I just started listening to Greg Boyd’s book Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty. Provocative title and thesis. I haven’t had his experience, but I know many do. I swim in different waters, where many are perfectly situated for such an experience. And I’m raising a questioner. I think it’s worth hearing from people like Boyd and Austin Fisher (Faith in the Shadows).
I encountered Christ in a very powerful way when I was seventeen years old. The experience was so overwhelming that for about a year I felt absolutely certain that everything this … church taught me was true. Unfortunately, as is so often the case …, this church valued emotional experiences over reason. In fact, questioning matters of faith was viewed with suspicion, and expressing outright doubt was considered positively immoral.
This didn’t bode well for me, for up until my conversion I’d always been a questioner. Since childhood I had found it hard to accept things just because someone told me it was so…
For me, such certitude was destined to crash. As I’ll share in this book, it took just one university course in evolutionary biology and one course in the critical study of the Bible to blow my blissful certainty sky-high. I obviously managed to piece my faith back together eventually, but my yearlong vacation from my incessantly questioning brain was over for good.
Confidence in the strength of a good Father has some benefit.
ETA: From the intro to the list:
This does not contain any of the multiple caveats against false confidence, but shows that there are way more than several reasons for true confidence.
It is not unrelated to the most frequent mandate in the Bible, “Do not be afraid” or one of its several variations – “Fear not!”, “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not”, and the like.
Thanks. Good to know. Just became too hard to fix it but most of Pullman’s best contributions come at the end of the podcast so probably in the last two videos. Now that I’m home and get on my laptop I expect those videos will be easier to find. I was trying to fix it on my phone in SF while waiting for my better half to finish with an appointment. If only Pullman didn’t write sci-fi. I’m finding it hard to get excited about that genre these days.
I can’t help but wonder if Boyd’s doubt ever touched his powerful encounter with Christ? Which reminds me of one skeptic who never really could shake his encounter with a Turkish translator. If I read the story right, he later renewed his Christian confession, but the skepticism was there for years it seemed.
In an environment full of emotionalism and easy-believism that accompanies some evangelical efforts, just sign here, one certainly wonders. It reminds me in contrast with the real encounter that Phil Yancey had, personal yet objective, and quoted at length here:
For years before, yes, but not after:
(And interesting that an indirect reference to our late and future friend Glenn Morton should arise a second time today, the first in a private message involving who cited Charles Colson.): Questioning what it means to be a creator - #16 by gbob.
Which means it can be had and it’s not a fluke. It may require some persistence in seeking – the timing is not up to us. (And hey, I’m old. )
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. Hebrews 11:6
Being found by God:
During a dark time in her life, a woman in my congregation complained that she had prayed over and over, “God, help me find you,” but had gotten nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer too, “God, come and find me. After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep.” She concluded when she was recounting this to me, “The only reason I can tell you this story is – he did.”
@heymike3 , So far he hasn’t addressed that encounter specifically. However, he does talk about returning to atheism to his father’s delight. So, it seems like he lost everything and had to start again.
@Dale , you might want to see where Boyd is going here before arguing against the introduction of the book.
Hammering away on verses that give you confidence, while ignoring the concerns of the author or forum participant, or telling them they are asking the wrong questions or believed wrongly, or weren’t persistent enough in seeking is ineffective. That is if you want to help them in their faith.
In some cases it’s simply cruel. I see people here regularly, who have worked harder than anyone I know personally, to find reasons to maintain their faith — for years. Some for decades.
Trying to redirect people’s questions to the ones we feel we can answer doesn’t address theirs. It just reinforces the idea that there are qustions we aren’t allowed to ask. That we should turn off the parts of our brains that plague us with questions that no one can answer, and pretend everything is fine.
I do have faith in Jesus. I know more and more people who don’t and whose honest, rational questions no one answers, or answers well. They need different answers from what you keep putting up to counter the quotes I share.
McGilchrist’s response to a listener question at about 1:40 into part 4 of these interviews…
Drawing on the thoughts of Goethe …
…We don’t find the eternal by turning our back on time, but by going into the things of time. We don’t find the spiritual by turning our back on the material, but by going deeper into the material and seeing it as ensouled, and that is this bringing together of opposites that I think is so important; if I could just leave everybody with that … that what I’m about is not polarizing but trying to bring together things that appear opposite because they’re really not opposite.
We don’t find the spiritual by turning our back on the material, but by going deeper into the material and seeing it as ensouled
The infinite task of human philosophy, and yet there’s that one question, that if asked and feared, illuminates the choice we as spirit beings have to make.
Returning to Greg Boyd’s Benefit of the Doubt, he asks some good questions in the intro, some that I’ve heard from other people, and all that aren’t easily answered with the tools I know. Here is a sample:
My personal frustrations aside, however, this conception of faith raises a number of perfectly legitimate questions–questions we will be exploring throughout part 1 of this book. For example, Scripture teaches us that we are saved by faith and that the power of prayer, whether for healing or for some other blessing, is directly connected to a person’s faith. But I’ve always wondered, why would God place a premium on one’s ability to convince oneself that something is true? What is particularly virtuous about one’s ability to push doubt aside and make oneself feel certain?
