, hard thinkers. Which often make them believers, of a sort, whether or not they want to admit it. They believe in what we “know” now, until we don’t. And then we think something else, based on new or newly discoverable evidence. It’s an answer key that is always changing. That does not get religionists off the hook for believing in an invisible God, I freely admit. And I wasn’t pretending it does. I’m merely pointing out that people who sit back smugly deriding people who believe in a deity, in favor of science and science only, also tend to be believers themselves. Even if what they believe in is nothing. As Bram Stoker wrote, “It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” Go a little more Big Picture with me for a second: You and I are still here, having an internet wankfest on a tiny marble in an infinite universe, and after many millennia, science , as much as we both might like science, still can’t explain why.
I guess I did go on a bit long. But one irrefutable scientific fact I think we can both forever stand by is that Tedeschi Trucks and Etta James are fantastic. You’re new here, but in a piece several months ago, I actually included a clip from Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks doing Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” with Warren Haynes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07rT1t2hkDU
I think we've reached the point of speaking past each other so I will leave yours as the last word other than noting that "what many people of faith take as the “evidence”" is or isn't evidence regardless of what people of faith or anyone else "takes" it as. Evidence, as I tried to point out earlier, is something that can be replicated and agreed upon by anyone with the requisite skills. Compare and contrast with Hitchens famous line: that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Apologies for my own delay. Dinner, friends dropped by, yadda, yadda.
"First, this "evidence" you speak of is often subjective."
No. Evidence is evidence, something that can be independently tested and verified by anyone with the requisite skills. You and I can't argue, for instance, about the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the earth. I can measure it. You can measure. Some person in Ulan Bator can measure it and we will all come to the same result.
"There has to be a divine architect to all these million happy accidents" relies on the same reality surrounding us that atheists often discount as evidence at all. I.E., we're here."
This is the logical error known as <i>argument from incredulity</i>. The proposition must be false because it contradicts one's personal expectations or beliefs, or is difficult to imagine. The arguer is stating that s/he lacks the education and/or imagination to recognize the validity of something. Many of those million happy accidents have been well explained by science. Those that haven't, haven't <i>yet</i>. It isn't that scientists don't accept the existence of a god it is that the evidence doesn't require one.
"nonbelievers have faith in processes they can't explain the origins of."
So it has always been as science works its way through the details of physical reality. A mere 500 years ago electricity was a product of the gods manifested by lightening bolts in the sky or a parlor trick where amber rods rubbed on wool could "magically" attract bits of paper. Today, you and I are conversing over (potentially) thousands of miles with each thought carried by electrical charges and pulses of light ... with absolutely no gods required.
Gods have always been the explanation for the inexplicable, the face, if you will, of ignorance. Science has not yet developed a bulletproof explanation of the first stirrings of life in the primordial ooze but we are very, very close. Tens of thousands of exquisitely trained researchers working in dozens of fields from molecular biology to biochemistry have slowly but inexorably peeled back the layers of ignorance and in so doing the realm of the gods has shrunk like a melting iceberg.
"Maybe there is no such thing as an infallible God. But "science" certainly isn't even a close stand-in. That's what Feynman gets at: science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it."
Oh no, Matt, I think you again misunderstand Feynman's point. I'll get back to this in a moment but this is a perfect time to examine the real issue here: epistemology. What we are talking about it is how we distinguish what we know from what we believe. I will argue that the scientific method is the most robust and productive epistemic engine ever devised. In short the scientific method is a successive approximation engine that in a rigorous, step-wise fashion, reduces our uncertainties about the shape and structure of reality. In many ways it is analogous to the "millions of happy accidents" that you invoked earlier, except that there is nothing accidental about the way that it works.
By way of brief recap, the scientific method generally follows the following pattern. Some phenomenon is observed and triggers a <i>conjecture</i> about how and why that phenomenon works as it does. The researcher then forms that conjecture into a <i>testable hypothesis</i>that invites experiments to <i>disprove</i> the hypothesis. This last is perhaps the most important concept that non-scientists fail to grasp. The point (and the usual result) of the experimental testing of a hypothesis is to prove it wrong. Remember Feyman's quote that the first principle is to not fool yourself? That is his layman's explication of this principle.
So we've seen something that sparked our interest, came up with a conjecture to explain it, developed a hypothesis that allows us to rigorously test it, tested it and found, oh sh!t, oh dear, the conjecture doesn't hold up. But rarely is this failure complete because the experimental attack often opens more doors than it closes. So the conjecture is modified, a new hypothesis developed, and a new set of experiments devised to test the revised hypothesis. Perhaps this time the experimental challenge fails to disprove the hypothesis. We have uncovered a new bit of information about reality!
