Paradoxes of Theodicy

Part I. The Problem of Evil.

A typical form of the Argument from Evil claims that it is unreasonable to think that a God exists who would permit evil, if he is assumed to have the following properties:

• Omnipotent (all-powerful)
• Omniscience (all-knowing, all-wise)
• Perfectly good

(Actually, it would be even more typical if the presentation used the term "Omnibenevolent" for the moral property.  But I can't help but notice that this term is only ever used by skeptics presenting this particular argument.  It is not a term traditionally used by theologians, and I'm not entirely certain what its meaning is.  What does the "omni" part extent over?  Different persons?  Different acts?  Does it mean that God is obligated to create every possible being?  Does it mean that God is obligated to give every possible good to every possible being?  Traditional theology tends to deny the existence of such obligations.  I have accordingly replaced the "moral" attribute with what I consider to be a better term.)

The argument goes, that if God is perfectly good, he will want to prevent us from experiencing any evil.  If God is all-wise, he will be aware of the best method for eliminating evil.  And if God is all-powerful, then he will be able to implement this method without encountering any obstacle to his power.  So then what is the explanation of evil?

The term "theodicy" refers to attempts to explain why God permits evil.  This post will not, quite, propose any specific theodicy.  Although there are various theodicy-like proposals that I will make in various places in this essay, most of them fairly tentatively.  Instead, my points will be more on the meta level.  I will argue for some reasons to be skeptical about the cogency of the Argument from Evil in this form.  I will argue for the following theses:

1. It is not highly implausible that God has reasons for permitting evil that we don't know about.

2. If there is a logically satisfactory explanation for suffering, it is not unlikely that the explanation—to the extent that we can understand it—would not emotionally satisfy us.  Arguably, it could not do so, without undermining whatever purposes God has for allowing suffering in the first place.

3. There are some deeply paradoxical aspects of the human relationship to "good" and "evil", that make it impossible for us to conceive of a perfectly good state of affairs, involving (a) human beings recognizably like us, who (b) experience no evils, and in particular (c) are content with this state of affairs.

(Strictly speaking, the discontent in (c) is a subcase of (b), but I have given it a separate letter anyway, because you can't stop me from doing so!)

While I maintain that thesis 1 follows from entirely straightforward and reasonable probabilistic considerations, the other two thesis may seem stranger.  How can there be an explanation for suffering that doesn't satisfy us?  How can it be not good for things to be perfectly good?

But I doubt that we can avoid all such paradoxes by denying Theism.  Especially the paradox in my 3rd thesis, which has to do with the nature of human preferences, and which would be a quite serious problem, even—in fact, especially—in a hypothetical transhumanist utopia designed by atheists.

The Order of Limits

Let me start by making one point, which I have said before, and which I consider to be utterly obvious.  It is stupid to think that Omniscience makes the Argument from Evil stronger.  It obviously makes it weaker.  The argument I mentioned above:

If God is all-wise, he will be aware of the best method for eliminating evil,

presupposes that God's infinitely greater wisdom only matters for purposes of selecting the most intelligent means, to accomplish those goals that we in our finite human wisdom have identified as good.  But it is equally possible that God's greater wisdom will involve him pursuing higher goals that humans are unaware of.  God could well be aware of forms of goodness we have no clue about.  (As well as seeing various ways in which our own goals might be better served, by first putting us through a sequence of events that doesn't seem to us like a good way to accomplish those goals.)

It is pure hubris to think that God's infinitely greater intelligence would only be like a higher technology in service of human ends.  Rather than also giving him a higher perspective on what are the goods most worth acquiring.

In other words, the Argument from Evil would be most convincing, if it were about a being who has human-level wisdom, but universally benevolent, and infinitely* powerful.  I certainly agree that such a being would be unlikely to construct a world that looks like our own.  But that is not the Judaeo-Christian doctrine about God, is it?

[*Footnote: except, to make the hypothetical work, the infinitely powerful being would have to be somehow prohibited from using one of their wishes to wish for greater wisdom?  The thought experiment doesn't really make sense, but that isn't the point of the thought experiment, so let's ignore its internal contradictions.]

On the other hand, if we imagine an infinitely wise being with finite power (but still universally benevolent) it is quite hard for me to imagine that I know what such a being might think are the most important priorities.  It could very easily be something quite different from my own top priorities.

Remember, infinite wisdom is a lot of wisdom. Now wisdom is not quite the same thing as intelligence, but if we consider intelligence then one of the smartest people who have ever lived is St. John von Neumann.  Suppose we imagine a being who is as much smarter than John von Neumann, in the same ratio that von Neumann is smarter than an average 4-year old child (let's call this being HvN for hyper-Von Neumann).  Then HvN is presumably able to have an enormous number of qualitatively important insights, that would be impossible for HvN to explain even to Von Neumann.  And this is a being who still has a finite amount of wisdom.  The same is true of hyper-hyper-Von Neumann (HHvN), hyper-hyper-hyper-Von Neumann (HHHvN) etc.  But God would be smarter than all of these.  (And, if you accept, as most modern mathematicians do, St. Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite cardinals of different size, then we probably aren't even done yet.  God's wisdom would not be exhausted just by saying it is infinite—it is bigger than the hierarchy of all possible infinities!)  So who knows what an infinitely wise being would do?

And note, that, at less than one iteration of this process, there are already plenty of evils (like needing to brush one's teeth and go to the dentist) that the average 4-year old is not likely to be able to understand the reasons for, but an average adult can understand.  (Of course, the 4-year old could simply trust their parents that there is a good reason to brush teeth, but this would involve faith in a higher authority, not the 4-year old's own reason.)

I've been using a bit of rhetoric here to drive home my point, by harping on how alien an infinitely wise being is likely to be, compared to us.  To be sure, it is equally valuable to meditate on the other prongs of the argument—just how much compassion a perfectly good God would have towards a child who gets cruelly murdered etc.  But proponents of the Argument from Evil have doubtless already rhetorically hammered on these points enough for almost everyone to know what that would look like.  I am inviting such proponents to meditate on a different prong of their argument, for a change.

