Do you ever find yourself wishing that someone had told or taught you something when you were growing up and thereby saved you a ton of grief?
(WARNING: Be careful about saying something like this if your parents are around for they may very well exclaim (yell) back, “We did tell you but you wouldn’t listen!”)
But I’m talking about things that really weren’t told/taught you. For example, being a Bible nerd I was shocked while doing university Biblical studies in my young adult years to discover that in the Old Testament there is no clear and agreed upon belief in people going to heaven and hell after death (Google “Sheol”), and even in New Testament times the Sadducees still denied this reality. This may not seem terribly significant to you but it made the Bible a whole lot more understandable to me.
Here’s another example which I hope you may find more relevant. I have spent most of my life, even though I am a pastor, accepting the assertion that religious people – more specifically Christian folk – are by definition less “rational” than those who don’t hold religious beliefs. After all Christians recognize it requires a “step” or “leap” of faith to believe, whereas non-believers can rationally declare that there is no proof for God or spiritual realities.
Along with this come many other premises, for example that it is impossible to prove and therefore to believe God created the universe and so the only logical explanation is (has to be) evolution.
Or that Jesus could not have been resurrected from the dead because that kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Or that prayer is a useless speaking of requests to a non-existent deity which accomplishes nothing. Or that miracles do not happen.
In my experience many of us Christians have not known how to respond to these “rational” arguments against faith and so we have timidly remained silent in the public square. Thankfully these days there are more and more people of faith standing up and saying “Wait a minute.”
How I wish I could have heard their rebuttals years ago!
One thing these folks are saying is while it is true we can’t “prove” God and spiritual realities exist, neither can it be proven that they don’t. To assert God does not exist is as much of a “faith statement” as to say that He does. And given the overwhelming evidence that people of all cultures and societies throughout history have strongly sensed the reality and presence of gods/spiritual realities, it is not irrational to suggest that the spiritual realm is real and not merely a figment of human imagination.
Moreover it is pointed out that if we exclusively accepted truths and realities observable only by senses or science, we would be poor indeed. The deepest truths and realities of our lives – love, babies, relationships, joy, delight, beauty, intuition, fear, passion, puppies, hockey, etc. – are often far beyond rational observance/explanation. Human truth is not limited to what science can “prove”.
Another challenge: so it is more rational to believe that somehow the incredible complexity, order and beauty of the universe came into existence out of nothing all by itself? That the even more incredible complexity, order and beauty of the Earth’s flora and fauna happened all by itself through natural selection evolution over the limited 4.543 billion-year life-span of the Earth? So a roomful of monkeys with typewriters (word processors) given 4.543 billion years would produce a similar miracle by replicating the collected works of William Shakespeare? And believing the universe was created by God is deemed illogical?
Moreover, Christian thinkers are pointing out that scientists and ordinary folk alike have often assumed that evolution explains how things came to be so we don’t need a god/God anymore. What isn’t said, either out of ignorance or scientific dishonesty, is that evolutionary science is absolutely unable to explain where the stuff that provided the raw materials for evolution came from – why there is “something” and not “nothing.”
And when it comes to miracles and/or the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, it is pointed out that it is bad scientific method to claim such things didn’t happen because such things don’t/can’t happen. Good science observes and considers all the data and then offers the most rational explanation of the data. Biblical scholars like N.T. Wright argue a strong case that the most rational/scientific explanation for the credible evidence about what happened following the crucifixion death of Jesus is that His dead body literally disappeared, that the newly embodied Jesus was actually seen and interacted with by a number of people, and that there is no more credible way of accounting for the complete metamorphosis of Jesus’ forlorn followers into the church that transformed the world than Jesus was indeed raised from the dead.
There are lots more of these “wait a minute” counterpoints, but these suffice to show that “the science isn’t settled” when it comes to God and spiritual realities. So maybe we can actually have honest, respectful, rational dialogue about our respective beliefs. And maybe folks who have long allowed a pseudo-scientific dismissal of all things religious to keep them from taking any religious beliefs seriously can be liberated to think and feel more freely and rationally about God and spiritual realities.