Maybe.
Because now we publish our results in a peer-reviewed journal and invite others with similar expertise to review our work and, should they chose, replicate our experimental challenge or to demonstrate that our experiment failed to disclose a flaw for whatever reason, apply their experimental design and either disprove the hypothesis and (or) elucidate some new insight. It is a tortuous path.
Real science is not what one sees on TV. I know researchers who have spent their entire careers studying trypanosomes or oncogenic signaling pathways in the cancer genome and whose work on its own will never pierce the consciousness of the person sitting at home reading the Washington Post but has nonetheless opened huge understandings of formerly opaque details of physical reality.
Sorry Matt, I've written a reply but it is apparently too long and the comment engine won't accept it. I will try to find time today to edit it down to a smaller size. Can you tell me the word or character limit? I'm at a bit over 1700 words now.
You're an atheist? I'd have never guessed that. (Kidding.) I am deeply interested in this little exchange, even if I can say with 100 percent certainty that this age-old question won't be solved in the comments section of Slack Tide. And I don't want you to mistake my (temporary) silence as affirmation. Have to prepare dinner. Korean beef bowls, in case you're interested. If only I could just multiply loaves and fishes and be done with it, we could keep sparring without interruption. But will be back to you this evening after I'm done. Thanks for your thoughtful critique.....Always happy to cross swords with a cocked-fisted scientist. Helps me work out my latent aggression, as I hail from the Social Studies/English side of the pool. More later, after chores.......
"Have to prepare dinner. Korean beef bowls, in case you're interested."
One of my closest friends is second gen Korean. I'm in. What time's dinner ;-)
Looking forward to it, Matt. I love thoughtful exchanges because they help me to understand how others arrive at the places that they are and it helps me to examine my own positions critically. Enjoy the beef. Save me some of the kimchi.
Thanks so much to Matt for this column, for introducing Tom, and to all who have added to the discussion. Joyful, grateful bittersweet but overwhelmingly joyful tears. The world is a better place because of you all.
I feel like you could have done just as effectively without disrespecting women of a certain size. I like Tom after reading this, but I don’t care for your casual disregard of human dignity for 300-pound women.
I understand your concern. But I did say "with a goatee." If it's any consolation, I wouldn't be attracted to a 120-lb woman with a goatee either. Just my own personal hang-up.
Grace. His grace is always sufficient. No one is too too bad, evil, slack, uncaring, or otherwise too far gone to be beyond the reach of His grace. By the same token, no one is too good, nice, polite, caring, or sincere to not need this same grace. God, through his son Jesus Christ, loves us. Why He does is the real mystery.
Crisis of faith, periods of doubt, hardships of many kinds, sickness and death.. all part of our fallen human nature, and all truly painful, but His love for us is steadfast.
Thank you, keep this up and you'll be #5 on the list in not time!
I also liked the help in 'my unbelief'. I think we all struggle with doubt. For me, I've found doing works of service in the community has helped in my belief.
I love this piece Matt. Thanks so much. Like you, I was raised in the church, met my wife at church, and we're raising our kids through it. (Gotta drop my son off at church this afternoon for a kids' Bible study, in fact.) I even went to seminary.
But doubts creep in, and for each and every believer. Hey, even the Rolling Stones knew about Jesus' "moment of doubt and pain." Abraham doubted the Lord's power and grace. Moses had his moments. Elijah was pretty much suicidal, wondering why God had abandoned him. And these are the titans of the faith, right?
That's why, like you, Mark 9:24 is pretty much my favorite verse: It takes doubt seriously. It doesn't punish it, but in a way honors it. I've found such comfort in that little verse, usually overlooked, over the years. If the titans of the faith had their moments of doubt and pain (and even the Lord himself had some tough questions for his Father), then I feel much better about my immense imperfections.
Great minds think alike Matt... That Tennyson reference is great too. I actually have my copy of In Memoriam A.H.H. right next to me on my desk as I type, as I've been reading through it (verrrry slowly) in my free time. I'm only on Canto 70, so I skipped ahead. But I appreciate that reference.
Tom's lack of faith is really honest, and I respect that, very much. Disagree? Yeah, but I see where he's coming from. And needless to say Tom (if you're reading the comments), I'll pray for you and your family.
Good stuff, Matt. I have been following the Lord for almost 5 decades and never really come across a satisfactory answer to the issue of doubt. I'm guessing every believer with the willingness to look inside honestly has uttered those words..."help my unbelief." Jesus wasn't here long, and we have 4 fairly small accounts of His time here. Pinch the pages of the 4 Gospels together and it barely makes the size of a Jim Harrison novella...and 3 of the 4 are somewhat repetitive. So, I've always thought that if the writers put something in their brief record of His time, travels and sayings we should realize His Spirit inspired them to put it there for a very good reason....so that we would know, He understands.