So, the Argument from Evil seems likely to be solvable if God is (infinitely wise, reasonably finite power level).  And it seems likely to be unsolvable if God is (reasonably finite wisdom, infinitely powerful).  What if (as Classical Theism holds) God is infinite in both respects?  Well then, I maintain that it is at least not obvious which of these 2 cases gives a better analogy to the (infinitely wise, infinitely powerful) case.  It's a bit like one of those functions F(x,y) in calculus where you get one answer if you take the x → ∞ limit first, and a different answer if you take the y → ∞ limit first.  So the value of F(∞,∞) is ambiguous.

Except that, the whole point of my argument is that we don't really know what happens when the "wisdom" parameter is taken to be enormously large values, even if those values are finite.  Maybe, insight into goodness tops out some wisdom level W, and all beings wiser than W would basically all agree about what goods are worth pursuing (and what means should be used to attain them, whenever said means are possible).  Then, any being wiser than W would either be able to "justify God's ways to"—well maybe not "man", but to somebody sufficiently far up in the sequence (vN, HvN, HHvN, HHHvN...).  Or, alternatively, maybe a being wiser than W would be able to tell that the Argument from Evil was perfectly sound.  But I see no particular reason why this should happen at a human level of intelligence.

On the other hand, it is also possible that infinite wisdom leads to some qualitatively new insights about goodness that aren't accessible to anyone in that sequence.

Which of these is more important, God knowing more about goodness than I do, or God being so powerful that he has ways of avoiding having to ever make a tradeoff?  Beats me!  But if agnosticism is justified concerning this critical question, then the Argument from Evil seems to rest on some pretty shaky foundations.

Maximizing Functions

Without assuming it is accurate in every respect, let us consider a crassly consequentialist model of the "God knows about more kinds of goods than we do" scenario.  Let's write a function f(w) that sums up all the kinds of goodness which we humans are aware of.  Here let w \in W where W is the set of all the (logically consistent) possible ways the world might be.  Now let us suppose that God is aware of the existence of other important kinds of goodness besides the ones we are aware of.  Call these additional goods g(w).  So the total goodness is the sum:

\mathrm{Total} \, \mathrm{Goodness}(w) \,=\, f(w) + g(w)

Let us suppose this function has a maximum possible value, and that God selects whichever world w maximizes total goodness.  (Or if there is a tie, he picks one of the maxima arbitrarily.)

What are the odds that the world w which God selects, maximizes not only f + g, but also f?  Well it is impossible to say for sure, without knowing what the function g(w) is.  But intuitively the answer seems to be, vanishingly unlikely (approaching probability 0), unless there is some reason why the function g(w) happens to be 0, or directly proportional to f(w), or some other weird thing happens.

This deviation will, almost by definition, appear to us to take the form of a gratuitous evil, since f(w) is smaller than it might have been and we are unaware of g(w).  So, on this hypothesis, we should be highly confident that God will create a world with at least one form of gratuitous evil.  It seems like this is even more likely to be true in a more realistic model where worlds w differ in a very high dimensional space.

How different will the optimum world be, from the apparent optimum?  They could be quite "close" if g(w) is small compared to f(w).  But we have no particular reason to think this is true.  If g(w) is comparable in size to f(w) or bigger, then maybe the maxima lie in quite different directions.

Aside: Some Goods May Be Incomparable

Now actually, my moral and theological beliefs are quite a bit different from the setup above.  I don't think goodness is really a number.  I think sometimes things can be compared, and sometimes they can't be.

In my view, there are many (radically incomparable) different forms of goodness, and (like an artist writing a novel) nobody has any right to complain if God creates one form of good over another, as long as the world is actually good, and there's no way he could have done a better job at making that particular good thing he was aiming at.

God is already supremely good before he makes anything at all, and in that sense all of creation is gratuitous.  But, once we specify what specific type(s) of goodness God is aiming for, it seems inevitable that there are better and worse ways of going about it, and therefore in some specific aspects, the consequentialist model above probably captures a fair amount of truth.

However, if these beliefs are right, none of the corrections I have made in this section seem to make the Problem of Evil harder to solve.  If anything, they make it easier to solve.  (There might be a question of why a God who is already supremely good made anything at all, but this is a different theological problem.)

If you are an AI-Doomer, you should reject the Argument from Evil

Let me put the argument another way.  Perhaps some of my readers belong to the Singularity school of thought (people who are hopeful/worried about AI bootstrapping itself into an enormously superhuman level of power in a short amount of time).  To such readers, I would note that the following beliefs seem to have incompatible justifications:

1. High risk of Yudkowsky-style AI doom (conditional on a powerful AI being built)
2. The Argument from Evil is devastating evidence against standard Theism.

As I understand it, the argument for (1) partly proceeds through the claim that an agentic AI can be modeled as a utility maximizer.  While the AI's utility function is likely to overlap in some ways with ours (since we built it to accomplish some tasks), relatively small mistakes in the AI's utility function, are (in this view) likely to lead to consequences which most humans will regard as grievously evil (e.g. human extinction or perpetual slavery).  Basically, the idea is that utility maximization is a harsh mistress.  Since whatever maximizes one set of goals perfectly, will often be a very bad fit to any other set of goals.  And if the utility maximizer has enormous power, so that the maximization is done over a very wide space of possibilities, we aren't in a good position to predict whether such a universe will be human-friendly.

But now consider the view Theism + Moral Realism.  On this view, God is an agent who seeks objective goodness.  For purposes of this argument, let us model goodness as maximizing some utility function, which partially overlaps with human preferences.  But as pointed out above, if there are any additional terms in the function (e.g. types of good which God knows about and we don't) then (if you buy the argument in the previous paragraph) it seems almost certain that the world will contain certain things that humans see as grievous evils, upon extreme optimization over God's "utility function", as it were.

