What is your reason for believing?

Faith & Science Conversation
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This is the second of the topics I created recently, being the more important of the two for myself personally.

After being on this forum for a while, I’ve been able to gain new insights to Christ, God, science, and life in general that I’ve been searching for for a while. However, there is one question that constantly haunts me. It started when I asked a friend of mine if he could help me write a testimony. To this, he told me to first and foremost say why I believed. When I ponder this even know, I’m not sure. Am I just afraid of the alternative, there being no God? This has been one of the biggest questions to bug me, and when I look at science and recognize that (as some have pointed out in past discussions started by me) a Creator isn’t immediately or truly evident. The historical case for Christ surely keeps God relevant but I still wonder why I believe, and why I should keep believing. I also find it extremely difficult to find resources to feed my faith, as an unfortunate majority of modern online Christian resources focus more on simple arguments and less on any of the issues I worry about (mainly the intersect of science and faith).

I was wondering what your guy’s personal philosophy on faith was. Where do you guys get resources? How did you go about bringing your knowledge of God and science together?

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Life is pretty complicated and we, as human beings, can’t get through the day without beliefs. Our biological brains need filters and assumptions and meta-beliefs in order to process the vast amounts of data we’re faced with each day. We have “beliefs” about everything, not just about faith and religion. Our “beliefs” govern all our choices, from the food we eat to the political parties we vote for. Often we can point to objective, scientific facts to explain why we hold certain beliefs. But sometimes we can’t. A huge part of the human experience revolves around the creative, emotional, heart-based, intuitive stuff that doesn’t fit into neat little logical boxes. Why do you like one song and not another? Why do you like dark blue on your living room walls but not light blue? Why do you wake up from certain dreams and wonder if the universe is talking to you?

Having faith – having a relationship with God – is a complicated belief system because it involves so many different aspects of being human. Faith isn’t just one thing. It’s like one of those “magic pictures” where a bunch of meaningless squiggles on a page suddenly “POP” and you see a recognizable image that has been hidden from you until you get the right focus. Once you’ve seen it, though, you know it’s there.

Then you have to decide what to do with it.

Seeing the image is the first step in experiencing faith. After this, you‘re faced with a lot of new choices about your life and how you’re going to live it. So although you may be able to pinpoint the start of faith (that is, the start of a relationship with God), there isn’t a finite end point because relationships are always changing, growing, and surprising us.

I personally find there’s a lot of freedom and joy in thinking of faith as an ever-evolving relationship with God rather than a rigid body of religious doctrines. Sometimes religious doctrines can take you closer to seeing God’s image, but sometimes they can blind you to God’s loving truth. So having faith means being willing to listen to what God is saying to you rather than exclusively adhering to what religious laws and traditions have been saying. It can be scary to let go of the certainty that religious doctrines promise. But learning to trust the certainty of God’s Divine Love in all the illogical, asymmetrical, unpredictable corners of human life that we can’t control is a bigger kind of certainty.

I can’t help you decide how or why you should believe. That’s between you and God. All I can say is that my life has been enriched in countless ways by letting go of the idea that I’m smarter than God. For me, the world of science has opened up like a grand narrative into who God is and why Creation is the way it is. Everywhere I look I see wonders and truths about God in the science of our universe. And everything I learn from science helps me grow and change in my relationship with God.

So that’s how I bring God and science together.

Hope this helps,

Jen

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Comment of the year! Well said.

Vinnie

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So I guess essentially I believe in God, specifically the Christian god El because I was born in the Bible Belt of USA, in southern Alabama in a community where everyone believed. So from birth I was simply raised up by and around people who believed in the story of Jesus Christ. Though most of the community believed in a very white washed Americanized conservative form of Jesus my immediate family was far more loose with their faith. For example I was raised up with just a general high regard for scientists and their consensuses and was taught that things like evolution was simply true and it was harmonized with saying like “well I’m not sure how God did it but he did and evolution was part of it” or things like god comes in many flavors for different people or that the Bible was man’s attempt at understanding God and so on. So as I learned terminology like “accommodationism vs concordism” and “inerrancy vs whether you call it I just as able to easily digest it.

So since it’s something ingrained in my “heart” and a pair of lenses I can’t seem to shape and it’s not something that conflicts with my general understanding of nature and reality I have no particular reason to toss it.

I also have a decent community online and in person of more liberal oriented science accepting brothers and sisters in Christ and we all mostly hep push each other forward.