Yessir. And think of it less like repetition, more like corroboration. I too, am a Harrison fan. The NYT asked him once what book had formed him most. And this was his answer:
"The King James Version of the Bible. Also the works of Dostoyevsky. I read the Bible over and over in my youth, and the Judeo-Christian sensibility focused the world for me, for better or worse. Now, at my advanced age, I wonder how we are taught to believe something, but then we fail to learn how not to believe it. I find that I still believe in the Resurrection, though I improved it somewhat in a poem:
In the forty days in the wilderness Jesus
took along a stray dog from town. When
they got back home Jesus told the dog he
had to go off to Jerusalem to get crucified.
Jesus stored the dog in his tomb and after
he himself was brought there they
ascended into heaven together."
Don't ask me what it means. But as a dog guy, I'll allow it......
"I wonder how we are taught to believe something, but then we fail to learn how not to believe it."
I liked this the first time I read it but had to think about it a while before I got it (I think I got it anyway). Yes.
The older I get, the more I learn that "the right way" wears many different faces. It takes experience and questioning and doubting and thoughtfulness and patience to see how this can be. I have learned to wonder, "How can that be right?" and so be slower to judge.
Hi Matthew. Perhaps you will get a notification for this but I don't expect you to respond. Yours was a great Spirit filled response to Tim. (Matt 11:25 comes to mind) Here's the line that jumped at me: " it's easier to come to faith young." I wonder if you could have written what you wrote to Tim having not been through your "great personal trial"- perhaps born again? (John 3:3 is essential) Think of Saul/Paul- coming to faith later in life ESPECIALLY when he had "much life and pain and as many intellectual defenses getting in the way" Our Father molded Paul to be what he became as it appears He is with you.
just reading this and i also see that your friend Tim passed away. i too hope he rediscovered the mystery and peace of faith in Christ and is with his Maker now. good on you Matt for encouraging him.
Beautiful essay, Matt! You might be interested in the French/American radical Peter Maurin: http://www.easyessays.org/
This is the column that compelled me to subscribe. Although I've enjoyed your fishing missives as well.
This aperçu seems relevant.
I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think? -Andrew Sullivan, author and editor (b. 10 Aug 1963)
This is beautiful!
Jim Treacher says you are a better writer than he is. Today you proved it.
Thank you.
(P.S. I know the Graeter’s black raspberry chip that Tom loves so much. Hope you get the chance to try it one day.)
Thanks, Julin. Jim's an old and good friend, but way too modest - he is a very fine writer.
I struggle with my faith, mainly doubting that I don't have what it takes. I'm not perfect by a long shot and don't feel like I'm doing what's needed to address my short comings to grow closer to my god. It is good to hear about doubt from others. It gives me the boost I constantly need to stay in there pitching.
As someone who is also "between drinks" and a non-agnostic participant in my life long 12 step enlightenment, thank you for sharing your friendship.
Hey, Matt, another thoughtful and thought provoking piece; thank you. For what its worth, I believe that God has the final say on this belief business and when the question gets asked and answered. Not up to me, no matter what the Good Book or anyone else may say. To think any of us can know the mind of God is such human folly. And I wonder sometimes if some people haven’t been walking side by side with the Son himself without knowing His name. That must count for something, if not the whole deal. So, while I took all the required steps, said all the right words, try to do all the right things, I cannot see myself as any different than so many folks struggling to get through this life.
Why believe things for which we have no compelling evidence? The Pascalian argument falls flat on its face. If there is a god and if this god would judge your worth on whether or not you accept his existence on blind faith, why would or should you care? Fear?
In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son, fear is the heart of love, " so I never went back
--- Benjamin Gibbard
The problem when we first accept a proposition without strong evidence is that it becomes easier to accept the next proposition without evidence. When these propositions are ones that we are already predisposed to believe it becomes easier still. At the bottom of that hill lie the ruins of Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany.
Nothing is as consequential as what we are willing to accept as true.
So Gibbard ran into a vicious nun. It happens. (I'm a Prot, btw, so I don't have much use for vicious nuns, either.) And fair enough on your quibbles. But I'll trade you the Death Cab For Cutie quote and the moral certitude of rejecting all uncertainty out of hand, for this one by Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics. This is from his address to the National Academy of Sciences. And it isn't a theological discussion, mind you. It's discussion of science itself:
"The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of uncertainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none ABSOLUTELY certain. Now we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure—that it is possible to live and NOT know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes that this is true."
