Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Chapter 1 EVIDENCE BASED FAITH
Bertrand Russell
"I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this:
that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it is true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system."
"The room is filled with four foot tall Skrinchen," my philosophy professor asserted. "They are," Dr. Jim Spicer told his freshman students, "invisible and without mass and they are visible only to me." Dr. Spicer introduced me at the age of 18 to the concept of an a priori truth claim that could not be verified by any external evidence nor could the claim be subjected to any sort of test. Though there was no way to prove that the room was not full of Skrinchen, there was also no particular reason to believe that he was telling the truth.
Still, I knew that I would be foolish to believe that I was surrounded by these invisible beings. It would take me another decade to have the courage to apply this same conclusion to what I had been told by my Sunday School teachers about angels, demons, a talking snake and so much more. After years of trying to teach philosophy and religion to my own college students, I recognize the difficulty in trying to explain how a story can convey important life principles while not being either literally or historically factual.
We believe much of what we believe because our family, community, church or nation has passed along those beliefs and we would be out of sync with our world if we did not also go along. In matters such as putting the fork on the left hand side of the plate, shaking hands with our right hands or standing for the national anthem it is just easier to go along than to demand a persuasive explanation. But when it comes to being told that, for example, being a homosexual is a sin worthy of eternal punishment, or women cannot be leaders in faith communities, or that you must belong to one certain sect of one certain religion or become anathema to the Almighty Creator of the universe, then some critical thinking is called for.
The famous philosophical maxim known as Occam's Razor is often mistakenly used to imply that the most simple answer is likely to be the right answer. What Occam's Razor actually says is that the solution requiring the fewest number of unverifiable assumptions is the most likely answer. So, if I ask you if the room is full of Skrinchen and you consider that there is no detectable evidence for the presence of Skrinchen except for some facetious philosophy professor who asks you to assume that he is telling you the truth then the most obvious logical conclusion is that there are no Skrinchen present. While you could be wrong, there is no good reason to assume that you are not right.
This becomes rather more complex, however, when authority figures, your parents, your friends and classmates are all fairly united in telling you that there are Skrinchen in the room. Then you have to be more resolved in your application of critical thinking to avoid falling in line with the generally shared faith in Skrinchen.
Of course, belief or disbelief in the existence of Skrinchen does not affect how you will live your life. Assertions about heaven and hell, a final judgment, the nature of salvation, the definition of sin... these do matter. In fact, they may matter more than anything else in life and yet, for the most part, there is not much evidence to substantiate these supernatural claims and attempts at giving evidence often do not stand up to critical analysis.
A pastor I know told me about a friend of his who had visited a medium when he was a member of the occupation forces in Germany shortly after WWII. The medium had channeled the young soldier's deceased father. The spirit allegedly told the soldier about the existence of a half brother, even revealing the sibling's name and address. The soldier contacted the man and discovered that what the spirit had told him through the medium was true. "How," my friend asked me, "can you explain that if there is no life after death?"
So I asked, "What did the medium tell him on his second visit?" "Well," he replied, "he never went back again." "Really," I asked, "For a few dollars he got to speak to his deceased father, discovered a previously unknown brother and he never went back again?"
I'm not saying that paranormal events never take place. I can no more say that there are not angels or demons than I can prove that there are not Skrinchen hiding behind every tree and rock but if a truth claim is not repeatable or testable then we cannot rationally draw any conclusions from these reported angel sightings, ESP experiences or visions. The events may be very powerful or even life changing for the individual but their private experience remains just that: private. Maybe they are accurately describing an event or maybe their memories become embellished in the re-telling. As neurologists have reported in their research about memory, repeated re-telling of a story often erases actual memories and all that a person can remember is their elaborately embellished accounts. They are not lying about the memory. They are giving an honest account of their memory but the memory itself has become the fictional account.
This, of course, was the problem that Paul, the author and inspiration of much of the New Testament, faced when he sought to convert the people he encountered to the version of faith that was so important to him. He never met the living physical Jesus of Nazareth; he had to rely on his visions. Only those who were willing to suspend critical thinking could fully accept what he had to say. He had no more evidence to offer that Jesus was raised from the dead than Clement, the popular first century bishop of Rome, had for his insistence that the phoenix lived for 500 years and then was reborn from the decayed remains.
Like Paul, Clement tried to add weight to his claim by saying that the newly born phoenix would carry the bones of the recently deceased phoenix to a temple in Egypt where priests recorded the arrival of the bird with the bones and nest of his predecessor on the 500th anniversary of previous phoenix. Of course, there never was such a magical bird but Clement had news of it from sources he trusted and, this may be the more important part, he believed it because he wanted to believe it.