In fact, if you are a dystopian about AI, that means you must regard our current world (prior to the predicted AI apocalypse, anyway) as rather surprisingly human-friendly, among the space of worlds optimized by utility functions slightly different from our own.  A world where, if the AI had produced it, the AI-doomers would all breathe a big sigh of relief that alignment had gone better than expected, even if we didn't get the Transhumanist Utopia.  But that means that the existence of apparently grievous evil is actually expected on the hypothesis of a benevolent God!  (That is, if you buy the AI-doom argument.)

In other words, if you think:

1. High probability of great evil, given a powerful AI whose preferences are slightly "incorrect" relative to human preferences,

you should also think:

2. High probability of (apparent) great evil, given that human preferences are slightly "incorrect" relative to divine preferences.

Of course, the God of Classical Theism is vastly more powerful than any AI could be, but it is not clear that this helps, since (in the case of the AI) people think that the more powerful it is, the more concerned they should be.

Does this mean that humans should hate and fear God, the way AI-doomers hate and fear unaligned AI?  Well, I would agree that a certain type of "fear" is appropriate, towards a powerful being with somewhat inscrutable goals.  There is a reason why the Bible talks about the "fear of the Lord" as a characteristic trait of pious people.  But if moral realism is true, I don't think that hatred can be appropriate towards a being that maximizes true goodness.  (Imagine, if it makes it easier, that you would come around to God's point of view after a million years of what Yudkowsky calls "coherent extrapolated volition".)  Note also that this view does not imply moral skepticism, as the things we care about can still be really morally good, and the things we dislike can still be really morally bad.  It's just that God just cares about some additional things, that we don't know about.

Degree of Inexplicability Not Proportional to Magnitude

It is tempting to say, well maybe this sort of theodicy explains stubbed toes or a lack of parking spaces, but surely it does not justify allowing mass starvation, rape, children dying of cancer etc.  But really it all depends on what is contained in the mystery box g(w), and how important it is.

Intuitively, there is a pretty big difference between a stubbed toe and childhood cancer.  It feels like explaining away the latter is almost offensive to the child or parents.  And indeed, in the presence of those who are suffering grave evils, one should be cautious about speaking in a glib way about God's plans.  But this social rule of politeness also applies when speaking to people who are convinced that their suffering is part of God's plan.  So this rule of politeness is hardly substantive evidence that there is no divine plan.

That said, it seems like a conceptual mistake to identify how apparently "gratuitous" an evil is with how large it is.  It is just as mysterious to me what good is gained when we stub our toes, as it is why some children get leukemia.  Indeed, the more severe an evil is, the more likely it is to build character or something else (infuriatingly) edifying, rather than just cause irritation without personal growth.

Part II. The Problem of Moral Action

Let us now consider a potentially serious paradox if we accept the above framework.  Suppose that there really are greater goods that justify all the evils in the world, it might seem to have the unpalatable consequence that it would be bad to try to improve the world.  For suppose we truly believe the world maximizes the goodness function f(w) + g(w).  If we try to change the world in a way that increases f, presumably we decrease g by a greater amount and end up in a worse place.

So seemingly we shouldn't try to cure cancer, or help little old ladies cross the street, or prevent rape, or anything like that, since any defects we see are part of God's purpose.  But that is morally absurd (and also contrary to the teachings of most Theistic religions, where God commands us to do good deeds).

Of course, since God also made us, we can't really think about God's goals in isolation from what we do.  As a result, it is not clear that this unpalatable conclusion actually holds.  But, to speak more carefully, not every possible bundle of hidden goods g will have the property that it still justifies our attempts to improve things.  Only some possible g's will have this property.  So, this does place a serious constraint on the kinds of justification that are possible.  It has to be a justification that is compatible with the continual struggle to morally improve the world.

But this fact, once we acknowledge it, has pretty significant implications for the whole problem.  And not all of these implications are bad for Theism.  Some of them help to explain certain aspects of why God might allow the existence of apparently gratuitous evils.

The Correct Explanation Might Not Be Satisfying or Helpful

It is tempting to say, "Why doesn't God at least explain why evil exists, so that we can be satisfied that our suffering is for a good reason?"  This might not eliminate the evils, but it would at least make them no longer appear to be gratuitous.

But there is no reason to think that, even if the answer is comprehensible to us (it might not be) that we would find it emotionally satisfying to learn the answer.  One thing that I have learned in life is to be suspicious whenever anyone says "I could bear my suffering if only I had [specific unobtainable consolation C]".  Sometimes when the C is finally obtained, it  doesn't help as much as we think it would.  The only way to be confident that this sort of thing is true, is if we actually had C and found that it helped us.  Obviously, we are not in this position when it comes to the Problem of Evil.

So it is quite possible that God doesn't explain the reason for allowing evil, because he knows that if we did, we wouldn't like it.  (Even though it actually is explanatory.)

The odds are good that the true explanation has some steps like "Let me first sit you through several courses in microbiology so that you see how inevitable it is that copying errors will appear in DNA of life forms like you.  Now let me say why I appreciate biology enough that I don't just do random miracles to stop it."*  Are you any happier now that your kid got cancer?  What if there are footnotes answering all the obvious objections?

[*Footnote: I don't mean that this is an actually correct theodicy that should convince you.  Just that the actual one could be something which is similarly unsatisfying.]

No?  Then you didn't want that reason.  You wanted something else: a compelling life narrative in which suffering (even if you don't know the specifics of why it happens) contributes in a meaningful way to your own personal beatitude (and that of your child in this hypothetical).  What you really need is inspiring stories about how historical people just like you have overcome the suffering and become heroes and saints.  In other words, to meet your emotional needs, what will really help is precisely the kind of consolation that a religion like Christianity actually offers, most especially through its view that suffering unites us to God if we offer it back to him, through the crucified Christ.  Even if it doesn't feel like solving the Problem of Evil in the abstract sense originally posed.

Or let's put this another way.  What would satisfy us as "Solving the Problem of Evil"?  What most of us want, if God exists, is for him to tell us some specific fact A that makes it so we don't have to struggle anymore with the seeming futility of life.  But if the moral struggle is part of the point (of our current stage of existence), then it necessarily follows that God had better not to tell us fact A.  Because if he does, we will stop struggling with it!  Perhaps he can tell us other things, but not that.  (Not yet.)