It is interesting that you quote Feynman but somehow miss its reach. Feynman was embracing the fact that every instance of knowledge includes an envelope of uncertainty. This does not mean that every instance of knowledge has equal value, much less that every claim that can be made meets the bar of being knowledge at all.
Feynman was speaking of physical reality. Everything we (scientists) say we know is supported by evidence. But that evidence is discovered and tested within a certain set of parameters. For instance Newton famously noted that F=ma (Force = mass x acceleration) and this held up pretty well for several hundred years until Einstein said (if you'll pardon the impertinence), "not so fast." At terrestrial speeds Newton's Second Law holds up. At something approaching the speed of light it isn't remotely close.
I won't go spend time going into Popperian falsifiability as your readers' eyes may already be glazing over but the point is that Newton's Second Law was only accepted even provisionally (and all scientific knowledge is considered provisional) because it held up robustly to empirical challenges and adequately predicted the behavior of massive objects <i>under conditions commonly encountered* at that time</i>.
The proposal of the existence of one or more gods does not pass this first bar. There is no empirically demonstrable evidence that they or it exists, therefore there is nothing to test, no predictions to verify. There are no error bars to calculate or estimate. In logical terms it means that the existence of gods is not a hypothesis, it is a speculation. And if you will believe this speculation why not another one?
I am an atheist. I am not certain that there are no gods. I am certain that I have yet to see a testable hypothesis supporting their existence. You may embrace the Abrahamic god. Someone else may embrace Shinto kami and someone else the Zulu Unkulunkulu. How do you judge which of you - if any - is correct? If convincing evidence emerges that Unkulunkulu created the world, I will re-evaluate my position. Until then it is just as likely that the Hindu world-bearing turtle is equally as untrue.
Uncertainty falls on a scale. The absolute speed of light (as one example) is on one end of that scale and ghouls and goblins, angels and gods at the other. Propositions on one side of the scale we accept provisionally, propositions on the other we reject provisionally.
Wrapping this up, Feynman also said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." Don't just believe things. It is too easy to hear what you want to hear. Accept only those things for which there is robust evidence and always with the understanding that absolute certainty is an illusion.
Since the "like" symbol didn't work, consider this a big "like"
Since all religions can't be true, there are a lot of people living in an alternate reality.
Chances are that you believe in the religion of your postal code, so is that truth or chance?
Okay, I'm back. Sorry I didn't save you any Korean beef bowl. I have two growing boys who clean their plates before I can set them down. (Monsters.) I defer to your scientific bona fides, and will not attempt to undo you in that department. But I do think you're misreading my reading of Feynman. He had a lot of interesting things to say about faith and men of science. Here's a nice deep dive on it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/11/richard-feynman-science-religion/ But I would raise two minor objections. First, this "evidence" you speak of is often subjective. As in, the very "evidence" that people of faith point to while saying: "There has to be a divine architect to all these million happy accidents" relies on the same reality surrounding us that atheists often discount as evidence at all. I.E., we're here. And having abstract discussions about a material world. And we're having them on on a modern miracle like the internet, which didn't exist at all a few decades ago, but which now we take as our birthright, and which we inhale as un-self-consciously as we do oxygen. Science absolutists - i.e., those who think there is nothing more to the world than the immediately observable - are willing to accept a million happy accidents, without accepting any divine architect. Which is fair, from a pure scientific observational basis. Except for one problem. If I see a car in front of me, I assume there is a car manufacturer behind the car. Not so, with all the rest of creation in atheism's case. As it is often said, both believers and atheists are people of faith. It's just believers have faith in God - whatever God may be - and nonbelievers have faith in processes they can't explain the origins of. In other words, we both have a lot of explaining to do, and can't, from a pure scientific purview. Second, people who only place faith in "the natural" and disallow all supernatural considerations (which by definition, even if supernatural stories are just fables we tell ourselves, exist outside of observable nature) still have to reckon with the fact that over and over again throughout recorded history, things that were accepted as immutable scientific laws were later shown to be fables we told ourselves, too. Maybe there is no such thing as an infallible God. But "science" certainly isn't even a close stand-in. That's what Feynman gets at: science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it. It is the very definition of seeing through a glass darkly, to pinch the biblical phrase. As I've written elsewhere, and I'm ripping myself off now: As Lewis Thomas, the physician, scientist, and poet, wrote in Discover: “Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”
And as I've also written elsewhere: "As the Science Channel recently detailed, if you believed in the science of the day as an ancient Greek, you were convinced that the liver circulated blood, instead of the heart, while also believing that the heart circulated 'vital spirit.' Similarly, it took Copernicus and nearly 1,400 years after the un-fact to disabuse 'science' of the second-century astronomer Ptolemy’s assertion that Earth is the center of the solar system. And even as late as the 19th century, doctors felt that washing their hands was unnecessary before surgery, since contagions were attributable to 'bad air' and disease was a result of the imbalances of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.) All of which is to say if you were a science-absolutist of the day, back in that day, you’d have a bit of yellow bile on your face now. And that’s just a small taste. You can say the same of everything from Maternal Impression (the belief that mothers’ thoughts create birth defects) to Spontaneous Generation to phrenology to Hollow Earth Theory."
