Musings of a Restless Mind

In a few weeks, I will, God willing, be baptized and chrismated into the Eastern Orthodox Church. It seems a good time to share this essay that I wrote years ago.

Let me first make clear that my purpose is not to convert anybody, but rather to explain why I believe what I do. For my purposes there are 2 types of atheists. There are the evangelical or, as I think of them, the angry atheists. Most of them were either blustered at by irrational parents or preachers whom they rejected because of their intellectual vacuousness and frequent hypocrisy, or they believed that God would protect them and theirs from harm and were so disillusioned when something truly tragic happened to them that they intend to forever blame God for allowing it to happen. My experience is that those people may someday come to believe in God again, but only from another life-changing, brain-bypassing event and only to an equally irrational if opposite belief. Then there are the non-angry, non-evangelical atheists who have tried to understand the universe from a perspective as objective as they can muster. They see God as an unnecessary and distorting belief in the way things are. It is to these latter that I address my essay.

Not only is there no way of proving that God doesn’t exist, there is also no way of proving that God does exist. No miraculous phenomenon would suffice for everyone. There are people who claim that earth is flat, and those people who deny the moon landing. Some philosophers have argued that even the idea that a chair holds you up when you sit is merely a belief. As Arthur C. Clarke has noted, any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic. Even if Jesus were to turn water into wine for someone today, and we could prove it not to be an illusion, we might simply consider him an alien with a Star Trek replicator.

If we can neither prove nor disprove God’s existence, why not just ignore the question? What we believe has a profound effect on how we live our lives. Angry atheists believe that a Christian’s viewpoint is a distorting force causing irrationality, pain, suffering, and even war. Christians believe that atheists’ beliefs cause pain, suffering, immorality, and damnation. What we believe about the existence and nature of God informs most of our significant choices about the way we live our lives and interact with others, so ignoring the question is not really an option.

Rational people hold to beliefs as long as those beliefs serve them, but most of us hold onto some beliefs after they have ceased to serve us. Thoughtful people remember that our beliefs are ultimately constructs that work. The greatest scientific discoveries arise from people who question basic, universally accepted assumptions. Think Copernicus and Einstein. Of course some who question basic assumptions are just lunatics or frauds. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

I remember as a freshman in college mentioning casually to another student that the atomic theory was just that, a theory, which could eventually be replaced by a better theory. He was appalled. He had seen pictures of the Bohr model atoms in textbooks and was convinced that these were photographs. Pointing out that it’s impossible to photograph something smaller than the wavelength of visible light was useless. He had seen pictures, and he believed. Ultimately what each of us believes is confined to our own mind, but there are many beliefs that we share with nearly everyone else. Those beliefs are what we call reality, and of course what we believe reality to be has a profound effect on how we live our lives and interact with other people.

To start and hopefully not end the discussion, I make a bizarre assertion: all rational human beings believe in God. That does not mean that all atheists are irrational. Let me explain. Only a lunatic believes that they control the universe. Clearly something or someone other than us controls the universe. What we argue about is the nature of what controls the universe.

Some people believe that the universe is mechanistic. They may not have any firm beliefs about how it came into being, but they believe, once set in motion, the universe proceeds in a logical fashion that we can eventually deduce by observing it.

Some believe that the universe is controlled strictly by chance. Earth just happened to be at just the right distance from the sun and be just the right size to allow life to come forth when just the right combination of elements came together. Life, the way we know it, came about by happy accident. They say the unlikeliness of that set of events happening is counterbalanced by the trillions of opportunities for it to happen. Some unhappy fluke could destroy all life in the universe.

Some believe the universe is controlled by an old man in long robes who controls the precise movement of every molecule. No one sneezes or yawns without his active consent.

Some believe the universe is controlled by an intelligent being who thinks and feels in ways analogous to our own ways–a being who is capable of intervening in the affairs of men, but usually prefers to let us work things out in our own way, hoping that through all our muddling we will eventually find a way to be happy.

These examples do not exhaust all possibilities of course. Even though the people described in the first 2 cases probably would refer to themselves as atheists, and those who believe in the last 2 would say they believe in God, each of these belief systems is very different, and all 4 acknowledge that something beyond our control runs the universe.

Now why do I believe what I believe? This will take a while.

I was raised Roman Catholic and went to Catholic school for 7.5 of my 8 years of elementary school. My observation was that there were about 3 or 4 of us in classes of 60 who took our religion seriously. Yes, there was the, “Hooray for our side” part of the education—the Protestant Reformation was called the Protestant Revolt. Despite the glaring, seeming contradictions of the bible, I was taught that I could understand God’s plan for me by reason. Even if the priest waved away questions about how there could be one God and yet a Trinity with a breezy, “It’s a mystery,” I knew that 2,000 years of scholarship meant it wasn’t that simple, but that it could be accepted if understood properly.

As an aside, despite the denigration of Protestants, I was given an altogether favorable impression of Jews by my Catholic schooling. The Jews were, after all, the chosen people. We Gentiles got in under an obscure, “yeah and them too,” clause. It was years before I understood the historical hatred of Jews for what it is, and that’s a subject for another essay. For me, the existence of a contemporary Jewish culture argued forcefully for the acceptance of the Old Testament. How is it that Jews, despite being despised and frequently oppressed to the point of near extermination, were still around and distinct after 4,500 years? The ancient Egyptian and Babylonian, and Greek religions are only fodder for archaeologists and fantasy writers, but the Jews are still here, reading the same texts, and following the same commandments. Likewise the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Christian Church have lasted for 2,000 years and, in what I was taught, are just an extension of the Jewish tradition. The New Testament reinforces that with every turn of phrase. We just believe the Messiah has already come, and we believe we know him and what he was all about, or at least we know what he has said.

