Side Bar: The Grand Dilemma

Before I continue discussing the problem of an omnipotent, loving God and cruelty in the world, I must provide some background. I know I often repeat myself, but I have a problem: while I have about 350 subscribers (a tiny number in the blog-o-sphere), over the past six years I’ve had 75,000 unique readers, meaning most are “drive-by” readers.

Here is what I call the humans’ grand dilemma. When you look honestly at atheism, the notion that the entire cosmos spontaneously sprouted out of nothing, with all its complexities, quirks (and quarks), its incredible mathematical consistency, and profound fine-tuning for human life, it is full of absurdities. One of many concepts about the origins is that a mysterious door swung open, allowing matter and antimatter to separate from nothing into their respective states. Then, the anti-matter and matter reunite into nothing, except the door closes, abandoning some matter outside, which is our cosmos. The stuff of fairy tales. And then, for human life to appear has its own absurdities. As Anton Petrov (one of my favorite science educators, and I think an atheist) explains here , the mathematical modeling of the cosmos shows that the odds of intelligent life appearing are less than 1 in trillions.

I will skip pantheism for the sake of brevity (which is also full of absurdities), but monotheism has its own absurdities; this idea of an omnipotent, loving God allowing cruelty is just one of many. This is the Grand Dilemma: all possible answers are absurd, yet one must be true.

Furthermore, I must say that most people who believe in a monotheistic God do so for the wrong reason. It is out of social coercion. They were raised to believe in God (or be shunned by the family) or entered the theistic-religious society via other means. However, they default to subjective truth: “I know God is there because I can feel Him or hear Him.” This ignores the overwhelming evidence from psychological and sociological studies that show human emotions are useless tools for finding truth, even if you label those emotions “spiritual.” The Bible is totally consistent when it says in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart, the seat of our emotions, is the most deceitful thing in the universe.

I believe that God has given us one epistomological tool for finding truth: God-given reason. We use it in everything we do, except for our religious thinking. However, reason isn’t perfect because we aren’t, and we allow our emotions to taint it. I also believe in God’s inspiration and revelation; however, when you go back to the problem of our emotions, also being fallible, it is tough for us to know that revelation. Most of the time when a religious leader says, “God spoke to me and said…” it is for an evil cause to manipulate people. Sometimes we get it right.

Here is the good news. If we believe the truth but for the wrong reasons, does it matter? Likely not, except that if you think the truth for the wrong reason, you are more likely to believe other things for the wrong reason, some of which are false. This is why false conspiracy theories about science, politics, and history have found no better home than in the Christian community. If there is a God, that God must live in the light of factual truth, not as an illusionist or a charlatan. Therefore, if Christianity is authentic, that community should hold factual truths the most, but they don’t.

The other problem with believing the right thing for the wrong reason is doubt. When I was an evangelical, in the very secret places of my heart, lying on my bed at night, never speaking these thoughts outside my head to anyone, I was plagued with doubts. The church teaches that doubt is a spiritual problem, or a moral problem… the lack of faith, so you better not disclose it to anyone, right? It is not. It is an intellectual problem. When you bypass reason, to reach subjective truth, it is human nature to be full of doubts, or delusions. Depending on subjective truth only is a relatively new invention in the chruch.

When I left Christianity in 1990, I began to study, looking for the truth. Before then, we believed in intellectual isolationism. Never expose yourself to non-Christian information or thoughts because those are of the devil. Never read a book written by an unbeliever. I threw away a lot of books as soon as I realized atheists wrote them, or anyone not conforming to my religious ideas.

But when I started to study the atheists, and others, not only did I find them to be good people (not the devil as I had been told), and intelligent people (not fools as I had been taught), at first, they did lead me further from Christianity. But I did not stop there. As I read and listened to more lectures from those opposed to Christianity, I found them wanting. Really? That’s all you’ve got? In the end, my belief in God was profoundly improved because I approached it with intellectual honesty. Yeah, there are absurd things in the Christian story, but equally or more so absurd things in the atheistic story.

If I were to teach a class on doubt to young believers (as I did in the past), I would not blame it on a spiritual problem. I would also not lie about the argument of the atheist as the Young Earth Creationists do. I would start with the best anti-Christian atheists, listen carefully to their claims, and with full respect as smart, decent human beings. You cannot address doubt with lies.

The problem for me is that when I write with emotional and intellectual honesty, as I do here, it causes religious people, people whom I would love to have as friends, to hate me. Because I challenge the popular thinking, they find me despicable and do not hesitate to tell me so. How many times have I been “mansplained” in my own church, that my relationship with God is not legitimate, or at least inferior? But I worry most, not about me, as my time on this earth is expiring, but about the younger people who are being forced out of the church because they ask the hard questions.

Now, back to my discussion about the injustices of life in the next post.

Respectfully, Mike