Let’s be honest: some people are naturally good at doing this and some are not, but this ability has nothing to do with their character. Whether a person is good at this is simply a function of how the person’s brain is wired. Some people’s brains are naturally inquisitive and others’ are not. …
But why would God unfairly advantage them over rationally balanced and naturally inquisitive people? Why would God leverage whether a person is healed, let alone saved, on this ability–which, if anything, seems to be more of a disability? Why did God even bother to create minds that naturally gauge their level of confidence in a belief on the evidence and arguments for and against it if he’s only pleased with minds that can make themselves more certain than the evidence and arguments for it warrant? I just don’t get it!
Here’s another example of the sort of problems I’ve had with most people’s concept of faith. If God is pleased by our ability to make ourselves feel certain that a particular set of beliefs is true, then a person is going to be pretty much locked into whatever beliefs they were initially taught to believe. Think about it. How likely is it that people will change their beliefs if they think salvation and damnation depend on whether they can remain as certain as possible that what they already believe is true? Not much. But this means that a person’s set of beliefs will be determined by circumstance–where they were born, who raised them, what proselytizer first persuaded them, and so on. Is this really how our beliefs should be determined?
(p. 4)
I like that because it makes it clear that religiosity isn’t a kind of mistaken perception or understanding which misses the nuts and bolts of reality as described by science. Rather it is an understanding that unfolds only if you look so far into reality that you see beyond the surface. The same can be said for imagination. It isn’t just an amusing alternative to reality but a means for seeing more deeply, one that is used by mathematicians and scientists at the highest levels as well or wherever new insights are being gained.
Thanks again to @Kendel for showing me the way to the other videos in the series. This part comes about 5 minutes into Part 2:
… a very important distinction between fantasy and imagination [whereas] fantasy turned you away from reality … imagination was a faculty whereby you looked at something you thought you knew and was apparently familiar to you and suddenly saw into it for the first time and realized that you had never known it at all [and] that now you did. Now that is the magic that we are talking about. And if I wanted to use the word magic I would do it very much circumscribed by this idea, that … we’re referring to a creative power that is utterly real that is quite essential for contacting reality but is not reducible to a technique or to a fantasy and is in no way to do with deceit.
Has everyone here read Peace Child? It’s the remarkable true account of God’s providential intervention into the lives of two tribes in New Guinea, one of which the first time they heard the gospel story, they thought Judas was the hero!
One inescapable conclusion is that science and philosophical materialism does not give us the whole picture of reality, the forest is not conflated with some of the trees.
Then there was this from around the 18 minute mark also from the second video:
when you are young things are fresh and you are really experiencing them and you’re really open to them you’re not already substituting your theory of reality or map of reality for the reality, that it’s being mapped. But we as we grow older find this very hard to avoid. … the contemporary world in which we live does this to the greatest extent that has possibly historically ever existed to the extent that now i think a lot of people find it very difficult to tell the difference between the theory and the experience of reality … this is the big difference [between when] things are fresh and new and once we think oh it’s one of those, i’ve got it.
there is something important about what Philip said i think about the dancer … that although one loses that fluency it can be recaptured later after the innocence has been lost and this is … a very important idea to me: that there is wisdom the other side of foolishness and there is knowledge the other side of ignorance and there is innocence the other side of experiences. [There is] the innocence of the child and there’s the innocence of a saint and these are earned through long suffering and it’s probably a richer thing than was lost.
This reminds me very much of William Blake’s understanding of Innocence and Experience. Connected to his concept of Innocence is also ignorance and a complete lack of wisdom, because it is the innocence of inexperience. Experience is costly yet the path to wisdom goes through it. Experience can only come through, well, experience, having lived, having made mistakes or sinned and dealing with the consequences. No one becomes wise under ideal circumstances.
I like how he contrasts the innocence of a saint with the innocence of a child. They are entirely different things, although the child can’t tell it. The saint has “been through it” and gained what the child cannot imagine.
We can never go back. Comparing the cost with what we have gained, few of us would really want to.
Yes. I have no desire to actually go back to being young, ignorant or innocent but I like the idea of seeing things afresh as they actually are and not just as a representative of a category. We always see things as a something, as IM often says, but I’d like to remove the cataracts which shave off the distinctiveness of each thing thing into nothing more than “one of those”.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
I think not so much to do with revealed religion, but rather a rejection of a completely scientistic (I hope that’s a word; it is now) world view. McGilchrist obviously does not argue for any particular religion or any religion at all, but recognizes that there are ways of understanding that make use of different kinds of cognition besides the solely rational. And that these ways of understanding can at least lead us to the expectation (?), grasp (?) [sorry. The right word eludes me at the moment.] that there is something beyond what we can apprehend merely rationally.
For Christians this alone is insufficient. However a different way of supporting the legitimacy of belief in what can’t be received through purely rational processes.
I struggle with this idea plenty. Would like everything neatly demonstrable like gravity. However, I don’t believe that it is. While I find McGilchrist’s views incomplete, I think they do have something valueable to contribute.
I have a conjecture that this is one of the reasons adults like to be around children (when we do) … or grandchildren for some of us. We get another crack at vicariously enjoying innocence again through their young eyes. Just as we enjoy a movie we’ve seen many times already - but we enjoy it almost like [every bit as much as] the first time if we are watching it with a friend who’s never seen it before, there is something contagious about “fresh eyes” and “virgin imaginations” enjoying that initial capture of the moment. And we all revel in it with them.
It’s not that we want to go back to being childlike, as you’ve said. But there is an importantly honest experience in there that is what really rings our bells I think.
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