Being taught Roman Catholic doctrine didn’t seem to take with everyone as I noted earlier, but it suited my intellectual bent. I was given a puzzle to work out. It wasn’t obvious how all the doctrines fit together. How did turning the other cheek fit with cleansing the temple with a whip and an angry shout? How did it coexist with calling the Pharisees hypocrites and vipers? Why did most of the heroes of the Bible do such terrible things (Jacob, Saul, David)? The religious authorities assured me that the pieces fit to make a beautiful whole, so I kept playing with the Rubik’s cube that is Christianity. Most of all it taught me that simplistic, easy answers are always wrong. Eventually I worked out my answers without having to resort to, “It’s a mystery.”

What I did find is that Christianity gives me a code to live by and to check my daily actions against. Is monogamy better than adultery? Is honesty better than lying? Is either being content with my lot or striving on my own to improve it, better than envying what others have? My own life’s experience and my observations of how other’s lives have played out, has shown me that the Christian choices work out better, certainly in the long run despite any short-term advantage that might be gained by other choices.

Above all, as many in Alcoholics Anonymous have found, I think Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer summarizes the first and tenth commandments very well and maps out the way to a happy life. Accept that you’re only in charge of your own actions, and take responsibility for it without envying what others have. It might be worth mentioning the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens who challenged anyone to come up with any valid rule of morality that could not be arrived at rationally by an intelligent person. While it’s true that I view the 10 Commandments as a guide to living a happy life rather than an arbitrary set of regulations instituted by a petulant god, my answer to Hitchens is: the first commandment. Humility is not a state arrived at easily or even naturally. Even if the ancient Greeks constantly warned of hubris, it was only because their gods were just as narcissistic and jealous as they themselves were, but more powerful. The Bible’s God says, respect me because I brought you out of bondage, and I have a plan for you. Not the kind of thing Zeus or Baal would say.

Any Christian or even any believer in a benevolent creator/controller of the universe must confront “the problem of evil.” Why would a good God allow evil to occur, much less be so prevalent? The answer I came up with is two-fold.

Firstly, my answer is free will. If we are endowed with free will, some will inevitably choose to do things that hurt themselves and others. In fact the very story of Genesis points to free will as the beginning of mankind’s story and struggle. Adam and Eve eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” and that causes their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

This view informs my understanding of all the strange things one reads in the Bible. Metaphorically, I believe God is our parent trying to raise humanity as one tries to raise a successful child. You don’t reason with a toddler; you have to give them simple commands to follow. Eventually, you can hope to have them grasp the reasoning and nuances that should inform their choices.

All of us have seen the harm caused by parents who are overprotective, attempting to shield their children from all harm and raising fragile failures in the process. We’ve also seen the harm of parents who try too hard to raise children in their own image, trying to make them the athlete or the dancer or whatever they never successfully were and instead turning them into angry, frequently morally deficient adults. Every good parent knows in their heart that children are not really from us but instead come through us in Khalil Gibran’s phrase. The dance we do in trying to instill in them our wisdom and experience but still letting them make their own choices is the stuff of life.

Free will cannot explain all the harm in the world, however. What of those afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease or crippling genetic defects? What of those killed or crippled by acts of nature?

That brings me to the second part that Christianity answers for me. Christianity teaches that we have immortal souls and that God is interested in raising our souls to him, not our physical bodies and lives. To believe and understand that means that what happens to us in this life is a series of teachable moments. Maybe “only the good die young” because they have completed their journey to God, and the rest of us still have further to go. Maybe the “living saints” among us are only here to serve as examples and teachers for the rest of us who haven’t fully understood yet. Solzhenitsyn describes his journey to faith via the Soviet prison system that he poetically called the Gulag Archipelago, noting an example that stuck with him of an imprisoned priest who was eventually released when his captors understood that they could take his life but not his convictions and didn’t want him to serve as an example of resistance to the other prisoners.

Another part of what reinforces my belief in God and Christianity is my direct experiences of God. No, I have not seen any burning bushes that were not consumed, but, twice in my life so far, I have heard the voice of God. Now “voice” is a good and simple metaphor that is also used in the Bible, so I repeat it here. It wasn’t a sound, but a simple declarative sentence that came unbidden into my head and that I instantly realized was true, but not arrived at rationally. It was not an “aha” moment that was the culmination of an exploration of something I had pondered that came to me in a flash like someone’s “Eureka!” of scientific discovery. I’ve had those too. No, there were 2 immediate responses to these declarations. The first response was absolute certainty that it was true. The second response was, “You must be joking!” The paths laid out by those incidents were not direct, but nonetheless important in my life.

I don’t fancy myself a Christian apologist like C.S. Lewis or Augustine of Hippo. I merely try to explain why I believe what I do.

Part of my path to Orthodoxy has reinforced that some things are mysteries and have to be taken on faith. For me, the teachings of Jesus belong in the category of explainable by reason, sometimes informed by experience. The doctrine of the trinity, not so much.