Yearning for Faith, Searching for Solid Ground - Calling on Believers

Faith & Science Conversation
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For background, I grew up Catholic and attended a Jesuit school from the age of 4 through 18. I regret not engaging more deeply with the content in my philosophy and theology courses during that time. As a child I believed blindly, but without nurturing that faith I drifted into agnosticism, then atheism, and eventually back to agnosticism.

Now, a few years post-grad with fewer distractions, I find myself desperately wanting to believe. I know I cannot derive lasting meaning from a strictly materialist worldview. I admire those who can, but I know I cannot and do not wish to return to that way of thinking. And yet, no matter how hard I try, my mind resists the step of faith.

I do not think religion and science are in conflict, nor do I think belief in God is unreasonable. I accept modern science, evolution, etc, etc. That is not the issue. The problem is that despite reviewing nearly every popular thought exercise for faith, such as objective morality and the human experience, nothing seems to work for me. I know faith does not appear overnight, it cannot be forced, and that it shouldn’t rest on a single thought exercise, but I feel like I have tried every angle without finding solid ground.

The argument I have found most compelling that I’m sure most of you have encountered countless times is the way humans experience love, beauty, and awe. If the universe were nothing more than matter and chance, beauty would reduce to an evolutionary by-product. But the universality, intensity, and almost “objective” quality of beauty make me suspect that it points to something real beyond us.

Of course, a materialist could counter that this sense of objectivity is an illusion. Evolution has primed us to feel awe at sunsets or to fall in love because such feelings reinforce cooperation, survival, and reproduction. From that view, beauty and love do not need to be real beyond our neurons.

A theist may reply that this still does not satisfy. If every natural desire corresponds to something real, such as hunger to food or thirst to water, then what do we make of our longing for transcendent beauty, eternal love, and something beyond ourselves? In this view, our experiences of love and beauty are not evolutionary glitches but signposts toward God.

And yet, despite how attractive this sounds, I still cannot put full confidence in it. I cannot shake the thought that my longing to believe might be clouding my judgment and leaving me vulnerable to confirmation bias. I find it difficult to move past the conclusion that evolution alone is the most likely source for these feelings. Even if I grant that the evolutionary explanation can be true at the same time as the idea that these experiences point to something more, I cannot bring myself to believe it. My heart resonates with Lewis, but my mind will not let me prefer that vision over the evolutionary account. I truly feel like I am missing something, and I would be grateful if someone could fill in the knowledge or understanding gaps I cannot bridge on my own.

I am genuinely trying to think deeply and honestly, yet I feel caught between longing and doubt. In speaking with dozens of theists over the past few months, the common thread I hear is that belief often deepens not primarily through argument but through practice: prayer, Mass, and the lived experience of relationship with God. I recognize that faith is not reducible to reason, but I do believe reason can and should provide a foundation.

I would absolutely love to hear from others who have been in a similar position: what helped you move forward, or how did you find peace in the tension between doubt and belief? Please feel free to comment directly on the aesthetic / human experience arguments, or on others such as objective morality, or simply share anything that you felt significantly helped your own faith journey, especially if you have been where I am now. Thank you!

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Welcome to the forum! It is good to hear your voice, and your thoughts resonate with me and I am sure many here. For me, a helpful thing is to come to embrace the fact that we cannot know everything with certainty, and to learn to be comfortable with doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but is part of it, it seems to me. If you are certain of something, it requires no faith on your part.
You seem to have a good handle on things, and I agree that exercising your faith is the best way to move forward. Community is important in our mental and spiritual health, and working with a community helping those both inside and outside that community is helpful in life’s journey. It will probably take a lifetime to answer those questions, and as I recall the headmaster at Jayber Crow’s seminary telling him in the book by that name, probably a little more.

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It is a shame we cannot teach faith, or argue faith or even pass it on. All we can do is witness the effect our faith has had on us and where we started from.

