Faith,Wilful Ignorance and Mysterious Ways

For this post I’d like to discuss something I touched on when discussing the effects of immigration. I want to talk about having faith in the absence of specific answers, and as an alternative to bickering about things we do not and cannot know.

Faith is a tricky concept, especially when, like myself, you’ve been raised in a culture that prizes rationalism, absolute intellectual knowledge and scientific enquiry. These are all good things. As humans we are curious; we like to find out what things are, what they do, how they work, where they came from, what will happen to them if we do this or that or just leave them be.

As a species this curiosity has not only been our greatest asset, it has defined us and our development. Right from ‘If I tie these logs together, could I sit on them and float down the river?’ to ‘I wonder what happens if I mash these two lumps of uranium together?’ Our thirst for knowledge drives us.

As a result, because religion can often only be very vague in terms of certain knowledge, many people grow frustrated or disdainful of it. ‘Prove it’ is the atheist’s constant (and not, on the face of it, unreasonable) refrain. The whole study of theology is based on similar questions. Who is God? What is God? How does He work? Where did He come from? What does He want? Theology suggests various answers to all these questions. Where these answers differ we get schisms, arguments, even conflicts.

Some questions have answers that can be reasoned through, and if we have no physical evidence, we can at least demonstrate a chain of logic. There are some subjects, however, for which we cannot do that. For me, some of the hardest are well-known questions such as ‘Will virtuous non-Christians go to heaven?’, or ‘Do other religions lead to God?’

My natural sense of justice and fair play push me towards saying yes to both. Surely a life lived in accordance with the ideals of love, mercy, forgiveness and grace that Christianity preaches must count for something, even if the person in question has not explicitly accepted the grace of God.

On the other hand, Jesus seems fairly unequivocal. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one shall come to the Father except through me.’

One can tie oneself in theological and philosophical knots and say that such a person has accepted His grace even if they didn’t realise it. ‘Every good thing is done for me, even if you do not know my name’. Similarly it strikes me as horribly arrogant to state that my religion happens to be the only true and correct one, and everyone else is mistaken or misguided. It seems only fair to concede that all faiths at least point to God, even if some are distorted or only see Him very vaguely. I can perhaps say that I think mine is the clearest image of God whilst still admitting that not only are others at least partially correct but that my image is by no means perfect.

Issues of soteriology cause ructions within the church. How are people saved? How does it work? Theories abound but true knowledge is absent. This doesn’t stop serious arguments, fallings out, accusations of heresy and even persecutions.

Secular modernity disdains blind faith, and I think does so rightly. To me a faith unexamined, unquestioned, and untested is a weak sort of faith, a brittle kind that might snap at the first hint of doubt.

It’s easy (for me at least) to believe in God. It makes logical and rational sense to me. Much of traditional Christian doctrine likewise makes sense, or is at least of a kind that I am happy to believe in until I see definite evidence to the contrary.

Other questions though leave me shrugging and shaking my head, unable to arrive at an answer. The typical atheist response would be to say that these issues can be dismissed until a proper answer presents itself, but this strikes me as a kind of close-mindedness. We can dismiss the importance of the question, muttering something about ‘mysterious ways’, and this can often come across as wilful ignorance or an intellectual cop-out in place of a robust response. When used as such, the ones asking the questions get rightly frustrated.

However, I think that as a response it can be used actively as well as passively. Faith in the existence of God, or the Incarnation of whatever is one thing. There may be no scientific evidence, but I can believe the assertion anyway. Not knowing the answer, but being able to believe that even though it might not make sense to me, God knows what He’s doing, even if I can’t figure it out myself is a different and more difficult kind of faith. It’s much more like trust than belief, and as a result is much harder, especially given the human need to know how things work. I don’t know whether salvation is through election or free-will. I don’t know whether good non-Christians go to Heaven. I know what I think makes sense, but that’s not the same as knowing the answer. All I can do is believe that God is good, loving and just, that He knows what He is doing, and what He’s doing is for our ultimate good.

I don’t see this as blind faith or wilful ignorance per se. It’s not a faith unquestioned so much as a faith that doesn’t know all the answers, and is happy to admit that. A faith that is willing to trust that all will be made clear, even if at the moment I am incapable of understanding, and that I already know as much as I need to. It’s a faith that comes very hard, and can be rather unsatisfying. I’ll just have to try and deal with that, try to trust, and believe that ultimately, all will be made known.

The Scientific Advancement of Theology

An opinion piece by Giles Fraser on the Guardian website has garnered a fair number of comments, and being a piece of a religious nature, has obviously attracted the usual angry atheists.  One commenter rubbished the entire study of theology, and supported his position by quoting Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason:

“The study of theology as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.”

Ouch.

Another poster pointed out that theology has changed since then.  A third poster responded to this with:

“What theology since then? As Hitchens said, "Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago". Nothing has changed since the days of Paine.”

There a few things to be said in response, least of which is that, as Paine says, theology certainly isn’t a science in the sense that most scientists would define it. I take absolutely no issue with that. Also, ‘Religion’ can speak no words at all, since it lacks a mouth, but I’ve been over that before and have no wish to belabour the point.

However, to suggest that theology has remained unchanged in the two hundred years since Paine wrote is simply untrue; it cannot be true. I say this because in many ways the people writing about theology now are very different to the people writing about it two hundred years ago. We have different outlooks, society is different, our values are different. We view what has gone before us with different eyes.

Ironically, given the constant attempts to set them in opposition to each other, this change in perspective and theology has changed, perhaps even advanced, because of science. Since Paine wrote his words, science and technology have changed not only our understanding of the universe, but the very world in which we live. We now know about evolution and genetics, our knowledge of astronomy is vastly greater than it was then, we know about molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, radiation and quantum physics. Our place in the world is not what we thought it was, and so we have had to adjust our conception of God and how He works.

As a result of these, our understandings of God have had to become more nuanced. God didn’t merely wave his hand and there was the world. God didn’t create man out of dust. Our sun is not the only sun, our planet is not the only world that might contain life. Life itself might exist in forms that are almost totally unrecognisable to us. This knowledge has to inform our theology. Where it has not done so, we see fundamentalist sects sinking into extremism fuelled by a siege mentality as the tide of scientific evidence to show that Genesis is not literally true threatens to overwhelm them.

I have said that theology is not scientific; that’s absolutely true, nor should it be. After all, since it deals with matters upon which science cannot have a bearing, it cannot be scientific itself. However, it has changed with scientific discoveries, and with the social changes that have been brought about by those discoveries and the technology that they have produced. Theology is not, should not and cannot be static and stagnant. God is unchanging, but few would claim that we are close to an understanding of Him yet. Our understanding of God must continue to change, to grow, to expand, even as we do. We must constantly adjust and refine our conception of God based on what He has revealed and is revealing to us and, indirectly, science helps us do just that.