So where on the "scale of uncertainty," as you put it, did all that fall? And how certain should we be of the uncertainty that everything from the plays of Shakespeare to the music of Otis Redding to the sublime poetry of Auden merely exist because of a big inexplicable explosion or cells emerging from the primordial soup, whatever that consisted of, and wherever the soup came from...... I think the difference between us is that I allow that my "religion" could be a delusion. I.E., I could be wrong! Even if I've chosen to believe in it. Whereas you keep putting absolute faith in your religion - science - even if your religion has proven faulty time and again. According to the scientific method itself, science is bad religion. You keep asking us to put faith in answers that are never the final answer, as though what is only testable through limited human understanding could be the only reality and final authority that exists. (Natural vs. supernatural.) None of which really explains the spirit or the soul, if those things do in fact exist (I'm pretty sure "soul music," which I love, is speaking to something other than the Popperian falisfiability in us. Tell me if they find a way to test what makes Sam Cooke's "Bring It On Home To Me" connect to the deepest part within.) I'm not saying that all science is wrong. Science is a gift. The best microscope we have. I'm just saying that it's consistently amended often enough to prove to be as faith-based, in many respects, as religion, leaving just as many questions unanswered. Certainly, all the big ones.
Not that I'm anti-science. I love science. (So long as I'm not getting tested on it in a classroom situation.) And I'm double vaxxed, and don't burn Anthony Fauci in effigy in my backyard, you'll be pleased to know. Science is the best photograph of reality we often have. Even if it's a smudgy Polaroid. It is an answer. But I'm not convinced it's The Answer. Not by itself.
And part two:
Again, it is a successive approximation engine, two steps forward, one step back. And that is why your assertion here misses the mark so widely: <blockquote>if you believed in the science of the day as an ancient Greek, you were convinced that the liver circulated blood, instead of the heart, while also believing that the heart circulated 'vital spirit.' Similarly, it took Copernicus and nearly 1,400 years after the un-fact to disabuse 'science' of the second-century astronomer Ptolemy’s assertion that Earth is the center of the solar system. And even as late as the 19th century, doctors felt that washing their hands was unnecessary before surgery, since contagions were attributable to 'bad air' and disease was a result of the imbalances of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.) All of which is to say if you were a science-absolutist of the day, back in that day, you’d have a bit of yellow bile on your face now. </blockquote>
In the first place science as we understand it today did not exist at the time of Hippocrates and was only beginning to take shape at the time of Copernicus. In the second, how do you imagine that we ever moved on from humors and miasmas? Did a god whisper the truth to us? No. Science did that.
Which brings us back as I promised it would to your imagining that Feynman somehow despaired that "science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it." That display of limits is the very core of science, it is the hard edge of epistemology: this is what we know and this is what we don't. It isn't a bug it is a feature.
Matt, you can go through life holding belief and knowledge as having the same epistemic weight. That is how we justified witch trials and the ownership of other human beings. Drawing a sharp line between what we know and what we don't serves a couple of critical functions. First, you can't learn something without first recognizing that you don't know it. Second, while what we know is always provisional (because new information can always emerge) what we don't know is always purely speculative. Another way of saying that is that there is always a (generally) small bit of uncertainty about what we know, but a huge chasm of uncertainty in what we speculate.
"Whereas you keep putting absolute faith in your religion - science - even if your religion has proven faulty time and again."
No, faith is not a part of science. And again that faulty time and again part is specious. Science never lays claim to absolutes. Religions tend to be much less self-reflective that way. The object of science is ever improving granularity of our understanding of reality.
"None of which really explains the spirit or the soul, if those things do in fact exist"
You might read some of Daniel Dennett's work, to name just one doing interesting work on consciousness. But let me address your point in another way. Art does not explicate reality. Art explicates our place in reality and our relationships with our fellow man.
I was at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo a couple of months ago to see Michelangelo's three pietas. While there I wandered into another room and came face to face with Donatello's Magdalene. It's funny, the gallery with the three pieta was jammed (understandably, it is a remarkable exhibit) but I was alone with the Magdalene. I'd seen pictures of it but never the sculpture itself. I had imagined it smaller but it is life size. It brought quite literally tears to my eyes because it so powerfully communicated a sadness beyond words. It communicated nothing about physical reality but much about the human condition.
