Evidence for God

When I was a Christian, one of the things that bothered me about faith was that God could be reduced to a matter of perspective. For most Christians, it seemed that life just happened as it would and God was given credit for all the good things and the bad things were just happening "in his time." For example, if I have a sick friend and I pray to God to heal him, one of two things will happen; my friend will recover or he won't. If he recovers, either immediately or within nearly any time frame, it must have been God healing him, but if he does not recover, then it was just God's will. I was always frustrated that knowing the God of the universe seemed to changed so little. Shouldn't everything be different because we know God?

I'm sure this outlook on life is comforting to the believer, but does nothing to demonstrate the existence of God. This is an exerpt from deconversion.com called Salvaging Santa. It's a clever piece of satire demonstrating that most of the apologetic proofs are God would be just as effective to prove the existence of Santa Claus. It is interesting to see all my old Christian arguments in a new context:

Place Santa out of the reach of science.
Some point to what they consider the absurdity of a voluminous man descending a narrow chimney and other mysterious aspects of Santa. Here are a few ways to deal with this form of persecution.

-Announce that Santa’s magic is far above human understanding. Santa, in his infinite magic, can fatten flukes at will, create chimneys where there are none, and leave everything intact as if he had never descended from the roof at all. Ask the secularists how they even dare with their puny minds to question the magic of our Santa.

-Call problematic parts of the Santa story figurative. Suggest that the notion of “descending the chimney” is a metaphor of Santa’s intent. He actually may come through a window. What matters is that the presents are there in the morning. In doing this, never submit a standard for discerning between literal and figurative elements of the Santa story. That will make it convenient for you to choose which is which as aplogetics needs arise.

-Remind non-believers that, if the Santa story could be tested and confirmed, we couldn’t employ the faith that feeds the magic. Accuse them of not listening to the clear voice of Santa that each of us carries deep in our hearts if we only listen with open minds.

-Affirm the magic. Point out all the cases in which reindeer dung was found on roof tops. Suggest that any father who would simply throw dung on his roof in an attempt to create the illusion of a rangiferine landing would have to be either a lunatic or liar. The only sensible inference is that Santa’s sleigh had indeed visited your house.

-Belittle science and its tools. Point out that science is often wrong and is therefore not an appropriate method to assess the magic of Santa. Claim that statistics are a silly invention, and strongly affirm the idea that anything can be “proven” through statistics. The stronger you affirm this, the more true it will become. In this way, reports that suggest poorer (not misbehaving) children receive fewer presents can be dismissed. If secularists suggest this is not logical, claim that Santa logic is not the same as secular logic, but don’t bother explaining how.

-Suggest that science and magic fall into two non-overlapping domains. Declare that scientific methodology cannot assess the wonderment of magic. When asked about specific claims of Santaism that seem to fall within the reach of science, offer evasive permutations of the particular doctrine to make it impotent and thus unassailable. Fudging a bit on exegesis is forgivable if the net result is an increase in believers.

-Disparage the notion of belief based on “evidence”. This is becoming one of the most troubling issues that has already led to the apostasy of thousands. You’ll hear secularists claim that the degree of confidence in an idea should match the degree of the evidence. Where is the magic in that? Evidence only goes so far and is largely linear. How can belief be linear? Choose a side! Unless we go beyond the evidence with faith, we would be left saying “I don’t yet know” on many questions, a wholly unacceptable option.

2. Exercise the right to arbitrarily define true Santaism.
You’ll often hear accusations that Santanists do not behave any better than non-believers. Here you’ll want to point out the fallacy in this accusation by simply explaining that those who don’t act like Santanists are not real Santaists. This will prevent your opponent from citing anecdotes, and require him to lean on statistics that require a substantial sample that you can then simply dismiss as not representative of Santaism. If your opponent then demands positive evidence for superior behavior among Santaist, simply offer a few anecdotes as proof.

3. Appeal to what people already know in their hearts.
There are times when you may simply ignore the anti-santa arguments. Every person knows deep in his heart that Santa is real. Presuppositional affirmations are the way to go. This is economical in that it minimizes potential cognitive dissonance that may creep in through cracks in your counter-arguments, and eliminates the expenditure of contemplation that distracts from faith in Santa, and may even lead to doubting.