Or, suppose no such fact exists, but there is some other good reason B for our struggle, but it has the property that learning would not cause us to stop struggling.  Well then, in that case, learning will not feel emotionally like a good explanation for evil.  And this is precisely because it doesn't cause us to stop struggling with the fact of evil.  So if God specifically wants us to mature through a process of struggle, we can't expect to be fully emotionally satisfied by any presently available explanation as to why we struggle.

To summarize, if there is a good reason for God to have us suffer, then it follows God won't not tell us the reason for that suffering, unless knowing that reason doesn't cause us to stop suffering, and is therefore emotionally unsatisfactory.

Of course, having discovered this reasoning, I already feel a bit better about God not telling me why I suffer!  So perhaps I am undermining my own argument a bit here.  But, it could also be true that there is an important difference between my having a theory about suffering exists, versus a hypothetical situation where we know the answer because God tells us explicitly.

Why Do Pandas Exist?

The Argument from Evil has the greatest force if, conditional on both God and evil existing, we would expect to know the reasons for the evil to exist.  (Then we can appeal to the fact that in the real world, there are seemingly gratuitous evils, where "gratuitous" means there isn't a  good reason, contrary to our expectations on Theism.)

But do we have the right to expect this, even conditional on Theism?  I think it is important to put the problem of evil in perspective, by noting that almost everything we observe in the universe seems similarly gratuitous, in the sense that we don't know its purpose for existing.

To be sure, people don't complain very much about gratuitous non-evils.  But that doesn't make them any easier to understand from an intellectual point of view.

For example, why do pandas exist?  Is it to be cute and fuzzy?  Is it because they give humans joy?  A plausible theodicy, but we don't really know that this is why God made pandas.  (Or snakes, or beetles, or...)  If we don't know the function and role that even seemingly good things play, in the ultimate purpose of creation, then why would we expect to know the function and role of seemingly bad things?

(One cannot simply appeal to their goodness, as there is a huge variety of good things God might have made.  Why are there pandas instead of dragons?  Who knows!)

This may be part of the meaning of the Answer to Job in the Bible.  It's not as if we were in a position to say to God, "OK, I know why you did everything else, it's totally obvious why there had to be elliptical galaxies and all those beetles, but what about evil?"  Most people can't even give a good explanation why humans exist, let alone all these other things in creation.

Evolutionary Theodicy

Or maybe we do know why pandas exist?

There's another way to interpret what God says to Job.  "I can't explain why evil exists in your current state of development.  But I'll give you a big hint, for the benefit of future generations.  It has something to do with why there are so many different kinds of animal species that behave in lots of crazy ways!"

Many generations later, Darwin comes along.  We now know something people didn't know in the past, which is that the brutal competition to avoid death and find love, is actually powerful enough to create new animal species and in fact, this is the reason why there are so many amazingly cool animals and plants out there.  Wild!

But, that means we do now know at least part of the reason for all the death and striving in the animal kingdom.  It was needed to produce humans.  (Not just us, of course, but also cats and dogs and horses etc.)  If God had decided that all creatures get to flourish equally, there wouldn't have been any creatures like us in the first place.  The reason you have all these unfulfilled strivings (to avoid pain, seek arduous goods, acquire a mate etc.) is precisely that it was only those who struggled in this way, who were able to pass on their genetic heritage to future generations.

You have pain because it was useful for the survival of your ancestors.  Thus, the evils that appear in evolutionary history clearly play a causal role in the creation of human beings. And human beings are good.  Therefore the evils in past evolutionary history were, at least in broad strokes, justified by the final outcome.  You, in turn, have that same capacity to suffer, precisely because it is the biological legacy passed on to you by your ancestors.

I already told you that you wouldn't like the explanation for evil, and that it wouldn't resolve your suffering, or make much difference to how you live your life.  But you didn't believe me then, did you?  Do you believe me now?

Some readers might have the following objection: God could have created life forms by some completely different method.  For example, like Young Earth Creationism (YEC) or something.  But precisely because Darwinian evolution is so—well explanatory—there is something about this view that strikes me as being fundamentally silly, like the YEC trees being created with rings already in them, or the YEC Adam and Eve having belly buttons, despite not having been born in the usual way.  But the point is far more profound than this.  The fact is, our evolutionary history is partly constitutive of who we are.  If God created life forms ab initio, without evolution or pain or striving, surely they wouldn't look anything like humans, with our bundles of animal drives.  They wouldn't even look like ideally happy humans.  They would have to look like something completely different.  Like angels or something.

But in that case, we wouldn't exist.  So is it good for human beings to exist?  If so, why shouldn't God create them?

You could bite the bullet and say that God should have simply created intelligent beings very different from us.  It's plausible.  But it also reduces my confidence that such a world would really be better, since it would be quite radically different from our own.  Our confidence in our ability to assess the goodness of a world, should surely diminish as we get farther away from the domains in which our common sense applies.

(Of course, traditional Christian theology says God did create angels; he just didn't stop there.  God went on to also create humans.  So the answer might be that it is indeed better to create angels than humans, but having created the angels, God decided the world would be even better if it also contained evolved animals such as us.)

I don't actually know if this amounts to a complete theodicy.  It may only be one piece of the puzzle.  But it is rather interesting that there is a nontrivial theodicy buried within Darwinian Evolution, even though this is widely regarded by many people as the scientific theory most supportive of Atheism.

Of course, that is because of its implications against (certain forms of) the Argument from Design (as well as the fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis) leading to many religious folks having an immune reaction against Evolution.  But in this post we are now considering the Argument from Evil, not the Argument from Design.  There is nothing contradictory about Darwinism partially undermining both of these classic arguments, for and against Theism.

The Ubermensch

Our current struggles put you in continuity and sympathy with past life forms, whose struggles absolutely were necessarily in order to create you.  What about the future course of evolution?  Here's another idea that might make Nietzsche happy: your current struggles might well create an evolutionary gradient that will result in the emergence some superhuman life form.