The same can be said for Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. I'm a particular fan of Tedeschi Trucks and Keb' Mo' and the late, great BB King (I flew home from Shanghai a few years ago to see King and Etta James perform near my home, but that is another story for another time).
All of this to say that physical reality is one thing and human feelings are another. Science can say quite a bit about all that shaped the human psyche but art speaks to how we experience it.
This has gotten very long and lacks the focus that I would have like to have brought to bear. I will summarize this by saying that my epistemology <i>believes</i> in nothing. There is that for which we have evidence and that for which we have none. All evidence is couched in a limited envelope of uncertainty and one of the functions of science is to shrink that envelope and improve our granular understanding. And finally one will never have all the answers and one will never have perfect certainty. One must look one's ignorance straight in the eye, confront it, shrink it where one can and understand it where one can't.
Hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to significantly shorten my rebuttal to your rebuttal to my rebuttal, or we could be running around this dog track until we’re both collecting Social Security. But a lot of what you’re saying, I’d submit, is a willful misreading and/or recasting into other words what I already said. Things that are not entirely in disagreement with what you’ve said. Or not to impute bad motives - maybe you just misunderstood. When I said evidence is subjective, I meant that what many people of faith take as the “evidence” that surrounds us everywhere (i.e., look around at our magnificent and mysterious surroundings) is evidence of an intelligence and an architect that people who are merely concerned with explications of the “granularity” you speak of often dismiss out of hand. (As you admit, even our first stirrings are still an unknown.) And whatever they can’t test, they often can’t consider the possibility of. I totally get that impulse, but it still discounts the fact that even knowing what we don’t know is often unknowable. (See my Martin Amis quote in one of the comments below when he was breaking in on my old atheist friend, Hitchens.)
And yes, we agree that those are the limits of science, and that the whole point of science is constantly pushing and testing these limits. A good thing. I wasn’t saying that as an attempt to discredit science’s utility, but to point out that the accepted science of the day frequently changes, and therefore scientific discoveries or outcomes often are, in practice, faith-based in the moment. As in, you have faith that this is the right answer, even when led to it by available evidence, until another scientist comes along and proves how wrong the scientist who preceded him was. And you dismiss my grafs on that with a wave of a hand, but as you surely well know, you don’t have to go back to Hippocrates or Copernicus for that to be so. Despite your insistence of today’s scientific rigor, it still happens all the time, constantly. If you read any health science at all, what we think we know seems to change about every five minutes., and is often in conflict with each other. Hell, I can’t even keep it straight. And this has been quantified, somewhat. See the Atlantic science writer David Freedman’s book, citing the work (it’s much cited) of Stanford’s John Ioannides (who I realize has become something of a COVID controversialist, but this was many years before we knew COVID existed.) He undertook the arduous tasks of studying the studies and found that two out of three times, it takes only a matter of months-to-a-few years, on average, until studies in well-respected peer-reviewed journals, are either fully refuted or need to be walked back.
In other words, hard-science-alone fetishists see their epistemological lines changing all the time, no matter how self-congratulatory they are for being pure, hard thinkers. Which often make them believers, of a sort, whether or not they want to admit it. They believe in what we “know” now, until we don’t. And then we think something else, based on new or newly discoverable evidence. It’s an answer key that is always changing. That does not get religionists off the hook for believing in an invisible God, I freely admit. And I wasn’t pretending it does. I’m merely pointing out that people who sit back smugly deriding people who believe in a deity, in favor of science and science only, also tend to be believers themselves. Even if what they believe in is nothing. As Bram Stoker wrote, “It is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” Go a little more Big Picture with me for a second: You and I are still here, having an internet wankfest on a tiny marble in an infinite universe, and after many millennia, science , as much as we both might like science, still can’t explain why.
I guess I did go on a bit long. But one irrefutable scientific fact I think we can both forever stand by is that Tedeschi Trucks and Etta James are fantastic. You’re new here, but in a piece several months ago, I actually included a clip from Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks doing Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” with Warren Haynes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07rT1t2hkDU
Loves me some Warren Haynes!
I think we've reached the point of speaking past each other so I will leave yours as the last word other than noting that "what many people of faith take as the “evidence”" is or isn't evidence regardless of what people of faith or anyone else "takes" it as. Evidence, as I tried to point out earlier, is something that can be replicated and agreed upon by anyone with the requisite skills. Compare and contrast with Hitchens famous line: that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Thanks for a great conversation.
Let's try this. I've clipped it into two entries:
Apologies for my own delay. Dinner, friends dropped by, yadda, yadda.
"First, this "evidence" you speak of is often subjective."