4. Emphasize emotions.
Fortunately, Christmas is replete with salient sensations that easily form a sense of identity, of belonging, and also address dozens of other emotional needs. We know through a feeling of certainty that emotions are a legitimate validator of what is true, so regardless of the apparent power of the secularist’s arguments, this emotional validation is what will vanquish the doubts that have destroyed the magic in so many young lives. And perhaps the greatest argument you can make is to ask weak believers if they would want to live in a world that had no magic. Ask them if they want to grow up to become merely scientists restricted by the parameters of materialism. Emphasize the rigor and critical thought required by those who have abandoned magic and have endeared themselves to rational thought. Above all, emphasize the personal relationship believers have with Santa. Have them make psychological investments by writing Santa letters for years, then remind them of this and of all other psychological investments at any point in which their faith is weak. Remind them that Santa’s apparent silence is simply a test of their faith or an indication that their requests are selfish. And always return to the assurance that emotions are a legitimate way to confirm the truth of their faith.

A First Look at Love

Because this blog is not solely about losing faith, but also the experience of love, this will be my first of many posts about love and its relationship to religion.

Through all my years of being heavily involved in church, one of the most prominent cliches is that 'God is love.' I had always been taught that not only does God love, but its what he is. His entire being is e essence of love and when we know God, we know love. Under that heading it was easy for me to get past the difficult parts of the Bible, because if God really was love, all those killings must have been for some reason I wouldn't understand until I got to heaven. Now that I am looking at Christianity from the outside, I wonder what the Biblical evidence for the statement 'God is love' really is. I went to an online Bible and search for the keywords 'God is love' thinking I would come up with dozens of responses, but interestingly, I only had two hits, both in the book of 1 John. (4:8 and 4:16) I thought it was strange that this teaching does not appear until the very end of the Bible and in a book that very few Christians study, so I tried again, this time on another search engine. Still the same. Certainly there are passages that discuss how much God loves his people or examples of his love, but why do so many Christians believe that God is love if it is only briefly mentioned in 1 John?

My hypothesis is that the human experience of love is so transcendental that we feel the need to worship it. Love is the one experience that makes me take a second look at whether we are only just chemical reactions or if there is some other force within or around us that causes us to feel this way. Love is something that represents what is truly good and for most people, what makes life worth living. I understand the need the make love something true, something more real than just chemical reactions. We feel the same way about morality; I don't follow my internal morals because they are inherited or learned social behaviors, but because I feel my actions are truly right or wrong. Emotionally, I don't think we will ever accept that these behaviors are mere chemicals, and so to explain it, we put a head and legs on it, and call it God. Now, this "God" is the source of all love and all morality, a being to explain our deep longing for truth.

Does this prove the existence of God? What if these other worldly experiences could be explained scientifically? I have been reading quite a few papers lately about oxytocin, the chemical released in our brains during sex, childbirth and stimulates a woman to release milk for breastfeeding. More research has been done to examine oxytocin's role in social behaviors, specifically long term partnerships and trust. Experiments were initially done on rodents that exhibit long term mating behaviors and the researchers found that oxytocin was directly involved in the strength of partnership behaviors. When rodents species not known for long term mating were given oxytocin, they remained with their partners much longer than placebo, and when those rodents who usually did mate for life had the genes for oxytocin knocked out, they suddenly were only interested in 'one-night stands.' This also applies to humans; oxytocin has been shown to increase trust and social behaviors in addition to its established sexual role. A nice summary of the research can be found http://www.oxytocin.org/oxytoc/love-science.html .

So now what? Is love only a series of oxytocin and dopamine release or do our desires for truth and love beyond ourselves prove the existence of some external source?

Why Evangelize?

In reading another blog about converstion between athiesm and catholicism (http://www.conversiondiary.com/) and learned this little tidbit from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

"Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation."