It is true that some (mostly not-very-Christian people) around the start of the 20th century got rather too excited by the possibilities of humans evolving into the ubermensch, and a bunch of silly and horrible things happened as a result.

While evolution might indeed occur in the future, I reject the idea that we should make this into a religion.  We shouldn't worship our descendants, any more than we should worship our ancestors.  As St. Lewis wrote:

There is no sense in talking of `becoming better' if better means simply `what we are becoming' — it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as `the place you have reached'.  Mellontolatry, the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.
("Evil and God")

At least in the case of our ancestors, if we choose to worship them, we have some notions what they were actually like.  But in the case of our distant descendants, it would just be a blank canvas to project our fancies.  For all we know they will be completely different from what we think they are going to be.

It is true that, if the world lasts long enough, future evolution may well create more evolved forms of the human race, and all this might in turn morally justify some amount of whatever "survival of the fittest" is taking place in the present.  But this is speculative, since none of us knows what is going to happen in the future. If you put all of your eggs in this basket, you'll look pretty silly if Jesus comes back sometime in the next few thousand years, and ends history before this hypothetical new evolutionary stage emerges.

The Christian worldview is bigger than the cosmos, not smaller.  So we should be willing to acknowledge whatever truth there is in other worldviews, even if those other views aren't seeing the entire picture.  As a Christian, I can accept that there are elements of truth to the Nietzschean philosophy, that struggle is a valuable thing and shouldn't be eliminated.  But there are lots of other moral truths that need to be held in balance with this one.

If learning about evolutionary struggle makes some people think it is OK to go around starting fistfights, collecting harems, and pissing in other people's swimming pools, then maybe there's a reason God didn't spell all of this out in the Book of Genesis.  Maybe instead of asking God why he allows evil, we should instead ask ourselves whether we humans are sufficiently trustworthy for God to explicitly tell us the explanation for evil.

Instead of trying to breed a new human race, maybe we should focus on trying to be good people.  Of course, you are allowed to have (some) opinions about what you think people should be like, when you choose a spouse and raise your kids.  But maybe we should leave the long-term management of the human gene pool to God.

We Christians have very good reasons to believe that God's ideal for human behavior is closer to St. Francis of Assisi, than to Genghis Khan—the most evolutionarily "successful" man of his generation!  But without evolutionary history, you don't get Francis any more than you get Genghis.  Francis had the same animal impulses, to retaliate and lust, that you or I have.  His meekness was like the gentleness of a tamed lion.  Not that of a mouse too small to do much harm.

Part III: The Problem of Humanity

Suppose we accept that it a good thing for human beings to exist—then on that supposition, the Argument from Evil amounts to this.  We are saying to God: "I'm okay with being a primate with a big brain, dedicated not just to seeking food and sex and affection, but also solving complex, difficult problems.  But, I also want to be placed in a world where there are actually no important problems that need solving, or at least none that I care about enough to affect my happiness.  Just give me the food and love, without me having to do anything to get them.  And please don't let me get bored either."

That comes across to me as a bit lazy and spoiled.

Perhaps it is even true, that the more moral virtue we have—in the sense of routinely accepting difficult or painful tasks for the sake of achieving greater goods—the less plausible we will find the Argument from Evil.  Because virtue gives us the lived experience of bringing goods out of evils (apparent or actual).  So the more we are able to do that, the more we will see the goods that can only exist when we overcome badness.  Conversely, a cynical and selfish person, is almost bound to see the world as more deeply bad than it actually is, whenever it contradicts their most superficial desires.  (Note that I am not implying that people who raise the Argument from Evil are acting on bad moral motivations, at the moment they raise the question.  What I am talking about is something happening at a deeper and prior level, before the argument is ever raised.)  Admittedly there are other ways in which being a good person makes our hatred of evil sharper, so the balance here is not entirely straightforward.

Somebody could say, well maybe virtue is only good because (unfortunately) it is necessary to do hard things in this world, and that's why we admire it.  But in a hypothetical perfect world where nothing bad happened, virtue would also be unnecessary.  We could be cowardly and selfish, and it just wouldn't matter because there would be neither danger nor competition.   On such a utilitarian view, virtue doesn't really matter for its own sake.  It only matters to the extent that it leads to more pleasure or less pain.

But I don't share this view.  I think it is good to be a good person, not just that it is instrumentally useful for gaining hedonic pleasures.  Indeed the so-called "happiness" of a hedonist is trivial, in comparison with the meaningfulness of a typical life of virtue.

What is the Optimal History?

In fact, the existence of large problem-solving brains, itself problematizes the entire concept of maximizing goodness, at least if this is considered in a static sense.  Suppose the world were already optimal, i.e. the best world possible, at the time that human beings first came into existence.  Then, there would seemingly be not much point in God creating intelligent animals like us.  Because animal intelligence involves the ability to imagine the world as different from how it is, and then to act to bring about that change.  But if the world is already optimal, than any change we make will make it worse, and that seems to make the use of intelligence a bad thing, rather than a good one.

But this is a paradox.  Because from another perspective, intelligent life is the highest, best, and most valuable good thing, among all the things we experience.  If intelligence were purely instrumental, that would imply you should be willing to sacrifice almost all of your intelligence to achieve your other goals, like pleasure.  But this is an absurd wireheading scenario.  (In this thought experiment, I am assuming it is possible to have large amounts of consciousness/pleasure, without much intelligence.)

So what is the best possible way to have intelligent beings like humans that meaningfully use their intelligence?

One possible way out, is for God to try to optimize for the best history, rather than the best static world-state.  That is, the world could be one that starts out imperfect, but eventually (at least in part as a result of human struggle, without ruling out a possible need for divine intervention) achieves a state of complete perfection.  (Of course, you could worry that once we reach perfection, the same problems will recur, but I will postpone that discussion to the end of this essay.)

Suppose this scenario is true.  Then at a sufficiently early state of our development, we should expect to find ourselves in a situation where the world is imperfect and requires fixing.  Well guess what?  Look around, and that's just what we see!  Suspicious, huh.