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Thank you for that. That was very heartfelt and inspiring :blush:

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My reasons for belief… I have posted them before. But here they are again…

  1. As a physicist I have to ask myself as other physicists have asked themselves whether life as we experience really can be summed up in the mathematical equations of physics. My necessarily subjective conclusion, the same as many others, is that the very idea is absurd. Science puts our experience through the filter of mathematical glasses and to be sure this methodology has proven marvelously successful at not only explaining many things but discovering new things about the world that we never expected. But this is just looking at life in one particular way and I think it is quite foolish to confuse this way of looking at things with the reality itself.
  2. It was through existentialism that I made a connection that first gave some meaning to the word “God” for me (I was not raised in a religion unless it is the “religions” of liberalism and psychology). I came to the conclusion that the most fundamental existentialist faith was the faith that life was worth living. I also concluded that for theists their faith in God played the same role for them in their lives, suggesting that the two kinds of faith were really the same thing in different words. That equivalence basically became my working definition for “God”, and from there it was a matter of judging what understanding of God best served that purpose.
  3. Physicists experience shock and cognitive dissonance when they first understand what quantum physics is saying for it seems to contradict the logical premises of physics and scientific inquiry itself. But there is one thing that makes sense of it to me at least. If the universe was the creation of a deity who wanted keep his fingers in events then these facts of quantum physics would provide a back door in the laws of nature through which He could do so without disturbing the laws of nature. I am not saying that any such conclusion is necessitated by the scientific facts; only that on this subjective level where quantum physics created such cognitive dissonance for so many physicists, that this idea would make sense of it – to me
  4. I have considerable sympathy with the sentiments of the eastern mystics that logic is stultifying trap for human thought and consciousness. The result is that even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them for the sake of our own liberty of thought. We need a belief in something transcendent in order for us transcend the limitations of logic and mundane (or material) reasons to give our uniquely human ability for abstraction more substance and life.
  5. I feel there are profound pragmatic reasons to reject the idea that reality is exclusively objective because it immediately takes any conviction about reality to a conclusion that the people who disagree with you are detached from reality and delusional or in some other way defective, I don’t believe that this is at all conducive to the values and ideals of a free society. The plain fact is that our direct contact with reality is wholly subjective and it is the objective which is the abstraction that has to be fabricated. Now I certainly think there is very good evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but I see nothing to support taking this to the extreme of presuming that reality is exclusively objective.

How these connect up with what I believe.

more intermediate reasoning.

Why Christianity?

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Very beautiful post, just one thing, Mitchell

Yes, but we would also need to fashion them in such a way that our conscious mind could not perceive them as fabrications. In other words, I agree that even if there really were no reasons to believe in God, the need for such belief would still persist; yet the self-deception that followed would have to be so powerful that it would not be recognized as self-deception at all.

And that would be very hard.

In other words, once you have taken the red pill (in an hypothetical scenario where there are genuinely no reasons to believe in God) you cannot continue living as though you had taken the blue one.

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This is too much fantasy – there are no magic pills. The reality is that we will look for reasons when we see a need to do so, and yes will find them if we look sincerely. Reason does absolutely nothing without first accepting premises on faith to start with. The premises we accept ultimately must serve the needs of life itself. Of course, people can always be inflexible, stubborn, and stupid, even perverse and self-destructive – but then they are the ones lying to themselves, that the premises they accept are not a matter of their choice. One of the roles of therapy is to help people to face up to this reality, and accept the fact other choices are possible.

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Yes, I was only reasoning within the hypothetical you mentioned, namely “even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them”

It is no fantasy to suggest that, in such a case, the fabrication would need to be so convincing as to go unrecognized; indeed, that is the very condition on which its value would depend (again, reasoning within your hypothetical).

The existence of a Creator is something that can be arrived at through human reason alone; however, the identity of that Creator, or the fact that He became incarnate, certainly requires faith to be accepted.

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I always had a liking to Science, for it likes Repeatabilty which means something is true. There are many Guessers of God of which there may be truth or not. The Doubting Thomas didn’t really Believe until He saw the Resurrected Body with the Scars. This is where Christ indicated that you don’t have to see to Believe. This of course is not Repeatable for all of Us to see Christ Resurrected Body, so Science can’t prove this. We do have Testament of Individuals and most Believing comes from Saul/Paul in His Books in the New Testament are true. The other Four Books( Mathew John Luke Mark) have been doubted because of their timeline, especially by Bart Ehrman.

I believe because the proof to me is We Humans have the ability to Pray. Why do We have this ability, it’s because The Creator made Us to Pray to it, Therefore The Creator exists. Of course because the Repeatabilty of Prayers not always being answered, Doubt is again the cause of Dis-Belief.

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No.

Nothing can be arrived at through reason alone.

Logic does nothing without premises accepted on faith.

That is not reason alone. It is reason and faith.

Science is different. It is not just reason and faith. It is also measurement – i.e. procedures which give the same results no matter what you want or believe. This gives it objectivity – a reasonable expectation that others agree. When it is just reason, then premises upon which it is founded can simply be rejected.