If you want to believe that God wrote the Bible, that you have a literal soul that lives forever (even if trees, birds and bees don't) then you can find reasons that support your belief: I prayed that it wouldn't rain on our picnic and it didn't rain.... Thank you Jesus!...too bad about all of those prayers for the end of the civil war in Syria. Perhaps God was too busy defending picnics from rain?
While it is impossible to be free of the prejudice of preference, still, we can strive to be as objective as possible in our application of critical thinking. One of the hazards faced by progressive religious people is that once we are set at liberty from the constraints of old creedal claims, some find themselves falling head long into seemingly more attractive and less destructive truth claims that are just as dependent upon untestable assumptions as the religion from which we have escaped.
It was bad theology that led to the Crusades, to the Divine Right of Kings, inquisitions, sectarian battles, some of which were fought on battle fields and many more divided families at the dinner table. There is good theology and there is bad theology. Critical thinking does matter. Sloppy thinking leads to uncertain results. Novices who have rejected the formal religion of their youth will often cobble together a more savory concoction that they will call Buddhism or Native American spirituality, much of which they made up last week after watching a really good movie, but, to call upon Occam's Razor once more, if they are trading one truck load of irrational assumptions for a new and more exotic sounding truck load of irrational assumptions, the implications are likely to be equally unsavory.
Our preference for good manners, getting along well with others and a desire to avoid conflict often lead us to a nearly sacramental love of false equivalents. I would invite anyone who says, "Everyone's religion is their private choice," or simply "To each his or her own," to take the time to visit their local shelter for victims of domestic violence or for teen "runaways." In my experience, a huge portion of the teen "runaway" population did not run away. They were kicked out of their family home because the religion of their parents kept them from accepting homosexuality, even if the homosexual in question was their own son or daughter. The misogyny that lies at the root of a great deal of domestic violence can be traced directly to the pulpits that influence the abusers. Mental health professionals have been trying to point out the connection between teen suicide and homophobic religious teachings for years. Sloppy thinking doesn't just lead to unnecessary feelings of guilt and fear but there is actually a casualty count and therefore, at the risk of alienating some for appearing to be impolite and lacking in diplomacy skills, I emphatically push for my peers in the religious world to be rigorous in their scholarship and their critical thinking.
The media has largely fallen prey in the past generation to a belief in false equivalents that compels them to appear to be neutral in almost every case, giving equal time to both sides of any issue. Sometimes, the sides are just not equal. Note that when almost any television news outlet talks about global climate change, they will give almost equal time to climate change deniers as they give to those who warn against the human behaviors causing climate change. Among climate scientists, there is more than a 90% consensus that it is our consumption of fossil fuels that is driving the climate change. It should also be noted that many of the climate deniers are on the payroll of the fossil fuel industries and yet a false value placed on neutrality prevents the news media from communicating important facts relevant to the survival of our race to their audience. We can be thankful for civility in virtually every case and yet the truth should not be sacrificed on the altar of being well behaved.
I am grateful for editors and friends who help me to see the other side of issues about which I may have allowed my own emotions or prejudices to lead me astray. Such calls for balance and objectivity are indispensible to any sincere scholar or pastor but only in so far as they are encouraging the search for what is true and not when they are simply attempting to enforce either silence or the comfort of acquiescence to the consensus mundi.
For many in the religious community, "faith" has meant the ability to believe as being true that for which there is little or no evidence. When I would ask questions about what we had heard in church on the car ride home every Sunday, my mother would tell me, "You have to take it on faith." For her, the ability to make your self believe totally irrational truth claims was a virtue to be acquired at all costs and every truly good person manages to do it. So I tried. I read the Bible over and over again. I majored in philosophy and religion in college, went to seminary, earned a doctorate in ministry and even did post-doctoral studies and every step of the way my mother's injunction to "just take it on faith," became increasingly impossible.
I no longer associate the word "faith" with the willful assassination of my brains. I am grateful to Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg for recovering an older and more meaningful interpretation of faith to mean something more akin to "courage," or "commitment." And so I invite you, my readers, to have courage as we re-think what it means to be a person of faith in the 21st century. No longer will we accept the demand of fealty to creeds and doctrines that do not describe the reality of the world we experience. Our religion will be a religion that allows for a spiritual perspective on what is demonstrably true.