Nothing I have said in this section necessarily requires libertarian free will.  But if it turns out that we do have such free will, then it is of course possible that some of our free actions will make things worse, rather than better.  This basic observation is different from trying to attribute all evils to free will, which is not at all the idea that I am proposing here.  (Though, there may be more attributable to this than we think.  For example, if nobody ever made the kinds of evil choices that cause or require wars, and if all that time and energy had gone to medicine instead, presumably there would now be far more cures for diseases.  Thus, many current events that we frame as natural evils, could be reframed as consequences of past moral evils.)

It should be noted that this moral action theodicy, like the free will defense, obviously overcomes the objection that it de-motivates moral action.  If a major part of the reason why the world contains imperfections is so we can remove those imperfections, then obviously this will motivate, rather than de-motivate, moral action.

The Garden of Eden

Someone might object by mentioning the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.  I've already mentioned Adam and Eve, so this is fair game.  Doesn't Christianity claim that human beings did start in a perfect state, and only lost it because they sinned, by eating the forbidden fruit (that is, the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil)?

To be sure, multiple aspects of this story would need to be interpreted non-literally in order to be compatible with Darwinian Evolution, a fact which any scientific worldview needs to incorporate.  But if we relax a bit, and just read the story as a story, it seems to describe a world without sin and death.  So isn't that the perfect world we are looking for?

I would deny this claim.  A world without sin is not the same as a world where nothing bad ever happens.  Even if we go by the literal text, Genesis indicates that there was pain before the Fall (Gen 3:16), and also things that were not good (Gen 2:18).  Even before the Fall, there was a mission to name the animals and to tend the garden.  And there was already a conflict brewing with the crafty serpent, implying that (to remain sinless) Adam and Eve were required to resist some of their own desires, an experience which is not usually 100% pleasant for the persons concerned.

Following a more Eastern Orthodox approach to the story, I would see Adam and Eve not as being perfect in the sense of maximally mature, but rather as being at the very beginning of their story, rather than at the end of their story.  We don't know how what the middle of the story would have looked like, if they hadn't sinned.  It could even be, that if Adam and Eve had resisted temptation for long enough, God would have eventually permitted them to sinlessly eat from the Tree of Knowledge.  (Knowledge is an inherently good thing, not a bad thing.  The problem was trying to acquire this particular knowledge by disobeying God, and also at a time when they were insufficiently mature to deal with the consequences of this knowledge.)  In any case, the story doesn't tell us what would have happened next if they hadn't succumbed to the first temptation, since they did succumb.  And as they say, the rest is history.

Haggling over the Price

Anyway, I certainly admit that there could well be lots of ways of introducing removable imperfections into the universe, that don't involve anything near as great a degree of suffering as we see in the real world.  Or, where we have enormous bliss at the same time as we solve a bunch of intellectually stimulating puzzles.  Or at the very least where there isn't death at the end of every road.  (Though most Theists think we survive death in one way or another.)

But at some level, this is just haggling over the price.  All of us can point to significant changes we would like to see in the world.  At the same time, that is exactly what this theodicy would predict—that there will be features of the world we find unsatisfactory and want to remove if possible, and also that it should not always be obvious how to remove them (since otherwise intelligent thought would not be needed).  And we can't expect to solve all the problems either, not if there is to be anything left for future generations to do.

There are lots of possible quantities of evil in the world that could be imagined.  But wherever on that spectrum God places the human race, it's always going to seem to us like he should have included a bit less evil.  And this is presumably going to be true all the way up to the point where, from the standpoint of our current world and its evolved preferences, we would see that there would then be not very much point in having intelligent creatures at all.  (Perhaps there really is an objectively optimum amount of evil to overcome, in which case God would presumably have created the human race right at that optimum point.  But I have very little idea how to assess how much or how little evil that is, relative to what we currently experience.)

Trying to solve the Problem of Evil here and now, is a bit like expecting to have, in the middle of an adventure story, the same sense of satisfying closure that you have at the end of the story, after the main character is rescued from the trials and tribulations which prevented them from getting what they wanted.  Maybe you can have this the second time you read the book, but not the first time (assuming you don't like spoilers).

Again, it's okay if you hate it.  Nothing about this explanation implies you will feel satisfied with this explanation.  At some level, you shouldn't!  Bad stuff is bad and you aren't supposed to like it.  You are supposed to fix and/or endure it.  You aren't required to like it.

We Prefer Stories where Bad Things Happen

But maybe we don't hate it as much as we think?  I just mentioned stories.  Consider our revealed preferences about that.  When all of our basic physical needs are met (or when we don't want to face our problems) our favorite pastime as humans is to tell each other stories.  Campside stories, bedtime stories, TV, books, movies, video games etc.

And one thing we absolutely insist on, almost always, is that these stories should have some bad things happen in them!  Problems to overcome.  Villains to fight, victims to rescue.  Or conflicts of value, hard choices that reveal character.  Trials that test characters, or break them.  Finding revenge, or redemption.  If there is nothing bad to overcome, the story is (usually) considered boring.  (Maybe this isn't true of strictly all stories, there might be some stories without much bad stuff, but it takes a very good writer to keep that interesting!  And certainly nobody would want all stories to be like that.)  It's okay for the story to have a good ending, but only if there was something to overcome in the middle.  (But there are also people who prefer tragedies and sad endings!)

Isn't that strange!  We want to remove bad stuff from our actual lives, but that makes us bored, so we insist on bringing bad stuff back in by the back door, as long as it is fictional evil.  Since this is something we all take for granted, being accustomed to it from our youths, I suggest that you stop, and really contemplate for 120 consecutive seconds, just how weird this (almost) universal human desire is.

Secretly, in the spirit deep within our hearts, we already know that some evils are necessary, in order for certain great goods to exist.  Let me be clear, I am not claiming that you should believe this based on the above arguments.  Rather, I am claiming that you already believe this, whether you recognize it or not.

To answer an obvious objection, I agree of course that a fictional bad event is quite different morally from a real bad even, i.e. it isn't necessarily actually bad.  For example, fictional people don't really suffer, we only pretend that they do.  If fictional evil were really evil, then it would be morally problematic to write fiction in which terrible events occur, and nobody thinks that this is the case.  (Perhaps it is sometimes immoral to write dreary nihilistic fiction, but if so this is only true because it demoralizes actual human beings.)

