Belief – less is more
Following on from the last post, I found this piece from Christian Piatt today.
“What if I’m not sure what I believe” is the question he talks about, and I’m entirely happy with the direction he goes in, of remaining open to new ideas, new ways of looking at theology. The snag is that in a very large slice of Christianity, being undecided about something is being lukewarm (perish the thought that Paul would disapprove of me!), and being undecided about many things is being a doubter – and as I was informed in an Alpha talk recently, doubt is a principal weapon of Satan.
The thing is, I am fundamentally a scientific rationalist, and so a very large amount of the concepts I work with are working hypotheses rather than things I “believe in” in the sense that churches tend to mean the word. I’m used to juggling a number of possible working hypotheses, and I’m used to situations like wave-particle duality in Physics where there are two mutually inconsistent ways of looking at something each of which “works” in certain circumstances but neither of which “works” in all.
I also have a fair number of years practicing law behind me, and am horribly familiar with the perils of being certain of a situation before all of the evidence has been examined, or in spite of some of the evidence which doesn’t quite fit the desired answer. Law, of course, always ends up with someone delivering a verdict. That’s an imposed certainty rather than an actual one, in most cases. Some years ago I considered a sample of cases of people who had been convicted of offences, and came to the conclusion that rather more than 25% of convictions were actually wrong – granted, most were convictions for the wrong offence, or convictions of someone who had committed this kind of crime on other occasions but was actually not guilty on this occasion.
Some years ago I read a terrible book called “Evidence which Demands a Verdict” by one Josh McDowell. This is a work of Christian apologetics, and where it promises to advance evidence, actually is a one-sided making of a case. The only way you’d be likely to get the verdict the writer wanted in a real adversarial tribunal would for there to be no argument against, whether based on the faulty or unreliable evidence, faulty reasoning or ignoring contradictory evidence, and for the Judge to be no lawyer. With any reasonably competent opposition, I think the only verdict which could actually be reasonably delivered would be “not proven”.
But why demand a verdict at all? Generally speaking, you only demand a verdict when you want certainty about something, and if it’s a shaky certainty because the evidence is not conclusive, you’re losing something by forcing the point. It frankly makes little difference to me whether about 90% of the creed in my church is correct or not, and my church is fairly light on the amount of theological assertion which is actually demanded openly (though there’s a stack of other stuff which is understood). I’m not going to love God more or less, love my neighbour more or less or follow Jesus more or less because of most of these statements, not least the labyrinthine complexities of trinitarian understandings. Or whether there was a virgin birth, or a physical resurrection.
Largely, therefore, my answer is that if I’m not sure what I believe, I’m avoiding false certainties, I’m trying to achieve some humility about my own viewpoints.
I wonder if Josh has read “The Cloud of Unknowing”? It could be that with belief, less is more.