No. Evidence is evidence, something that can be independently tested and verified by anyone with the requisite skills. You and I can't argue, for instance, about the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the earth. I can measure it. You can measure. Some person in Ulan Bator can measure it and we will all come to the same result.
"There has to be a divine architect to all these million happy accidents" relies on the same reality surrounding us that atheists often discount as evidence at all. I.E., we're here."
This is the logical error known as <i>argument from incredulity</i>. The proposition must be false because it contradicts one's personal expectations or beliefs, or is difficult to imagine. The arguer is stating that s/he lacks the education and/or imagination to recognize the validity of something. Many of those million happy accidents have been well explained by science. Those that haven't, haven't <i>yet</i>. It isn't that scientists don't accept the existence of a god it is that the evidence doesn't require one.
"nonbelievers have faith in processes they can't explain the origins of."
So it has always been as science works its way through the details of physical reality. A mere 500 years ago electricity was a product of the gods manifested by lightening bolts in the sky or a parlor trick where amber rods rubbed on wool could "magically" attract bits of paper. Today, you and I are conversing over (potentially) thousands of miles with each thought carried by electrical charges and pulses of light ... with absolutely no gods required.
Gods have always been the explanation for the inexplicable, the face, if you will, of ignorance. Science has not yet developed a bulletproof explanation of the first stirrings of life in the primordial ooze but we are very, very close. Tens of thousands of exquisitely trained researchers working in dozens of fields from molecular biology to biochemistry have slowly but inexorably peeled back the layers of ignorance and in so doing the realm of the gods has shrunk like a melting iceberg.
"Maybe there is no such thing as an infallible God. But "science" certainly isn't even a close stand-in. That's what Feynman gets at: science is constantly showing the limits of its own understanding, or lack of it."
Oh no, Matt, I think you again misunderstand Feynman's point. I'll get back to this in a moment but this is a perfect time to examine the real issue here: epistemology. What we are talking about it is how we distinguish what we know from what we believe. I will argue that the scientific method is the most robust and productive epistemic engine ever devised. In short the scientific method is a successive approximation engine that in a rigorous, step-wise fashion, reduces our uncertainties about the shape and structure of reality. In many ways it is analogous to the "millions of happy accidents" that you invoked earlier, except that there is nothing accidental about the way that it works.
By way of brief recap, the scientific method generally follows the following pattern. Some phenomenon is observed and triggers a <i>conjecture</i> about how and why that phenomenon works as it does. The researcher then forms that conjecture into a <i>testable hypothesis</i>that invites experiments to <i>disprove</i> the hypothesis. This last is perhaps the most important concept that non-scientists fail to grasp. The point (and the usual result) of the experimental testing of a hypothesis is to prove it wrong. Remember Feyman's quote that the first principle is to not fool yourself? That is his layman's explication of this principle.
So we've seen something that sparked our interest, came up with a conjecture to explain it, developed a hypothesis that allows us to rigorously test it, tested it and found, oh sh!t, oh dear, the conjecture doesn't hold up. But rarely is this failure complete because the experimental attack often opens more doors than it closes. So the conjecture is modified, a new hypothesis developed, and a new set of experiments devised to test the revised hypothesis. Perhaps this time the experimental challenge fails to disprove the hypothesis. We have uncovered a new bit of information about reality!
Maybe.
Because now we publish our results in a peer-reviewed journal and invite others with similar expertise to review our work and, should they chose, replicate our experimental challenge or to demonstrate that our experiment failed to disclose a flaw for whatever reason, apply their experimental design and either disprove the hypothesis and (or) elucidate some new insight. It is a tortuous path.
Real science is not what one sees on TV. I know researchers who have spent their entire careers studying trypanosomes or oncogenic signaling pathways in the cancer genome and whose work on its own will never pierce the consciousness of the person sitting at home reading the Washington Post but has nonetheless opened huge understandings of formerly opaque details of physical reality.
To be continued...
Sorry Matt, I've written a reply but it is apparently too long and the comment engine won't accept it. I will try to find time today to edit it down to a smaller size. Can you tell me the word or character limit? I'm at a bit over 1700 words now.
You're an atheist? I'd have never guessed that. (Kidding.) I am deeply interested in this little exchange, even if I can say with 100 percent certainty that this age-old question won't be solved in the comments section of Slack Tide. And I don't want you to mistake my (temporary) silence as affirmation. Have to prepare dinner. Korean beef bowls, in case you're interested. If only I could just multiply loaves and fishes and be done with it, we could keep sparring without interruption. But will be back to you this evening after I'm done. Thanks for your thoughtful critique.....Always happy to cross swords with a cocked-fisted scientist. Helps me work out my latent aggression, as I hail from the Social Studies/English side of the pool. More later, after chores.......