Basically, it is the opinion of the catholic church that if you have never heard about Jesus or even God, it's not your fault and you can still go to heaven. If you are a sincere and good person, that's good enough for God. Initially, I was relieved to read something like that. The idea that God could send someone to eternal punishment for something they were completely ignorant of had always struck me as globally unfair, but this bit of theology raises an interesting question: why evangelize? If everyone who is ignorant of God and a relatively good person will go to heaven, why risk telling them the truth? Then they might decide they don't agree with what you've said, but since they now have information, they will be held responsible for it. Why not just let everyone die in their ignorance and end up in heaven? The only argument I can think of is that those in ignorance will miss out on knowing God in this lifetime and doing his work, but that doesn't seem to be much of a problem in light of eternity. If a person can just make it into heaven, they have millions of years to foster a relationship with God, do his work and most likely have relationships with others around them. If its true that "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 4:14b), then just a few years of knowing God on earth hardly seem worth the risk.

Angry Atheists

When I first began this journey of dwindling faith towards the realm of atheism, I starting with a lot of reading. The first book I picked up was Dan Barker's Godless. I was moved by his story of completely leaving the world of religion and felt for the first time that maybe I didn't have to believe in this anymore. Naturally, the first thing I did when I got home from the bookstore (seeing as I was too cheap to actually buy the book) was google him. I found dozens of book titles and interviews, and when reading through the text of his discussion with Christians, he came across as sort of an ass. I had the same experience when listening to Christopher Hitchens debate a Christian and Jew; he was definitely an ass. The more atheist blogs I visit and comment conversations I eavesdrop on, it seems that there are plenty of angry athiests out there; people who are enraged or at least highly irritated by religious people and have no qualms about calling them idiots or speaking about them with condescention. I vowed to myself that I would never become one of these angry athiests; that I would always respect Christians because not so long ago I was one.

This week I had my eyes opened as to why a great number of athiests may be angry with Christians. I posted a comment on a christian blog that was discussing what to tell your friends when they say they have been searching for God and cannot find him. Most of the readers responding with either 'try harder' or 'just wait', and I felt the need to enter the discussion. I empathized with those who have searched and never found and I wondered why God would be this way if he loves us so much. In return, I was told that I must be ignoring God, that I am being selfish and self centered for desiring so much and that the work Jesus did on the cross should be enough for me if I would just quit putting demands on God. There are Christians out there who would not respond this way, and I hope I run into more of them in this journey. However, if this is the response that atheists are getting from trying to dialouge with Christians, I am beginning to understand why they are angry.

Supernaturalists are naturalists

In all the time I've spent researching whether or not I believed in God, one of the authors I always had referred to was C.S.Lewis and his book Miracles. His main discussion in that book is the difference between naturalists (people who believe that the universe we experience with our senses and logic is all there is) and supernaturalists (people who believe that there could be something outside of the universe that created it).

The more I look, I am finding that most supernaturalists are closer to being naturalists than they realize. For example, one argument for the existance of God is that we all have a sense of morality and justice, which must have been put there by a creator. It is the belief of the supernaturalist that all of our inclinations towards morality are a reflection of the thoughts of God, and He decided before our creation what was just and put in our hearts those ideas. If this were the case, I would expect that every act of God or action He approves of or commands would agree with my sense of justice and morality. If God gave me my ethics, I should wholeheartedly agree with His. However, I am hard pressed to find anyone who strongly agrees with the actions of God while establishing the nation of Isreal. He commanded killing of women and children and occasionally ordered genocide of 'evil' people groups. If our sense of justice or morality comes from God, why do his actions violate that? We should not need apologists to try to make sense of this issue, but we should find ourselves resonating in agreement with every one of God's actions. Yet, we don't.

If God truly is the origin of everything, including natural and spiritual laws, then He should be bound by no law except those he chooses to follow. Why is it that the wages of sin are death? God appears to be subject to a spiritual law he cannot overcome; he has no choice but to die for his people. If he created everything, why not create a world where forgiveness does not require death, but comes freely?

I believe that most people follow God not because they are convinced he created 'good' but because he is good. If God's commandments about love and justice are just whims of a creator, then nothing is truly good at all, but merely an opinion. In that case, God is subject to the laws of right and wrong just as we are, some deeper meaning of justice that is even greater than God.

Is God Good?