Sure science requires faith also. But it is minimal. One reasonable premise really, that there is nothing supernatural arranging the evidence to deceive us.

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I disagree. And many of the most important philosophers who ever lived would disagree as well. Accepting the claims of Christianity (and the trinitarian nature of God, which is something that reason alone, without Revelation, could never grasp) requires also Faith, but the existence of a Creator is another kettle of fish.

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Whereas I think imagined proofs for God’s existence is idolatry and fundamentally distorts the understanding of God. It basically replaces your faith in God with the faith in the premises of your so called argument. All just so you can force your opinion on other people. It is not only wrong but changes religion to something destructive and dangerous.

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You can’t force anything, this is proven by the fact that there are people like you who don’t believe that they are proofs in any meaningful sense. Hell, I’ve literally read materialists saying that if they were to see Jesus’ resurrection they would think He was an alien, a member of an advanced human race evolved in another galaxy using technology beyond our knowledge.

So nobody is forcing nobody, don’t worry.

But certainly reducing Christianity to irrational fideism is not the traditional understanding of Christianity at all (much less theism).

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I assume you are talking about faith in Christian doctrine. Since I don’t have that I haven’t responded. However I am very comfortable with my own mongrel faith. So if you have any specific question of me I’ll try to answer.

Also, I haven’t read every post but I’m very comfortable with those that @mitchellmckain has made.

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Mongrel faith is certainly original Ahhaha.

But I believe that “whateverist” is more iconic.

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I would split the question to at least two parts: (1) faith in God and (2) how do we combine what we learn about this universe with our faith in God? The question of philosophy is another box although it is connected to the two questions.

There are many ways how a person starts to believe in God. After the steps towards faith, some get a strong inner convinction that yes, there is God and He listens and shows His love, especially through what Jesus did. For others, the journey starts with more uncertainty and questions, asking are you really there, God?

During the journey, what keeps me believing in God is my experiences of Him. I have learned and experienced enough that I could not anymore deny that there is an unseen reality and someone there (God) acts in ways that fit to what I have been told. What I have experienced fits to the great story of Christianity, much better than to any competing story.
I think that it would be difficult to maintain the faith in God without personal experiences of Him - a theoretical construct would not be a sufficient long-term basis.

As my faith that there is God has become more stable and I have leaned more, I have felt that my certainty of knowing His ways has diminished. As a newborn believer, I suffered from an illusion of knowing much. As that has fallen off, it has forced me to continue the journey more from the position of a disciple or child that is asking and trying to learn.

I believe that God has given to us two ‘books’.
Biblical scriptures contain a special revelation about the will of God - we need to interpret what is told to understand it correctly but the revelation is there.
The other ‘book’ is the book of creation. It is more general but it can reveal about the way how God acts like art can reveal something about the artist.

I also believe that God does not lie. Truth is therefore important for me, more important than what I have earlier believed to be true. If I learn something about our reality, something that holds through all testing, I cannot just deny it. When necessary, I need to adjust my interpretations so that my beliefs are not in conflict with truth. That is a stepwise process where I have to first admit that I do not know everything and then accept that I have to be willing to modify my assumptions where these are in conflict with what is shown to be true.

That includes also having the same attitude towards the teachings of the various religious groups. A church may have a better cumulative understanding of the will of God than an individual but none of the churches has infallible knowledge. For that reason, also the doctrines of the various religious groups need to be tested, compared with what is shown to be true. What is according to truth may be kept, what is in conflict with the facts should be modified or rejected.

This attitude is somewhat demanding in the sense that I cannot just hide behind the backs of religious authorities. Truth challenges at the personal level and sometimes forces to chose. I have chosen to support what the facts tell, even when that puts me outside my former social circles or even outside a denomination.

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I think of logic as a foundation: absolutely necessary, but if you just stay with the foundation you don’t have much of a house.

For me they were never apart – how could they be? If I have a friend who designed a city park covering an entire four city blocks, learning about the park is learning about that friend, and learning about that friend is learning about the park.

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You can’t possibly know that. You can only assert via blind faith you think it’s reasonable.

You are saying, “Everything is based on blind faith at its core but I blindly believe my blind faith is more than reasonable than yours because I blindly believe this stuff is more important than that stuff and I’ll make an arbitrary and untestable reason why.”

The entire time your defense rests on using reason as does science itself. Reason is more fundamental than science in that sense.

Your special pleading for science is not very compelling.

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Moderation note: Thank you all for sharing your testimonies and experiences. Since this thread is essentially requesting people’s very personal spiritual musings, maybe we could not argue about whether other people’s experience or explanation of faith is correct enough or not here. (There are plenty of other threads for that.) If you have a genuine, “what did you mean by that?” clarifying question, by all means, ask away, but if you are feeling a knee-jerk need to tell someone else they are wrong, how about we not do that here? Thanks.

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