"Have to prepare dinner. Korean beef bowls, in case you're interested."
One of my closest friends is second gen Korean. I'm in. What time's dinner ;-)
Looking forward to it, Matt. I love thoughtful exchanges because they help me to understand how others arrive at the places that they are and it helps me to examine my own positions critically. Enjoy the beef. Save me some of the kimchi.
Thanks so much to Matt for this column, for introducing Tom, and to all who have added to the discussion. Joyful, grateful bittersweet but overwhelmingly joyful tears. The world is a better place because of you all.
I feel like you could have done just as effectively without disrespecting women of a certain size. I like Tom after reading this, but I don’t care for your casual disregard of human dignity for 300-pound women.
I understand your concern. But I did say "with a goatee." If it's any consolation, I wouldn't be attracted to a 120-lb woman with a goatee either. Just my own personal hang-up.
Grace. His grace is always sufficient. No one is too too bad, evil, slack, uncaring, or otherwise too far gone to be beyond the reach of His grace. By the same token, no one is too good, nice, polite, caring, or sincere to not need this same grace. God, through his son Jesus Christ, loves us. Why He does is the real mystery.
Crisis of faith, periods of doubt, hardships of many kinds, sickness and death.. all part of our fallen human nature, and all truly painful, but His love for us is steadfast.
Matt,
Thank you, keep this up and you'll be #5 on the list in not time!
I also liked the help in 'my unbelief'. I think we all struggle with doubt. For me, I've found doing works of service in the community has helped in my belief.
Keep it up
I love this piece Matt. Thanks so much. Like you, I was raised in the church, met my wife at church, and we're raising our kids through it. (Gotta drop my son off at church this afternoon for a kids' Bible study, in fact.) I even went to seminary.
But doubts creep in, and for each and every believer. Hey, even the Rolling Stones knew about Jesus' "moment of doubt and pain." Abraham doubted the Lord's power and grace. Moses had his moments. Elijah was pretty much suicidal, wondering why God had abandoned him. And these are the titans of the faith, right?
That's why, like you, Mark 9:24 is pretty much my favorite verse: It takes doubt seriously. It doesn't punish it, but in a way honors it. I've found such comfort in that little verse, usually overlooked, over the years. If the titans of the faith had their moments of doubt and pain (and even the Lord himself had some tough questions for his Father), then I feel much better about my immense imperfections.
Great minds think alike Matt... That Tennyson reference is great too. I actually have my copy of In Memoriam A.H.H. right next to me on my desk as I type, as I've been reading through it (verrrry slowly) in my free time. I'm only on Canto 70, so I skipped ahead. But I appreciate that reference.
Tom's lack of faith is really honest, and I respect that, very much. Disagree? Yeah, but I see where he's coming from. And needless to say Tom (if you're reading the comments), I'll pray for you and your family.
Thanks again Matt.
See? Your seminary time served you well, Steve.
Good stuff, Matt. I have been following the Lord for almost 5 decades and never really come across a satisfactory answer to the issue of doubt. I'm guessing every believer with the willingness to look inside honestly has uttered those words..."help my unbelief." Jesus wasn't here long, and we have 4 fairly small accounts of His time here. Pinch the pages of the 4 Gospels together and it barely makes the size of a Jim Harrison novella...and 3 of the 4 are somewhat repetitive. So, I've always thought that if the writers put something in their brief record of His time, travels and sayings we should realize His Spirit inspired them to put it there for a very good reason....so that we would know, He understands.
Yessir. And think of it less like repetition, more like corroboration. I too, am a Harrison fan. The NYT asked him once what book had formed him most. And this was his answer:
"The King James Version of the Bible. Also the works of Dostoyevsky. I read the Bible over and over in my youth, and the Judeo-Christian sensibility focused the world for me, for better or worse. Now, at my advanced age, I wonder how we are taught to believe something, but then we fail to learn how not to believe it. I find that I still believe in the Resurrection, though I improved it somewhat in a poem:
In the forty days in the wilderness Jesus
took along a stray dog from town. When
they got back home Jesus told the dog he
had to go off to Jerusalem to get crucified.
Jesus stored the dog in his tomb and after
he himself was brought there they
ascended into heaven together."
Don't ask me what it means. But as a dog guy, I'll allow it......
"I wonder how we are taught to believe something, but then we fail to learn how not to believe it."
I liked this the first time I read it but had to think about it a while before I got it (I think I got it anyway). Yes.
The older I get, the more I learn that "the right way" wears many different faces. It takes experience and questioning and doubting and thoughtfulness and patience to see how this can be. I have learned to wonder, "How can that be right?" and so be slower to judge.
Thanks so much for this piece.