An actual argument

So now we get to the point where I actually try to craft an argument for faith. I think it's an important exercise; not because I assume anyone is ever truly convinced by arguments. But I do think a good, solid argument for something can sometimes at least plant the seed of doubt in even one who is thoroughly convinced that God does not exist. I certainly am not going to go over the whole plethora of argument in regards to faith, merely a few that have stuck out in my mind. Nothing I say here will be original, of course, but really, in this day and age, what is? With an easy access to information, can any of us really craft a unique argument that has never been before put into writing? I imagine a small number of us will, probably entirely by accident, but I also imagine this will be an extremely rare occurrence.

First I'd like to start with the idea of the supernatural. Now, in C. S. Lewis' book "Miracles", he in fact starts his argument for the supernatural with the existence of peoples' ability to reason, without which one cannot even know of science, much less of the supernatural, but here I am writing a simple blog post and not a 200 page book, so I'm going to get straight to the point. Because frankly, without the supernatural, Christianity cannot possibly exist, since it is entirely premised upon a supernatural act, that being the resurrection of Jesus. I would call this act supernatural because it clearly falls outside of any reasonably accepted view of nature: that death is permanent. And so for Christianity to be valid, the supernatural must indeed be possible, in fact inevitable.

And here of course is perhaps the biggest stumbling block for any nonbeliever: the fact that, in this day and age, at least among "well-educated" people, it is pretty much taboo to admit to the existence of the supernatural. Everything has a "logical", or "rational" explanation. And yet this "logic" and "rationality" seems to me now to be downright irrational. What if the most rational explanation for something is in fact the supernatural? And yet since we discount it out of hand, it is immediately removed from the list of even possibility, let alone rationality. It seems odd that we can so cavalierly remove from our sphere of understanding something that thousands of years of human civilizations have taken for granted. Are we so arrogant in this day and age that we think all who lived in those eras were fools? To paraphrase Lewis, they may not have known about the workings of storms, and sickness, and all of those things that modern science knows of, but they certainly understood death. They certainly also understood logic and reasoning.

Now, I'm not going to here put up the bible as "truth" although I certainly in many respects believe it to be so. But putting aside that issue for the moment, something that has struck me in my exploration of it, particularly in the letters of Paul, is its reliance on logic. Paul was certainly a man who existed, of that there seems little doubt. What also seems mostly uncontested is that he was one day a man notorious in his persecution of Christians, and the next possibly their greatest teacher to come after Jesus. What happened in between is up to the reader, although Paul himself claimed he was visited by Jesus. The point, however, is that even though Paul believed the truth of Jesus' teachings to be self-evident (at least as expressed in Romans), he realized that he would have to make lucid, logical arguments for them. In reading a letter like Romans, one can see clearly crafted logical ideas that build on one another into an overall thesis. I think it's sometimes tempting to view Christianity as the work of superstitious men pining for salvation, for life after death. And yet in Paul one finds just the opposite: a clearly rational, brilliant writer who believes that he has been called by God to convince people of the truth of Jesus.

And here I also hold myself up as an example. I am not a superstitious man. Even now I find myself deeply skeptical (although certainly less so now than I was) whenever I hear talk of supernatural occurrences. But then again, it depends on who is doing the recounting. If I know the person, know their character, know how they think, if it's a person whose intelligence and judgment I trust, then which is more likely: that the supposed "supernatural" experience that they are recounting never actually happened? Or that they are telling the truth? Now of course psychology tells us that if an event happens and six people witness it, we will get six different stories. And yet an event did happen, outside of their perceptions of it, and it is likely that some are closer to the truth than others. That's why the source of the story is so important.

And so if you view me as a rational, intelligent person, how then does one explain my conversion? Well, there are any number of ways one could explain it away. Maybe I'm not as rational as I'd like to think. Maybe deep down I have yearned for religion all of my life, and was then slowly swayed by a church until my mind concocted the whole experience. And yet anyone who knows me knows that I have at times in my life been overtly hostile to religion, at other times ambivalent, but never accepting. The point is that for me, it took experiencing something outside of my awareness, outside of my story, outside of anything I had ever even conceived of, to find God. I couldn't have made up my conversion even if I wanted to which, in my mind, lends it a great deal of credibility; not, mind you, to others, who of course weren't in my head this whole time; but to myself, as even now I am tempted at times to doubt my own experience.

I would also hold up as example any one of the plethora of rational men of faith, whose writings are scattered all over the history of philosophy and literature, or who can be seen teaching today at various churches. To doubt the core rationality of so many brilliant scholars and thinkers is to my mind just a little bit weird. I am not saying that Paul, myself (I of course here am not attempting to truly compare myself, or my experience, with Paul. However, there are a few similarities, namely a divinely inspired absolute shift in beliefs, and a need to see Christianity logically and rationally explained), and all of these thinkers are speaking truth (although of course I believe so), as, well, there must always be room for doubt and skepticism. What I am saying is that the only reason I was able to dismiss even the possibility of the supernatural for my entire life was that I never even asked myself the logical questions that this conclusion must ask, namely, are all these people insane, or stupid?

So for anyone who may be reading this who thinks religion to be mere superstition, or for the religious who discount any occurrence that seems to carry a whiff of the supernatural, I would say, just examine these questions. Read some letters of Paul, or some works by Lewis or Chesterton (to name my personal favorites). I'm not saying you will agree with them, I still find plenty to question in all of them (yes, even Paul - which is good. The bible should be grappled with, not just blindly accepted), but it will be harder (I hope) just to discount them as random whackos.

And if they were not crazy, then what was it that they experienced? If we are merely victims of constant stimuli out of our control, can we really know anything? Can we state anything at all as fact? Can we trust our own ability to reason? Why is it that we trust our abilities to discover the universe and the science that explains it, but not our abilities to discern when things happen outside of that understanding?