Nevertheless, our love for the fictional story represents a real desire in us.  So it is striking that this love not only allows, but often requires bad things to exist, in the story.  And this love suggests, in turn, that there is something good about worlds that include evil, that simply cannot be found in worlds without it.

And of course, many people enjoy confronting potential evils in the real world—it's called a sense of adventure.  We certainly like hearing about stories of adventure that really happened too.  In fact, as long as the story is equally good, it is more interesting to us if it really happened.  Though for most of us, we would prefer for it to happen to somebody else!  But if bad things never happened to anyone, presumably we wouldn't know how to tell or enjoy stories about it happening.  So even fictional badness requires some real badness (even if only a limited amount of it).

Somebody could say, well maybe we only like stories which include bad stuff because we are evolved to face bad stuff in the real world.   So in a world where nothing bad happened, we would also not have a taste for adventure stories, and we wouldn't get bored not having them.  But doesn't that seem... at least a little bit bad?  There is a genuine good in these adventure stories, and it seems like in some ways the perfect people would be missing out, not being able to appreciate them like we do.  But then, if these stories capture some sort of goodness that requires evil to exist, then surely this implies the existence of a partial justification for evil?

If some amount of fictional evil is needed to maximize fictional good, then plausibly some amount of actual evil is needed to maximize actual good.  And perhaps, the actual goods concerned, are not completely unrelated to the goods that we appreciate in stories: adventure, interestingness, a dramatic plot etc.  Perhaps, one of the differences between God's notion of goodness and are own, is not that so much that he values some things we think are evil, but rather that he sees that some of things we genuinely like (in certain contexts), are in reality far more valuable even then we think they are, when viewed from an eternal perspective.

At any rate, our taste in stories implies that, if we were just judging God's creation as if it were a fictional narrative, from an aesthetic viewpoint rather than a moral one, we would certainly judge that it had better contain evil.  At any rate, in order to not feel that way about life, human beings would need to relate to the concepts of good/bad in a rather different way than we do so now.  (Perhaps, we would need to be a species without "the knowledge of good and evil"?)

From this purely aesthetic perspective, one could even argue that maybe our modern world doesn't have nearly enough evil! Since most people's lives are rather dull from a day-to-day basis, with most of our daily needs met, and no dramatic actions needed.  Most people need to seek out adventure, by reading about other people's problems (people whose lives are usually much less pleasant than average).  On the other hand, from a moral perspective, since real people aren't fictional characters, we also have good moral reasons to want them to suffer less, out of mercy.  So maybe this world is actually a compromise between the two perspectives, the aesthetic one and the moral one.  With enough drama to be interesting, but not enough to ruin the majority of day-to-day pleasures.

(Admittedly this doesn't do much to explain evils that are also boring and tedious, like factory work and so on.  Though a lot of these evils come from our choice to organize society in a particular way.)

Again, I don't know if this is the correct theodicy.  Perhaps it is mostly off-base.  But there is at least one insight from this discussion which I am quite confident about.  Which is this lesson:

I can't think of any conceivable scenario in which human beings as we know them are totally happy, without some badness to overcome somewhere.

In other words, it's not that I can identify some specific way to run the world, in which everything is perfectly hunky-dory, but our human-level intelligence is also meaningfully exploited, and I am wondering why God doesn't do that.  Rather, I can't see any way to avoid some evil existing (even if these might be different evils than the ones we actually see in the real world.)  Maybe Omniscience would see another solution, but I can't.  To me, any such solution is, and I mean this word advisedly, inconceivable.  By this, I mean, not that it is logically impossible, but rather that if there is a solution, I don't think any human being on Earth has succeeded in conceiving it.

To be sure, there are plenty of specific bad things about the world, that I would change if I could.  I never denied that, and in fact it is part of my argument.  What I find impossible to imagine, is a world in which everything is perfect, by human standards.  I claim that a world like that is literally impossible to imagine.  Or put another way, any utopia which you can imagine will always have some aspects which are unsatisfactory, and will thus not be fully compatible with our present human conceptions of what a good life should look like.

Transhumanism and the New Jerusalem 

This is why, in transhumanist utopian fiction, once technology reaches the point where almost all problems are overcome, there is often a somewhat bittersweet tone, once you realize the characters living in that society have little to strive for.  Or in a long fantasy series, after the main character becomes a wizard-god so powerful that they can just do whatever they want, and then the character—or at least the reader—has to grapple with the resulting lack of meaning.  (Of course, most good storytellers are smart enough to never put their protagonists into this situation, since it usually ruins the story.)  These scenarios illustrate the sort of ennui which any actual paradise would have to somehow overcome, in order to truly be paradise.

Of course, these scenarios are a pretty long way—and perhaps we should say, thank God—from what a typical human life looks like.  Although there is a little bit of an earthly parallel, in the archetype of the bored aristocratic hedonist:

There are things you need not know of,
though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure
than you are sick of pain.

(The Aristocrat, St. Chesterton)

Perhaps some readers are tempted to say, well I certainly would never get bored with a life of prolonged pleasures and no other suffering.  But it is not clear why anyone should believe you, if you haven't yet been put to that particular test.  Others among my readers might think that for precisely this reason, they wouldn't want to live forever in Heaven, because surely (after a gazillion googleplex years, or if that isn't enough, try Graham's number) it would eventually become tedious.

Fortunately, the Christian concept of Heaven—or to use more accurate biblical language, "The New Heaven and New Earth"—isn't vulnerable to this objection, that any conceivable infinitely prolonged utopia would end up being boring and shallow in the end.  The reason for this is simple: we can't yet conceive it.  Not until after the Resurrection, when our bodies are made new, and when we see God face-to-face.  As St. Paul writes:

“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him.
(1 Cor 2:9)

Since the New Heaven and New Earth isn't conceivable by us, arguments about "all conceivable utopias" don't apply to it.