I think we can get distracted by heated discussions between people who are passionate about their beliefs and emphatic about what can or cannot be believed. At the end of the day you have to make up your own mind. Scripture is there with the basics about Christianity but whether you include all the pious baggage is another matter.

Religion is not just about eternity, but also how we liv this life. if all you do is align yourself with good intentions you may find it helps you to isolate what really matters to you. Clearly the existence of God is paramount and is the biggest step of all. Get past that and maybe the rest will fall into place.

Richard

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Not bad! I routinely shoot down arguments for God, spirit, etc… but mostly because they pretend to objective validity. This approach looks inherently subjective to me and I think that is much better. I think dealing with the subjective necessities of our life is the whole point.

My reasons for belief… perhaps it is time for me to post these 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.

But are these actually biological? Or are they something which has risen in quite a separate part of our existence with its own process of development and inheritance apart from the biological one? Again I think the highly subjective nature of these are the greatest hint for them being on the right track. IOW skeptics can simply doubt the reality these feeling apart from more physical experiences – dismissing them as imaginary (and they have done so many times). Sounds like the right category of existence to me.

Now if you were talking about morality I would totally agree with an evolutionary origin. I think morality is a necessity for all organisms which participate in any kind of community. And if what we have is different from other animals it is only because we have this non-biological aspect of our existence in language and the human mind by which we give a conceptual dimension to morality which animals do not have (at least not yet as far as we can tell).

I grew up mostly outside religion, unless you characterize psychology and liberalism as such. Though I did go to a Catholic school for one year (sixth grade, last year of elementary school). And I did get introduced the Narnia series (as well as Tolkein) at that time. So I was coming much from the opposite direction, starting with science and then peeking into religion to decide if any of that stuff was worth my time and consideration.

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I spent the earliest years of my life outside religion. My parents became Christian when i was about 11.

When i look back on my journey through life, im grateful that they did because when we strip everything else away there is one absolute…death. the fundamental scientific fact is that at some point sooner or later its kaput for all of us.

When i consider the inevitable id like to think there is more. Some say that believing in the bible is but one of many alternatives for a future beyond death, however when we dive into the depths of the bible narrative we find it has so much supporting evidence, we can trace the history right back to its earliest pages. The internal consistency of its writings are significant…its clearly a lot more than a made up story. The evidence is strongly in favour of the notion of God, the plight of mankind and the gospel.

The summary for me is this:

Atheist says there is no God = whether true or false, atheist dies and there is no life for him beyond this one

Christian says there is a God = if he is right he recieves eternal life after death. Even if Christian is wrong, he and the atheist end up the same at worst.

Given the above, the only person who could possibly win there is the Christian…he has absolutely nothing to lose but a heck of a lot to gain. People regularly play lotto for far less than a chance at eternal life.

I have spent the last 5 years deeply studying the history of the bible. The are some overwhelming historical evidences for its narrative and these are important. The bible is far more than a book about morality…it has a well evidenced, consistent, and rich history. Id suggest you need to immerse yourself into an historical journey that js the bible, then you will be able to confidently know that faith isnt blind, faith isnt naive, faith is historical, faith is believing in a real God, faith is sourced from a real gospel…these are real literal things based on real history. Socratees cannot offer us that…Islam cannot offer us a traceable history (historicaly its a fraud actually), only Christianity and the Bible can offer one those things. Study its history.

Christ came and lived among us so that we could see and believe. Sure he also said blessed are those who do not see yet believe (doubting thomas)…but he still came and lived smong us just the same right, so go amd find the history and find the historical reason for your faith.

Oh, and go help others in need…i think that is a gift from God that we seek to help others. Christ said “in as much as you have done it to the least of these my bretheren, you have done it to me” (thats the gospel in action i think)

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Take the Gospel of John as the start because it devotes much of its material to Holy Week and then the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is why I ever went to church – without it, there’s no point; with it, there’s little reason to not go! If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the whole business is just a con game; if He did, then everything begins to make sense.
The first thing that makes sense is the Cross, the center of Christian theology. After it, the rest begins to fall into place.