Knowing the answer to this question is the crux for all belief in god; positive or negative. Most Christians who have struggled with their faith are only able to overlook certain contradictions or problems with their beliefs because they strongly hold to the fact that God is good. Whatever question they cannot answer or confusing passage of scripture they encounter, if God is good, then no matter how the situation appears, faith remains intact. For example, I long struggled with the passages in the New Testament from Paul stating women's place in the church; that women were the weaker sex and they are not even allowed to speak at church but must ask their husbands at home. On the surface, this doesn't sound like God loves women as much as he loves men, but under the basic assumption that God is good, I always found a way around the evidence. Christian apologists state that these were just cultural norms to help unruly Greek women get along in church with more orderly Jewish women. It is possible to make excuse for any of God's actions by saying that we don't understand his ways and even though it seems the opposite, God is good.
The moment of my grandpa's death finally poked a hole in this philosophy. It is not good if God condemns a man who spent his life caring for others to eternal death just because he did not say the sinner's prayer. I had always been taught that God doesn't send people to hell, but they choose it. They reject God and refuse to follow him, so they get what they asked for. I was able to compartmentalize that thought because I never had to consider the ramifications of someone I loved going to hell. My grandpa was not a case of someone actively denying God, but someone who had a difficult time accepting that there was only one way to heaven. God states that we all deserve to die and none of us can measure up to his standards, yet some of us accept what we have been taught about God and some of us don't. Does that really merit eternal punishment?
I think that as humans, we have a longing to be intimately known and loved for exactly who we are. We desire to be cared for and know that our lives have a purpose. Doesn't it make more sense that we designed God to have these characteristics (loving father, best friend, even lover) and then use our theory to twist the evidence?

Is the Bible the Perfect Word of God?

I have great difficulty accepting things without good reason and more and more, Christianity was asking me to defy logical understanding in order to accept things on faith. I have heard the argument (and had used it more than once myself) that science is also fraught with leaps of faith, and any scientist cannot discredit religion when they themselves accept things on faith on a daily basis. While this is absolutely true, there is quite a difference between the leaps of faith asked of a scientist and those asked of a Christian. For example, the basis of nearly all research is founded on proving statistical significance, meaning we can say with 95% certainty that the treatment has caused an effect and the difference demonstrated there was not random chance. It is impossible to prove without the shadow of a doubt that whatever effect you are testing occurring precisely because of your intervention and that it will behave exactly that way each time you intervene, but we must make that assumption in order to proceed through scientific method. Therefore, scientists are constantly making leaps of faith. However, this faith is based on logical conclusions and usually mountains of evidence; if twenty times in a row, when I exercise my heart rate increases, I will have faith that on the twenty first time the same change will occur.
Asking me to take the leap of faith that the Bible is the infallible inerrant word of God was an entirely different matter. It defies logic to presume that a collection of documents whom scholars cannot agree on authors or dates written, which have been translated into dozens of different languages and passed through treacherous Dark Ages in which the controlling and often abusive Catholic Church employed the only people who could read and write somehow made it thousands of years without a single mistake. That in all the different translations into English, each one completely presents God’s intended message.
I do understand the need for the infallibility of the Bible, the need to completely accept everything we have been handed, because without it, what do we have? I had hoped that maybe I could come to a place where mistranslations and forgeries were just a part of reading the Bible and I could just try to get the intended message without any real harm to my relationship with God, however that is no better than before. How do I know which parts are truly representative of what God was trying to say and what stories are true? I would be tempted just to write off anything disturbing or disagreeable as a mistranslation and create my version of the Bible to my liking. (I have a sneaking suspicion this is already the unconscious practice of many Christians). What if the true meaning is exactly the uncomfortable parts and some edited in the nice words to help us swallow a difficult message a little easier? Accepting God’s word as only partially true was an even more difficult proposition than throwing it out completely. I could only see two options; either the Bible, through some miracle not described within its contents, was the perfect word of God, or it was purely and totally a human product, another reference to the ancient world for historians and philosophers to pour over.
When I was little, my dad used to ask me, “What do you think would happen if an irresistible force met an immoveable object?” Granted, I was only ten at the time and had to ask him what an irresistible force and an immovable object were, but I always remembered that strange question and struggled until I found an answer. After much thought and many years of growing up, I finally said to him, “The two cannot co-exist. If there is such thing as an immovable object, then there is no such thing as an irresistible force.” And yet, here I am struggling with those two things at this very moment; the immoveable object o f the existence of God, and this new irresistible force of reason telling me the God I believed in for so long has too many holes to make sense anymore.

Free Will and Knowing God

Most Christians struggle with the idea of predestination, especially when it comes to the “unsaved”. My particular quarrel with this is that either God is in control or we have free will. It cannot be both ways. For example, if God is control of circumstances, then he gives some people an easy time with faith, brought up in a loving home or taught scripture from an early age. It would be easy for someone like that to trust God, because their circumstances how made faith easy. However, someone brought up where religion is equated with hate and bigotry will have a much harder time. I have heard the argument that even someone who is brought up in this rougher situation still has a choice and if they don’t choose God, that means their hearts are bitter and hardened. But doesn’t God have the ability to soften a heart? When Moses was negotiating his people’s escape, God admits he hardened pharaohs heart. If God has the ability to harden, shouldn’t he be able to soften? In fact, isn’t this what we tell ourselves when we evangelize; that it is not anything we say or do really that wins people over, but God revealing himself to a person and we ask God to soften their hearts to his message. That would mean that God is really in control of whether we accept him or not. If that is true, then why isn’t everyone a Christian? Why wouldn’t God augment their circumstances in order that they would see him or soften their hearts so they would hear him? If he truly loves the whole world, why not give the whole world an equal chance to know him?

History

My grandpa died this year. I wasn't angry that he left; he had been defeating cancer for the past five years and he was nearly ninety. He was the kind of man you could count on. Anytime his family needed a new shelf built, a basketball hoop, someone to pick the kids up from school, he was there. He treated us to ice cream cones, and more than once bailed my parents out financially. He took care of the ladies down the street and planted flowers for his neighbors who were too old to do it for themselves. He was selfless and kind and in love with my grandma until the day he died. I was angry, not because he had cancer, but because the God that I had committed my life to said in his word that my grandpa deserved eternal torment in hell. This was the first time that I was faced with the uncertainty of a loved one's eternal life. My grandpa died with love for his family and friends, but none of us were really sure about his faith. He had been a semi-regular church go-er, but had some difficult experiences with religion in the past that kept him from really trusting it again. The moment that he died, my security in the character of God began to crack. What made my grandpa so different than me that God would allow me eternal life, but not extend the same mercy to my grandpa? In scripture, He makes it very clear that none of us deserve his love and mercy, so why do only some of us recieve it?
Everyone who calls themselves a Christian has certain areas that sit unsettled, sticking points about their faith they hope no unbeliever asks them to explain. For some, it's predestination, for others, its the stories of God's ruthlessness in the Old Testament. I always had a list of questions/problems that didn't sit well with me, but the pros of my beliefs always seemed to outweigh the cons, and because I was so sure that God was real and most importantly that God was good, I allowed myself not to think of these difficulties.
With this deep crack in my faith, allowing me to ask questions I never had before I began to examine all the basic assumptions of my faith. How do I know God? How do I know the Bible is accurate? Is there even a God?
Each post hereafter will be some piece of an answer to these questions. I want to know if there is a god and the ramifications of that answer. If yes, how do know anything about him? If no, what does that mean for the purpose and meaning of my life?

Welcome

Welcome to Love and Losing Faith.
This journey began as a search for answers from God, a painful process of crying out to blank walls and silence. The further I dug with questions about the basic tenets of my Christian faith, I began to find that everything I believed may not be as it seemed. For too long I was unable to look at my beliefs objectively, holding them so close they became a part of me, but now that I am finally ready to shake my foundations, I have found nothing to press against. Reading and researching aren't enough for me anymore; I want to debate with others who have considered these same questions. So, my purpose in this blog is to present my findings, ask questions I cannot answer, and listen closely to your thoughts. I am eager for discussion about the validity of the Bible, our purpose on earth and the inescapable need for humans to love and be loved.