Once again, I am using the word conceivability quite literally, to mean "capable of being conceived by our minds", not as a cheap synonym for "logically possible".   If I thought that the New Heaven and New Earth weren't logically possible, then I obviously I couldn't also believe that it will come to exist.  But there is no reason why every possible state of affairs must be imaginable by us, especially if that state of affairs is created by a God who exceeds our understanding, and in some way involves union with that God.  It might not even be measured by time, at least not in the exact same way that our current earthly existence is.  It might instead participate somehow in the timeless and eternal life of God, in which case we definitely can't imagine it.

This is why the Christian hope is not subject to ennui.  Ennui arises when you get what you thought you wanted, but you still aren't satisfied, and say "Is this all there is to life?"  But since the state of the redeemed is beyond our understanding, and requires going through a radical transformation as a preliminary, nothing in our current life experience contradicts the idea that those who love God can be perfectly happy and fulfilled, once we get there.  Without ever getting bored, or pining for an impossible state of affairs.

If we are eternally happy in God's kingdom, then in turn justifies all the suffering we had to go through, in order to get into it.  At least, so long as having gone through suffering in some way improves our eternal experience once we get there.  And it's hard to prove that this can't be the case, if we don't know what it is like to see God face-to-face in the first place.

It is easy enough to make the case that our current life is not fully satisfactory.  But if our current life is just a preliminary to another, greater life, then the things that make an earthly life good or bad might well be very different from what we now judge to be the case.  In other words, on the assumption of an afterlife which is radically different from our current one, it is virtually certain that the original idea I defended—that God will know a lot of stuff about goodness that we don't—is going to be true.

As an analogy, our unborn existence in the womb was a preliminary to a greater life, that mostly couldn't be imagined by an unborn child, who has no real concept of sight, taste, or open space.  Of course, the unborn child can still hear sounds and music from outside the womb.  Perhaps it is not a coincidence that music is one of the most common ways that religious literature describes the activity of the saints in heaven?

And don't give me that stale line about "I don't want to play a harp on a cloud".  I've already said that we can't imagine it, and cartoon imagery is definitely out of the question.  But even if we take the accusation on its own terms, who says it has to be a harp, if you prefer some other musical instrument?  As musically inclined people know, jamming with some friends on earth can be a transcendental experience, in which we somehow go out of ourselves, and feel as if we are participating in a higher harmony of existence.  A deeper rhythm, which reconciles us to all the sorrow and longing we've felt, by making it seem part of a greater and more significant wholeness.

On a religious outlook, this feeling gives us a real insight into the nature of reality.  The New Heaven and the New Earth will be something like that.  Only better.

Posted in Ethics, Theology | 5 Comments

The Argument From Confusion is Weak

One of the mainstays of atheist rhetoric is the Argument from Evil (AfE), that there exist evils in the world, of such a quality or quantity, that it is irrational to believe in a good Creator.

This post is not directly about the Argument from Evil.  Instead, I want to address the Argument from Confusion (AfC).  This is the argument that no good God—especially one that wants everybody to believe in some specific religion such as Christianity—would allow the extent of human religious confusion that exists in the world.  (Including a plurality of contradictory religions, but also atheism/agnosticism.)  True, Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with over 2 billion people claiming to be Christians of some sort or another, but this is still a minority.  Why doesn't God reveal himself more clearly?  The AfC claims that this is by itself good reason not to believe in God, or at least a specific religion such as Christianity, etc.

The AfC must of course be distinguished from the general AfE.  The world includes lots of unpleasant stuff (like cancer etc.), and it might be possible to view religious confusion as just a subset of such evil.  It isn't totally obvious—except on some highly specific religious views about the necessary conditions for salvation—that religious confusion is the worst evil in the world.  So we could treat the AfC as just a special case of the AfE.  Here, I want to instead treat it as a separate argument, and see how it fares when detached from the rest of the AfE.  If you think it is overwhelmingly likely that if God exists there would be no evils whatsoever, then you probably don't need an AfC.  The AfE suffices.  But let's suppose that God might have some reason to permit some evil, and allow human life to be difficult in various ways.  Then, let's ask whether the AfC specifically, changes the situation.

It cannot be denied that the AfC has emotional appeal.  What I want to argue in this post is that the argument actually has very little rational force.  Specifically, it depends crucially on equivocating between different scenarios.  Once we specify the scenario more clearly, we find that there is not much reasonable work for the AfC to do.

Specifically, I want to break the AfC into subcases based on the following:

  1. Is the argument supposed to be about (a) myself and my own confusion?  [By the first person pronouns here, I mean whichever individual is considering the AfC as a possible objection to Christianity.]  Or, is the argument supposed to be about (b) the confusion of other people besides me?
  2. Apart from the AfC (let's abbreviate this important concept as AFTAFC) would such persons be (i) rationally justified in believing in Christianity, or (ii) not rationally justified?

To be a little more technical about 2, we could adopt a Bayesian framework where people have credences in various propositions such as Christianity (which are subjective probabilities between 0 and 1, based on the evidence available to that person, and their prior sensibilities).

By contrast, let us consider belief in a religion to be a binary (yes/no) decision.  After all, from the point of view of making a decision, I need to either live my life as if God exists (going to Church, praying, asking for forgiveness of sins, taking sacraments etc.) or else not bother to do this stuff.  And the simplest way that credences could be related to beliefs, is that that there exists some threshold probability t, with 0 < t < 1, such that if my credence p satisfies p > t, then rationally I should believe, whereas if p < t, then rationally I should not believe.  I won't discuss in this post where the threshold t should be set, and why; all that matters is that it exists somewhere.

[We could consider more complicated decision theories, e.g. a range of probability for which either stance is permissible, or belief for-purpose-X but withholding judgment for-purpose-Y.  I think that making things more complicated is unlikely to change the final conclusion much, so let's keep things simple.]

(a)(i) Let us start by considering the case (a)(i), when the argument is about me and my own confusion, but I nevertheless think I am AFTAFC-justified in believing in Christianity.  By ATAFC-justified, I mean that I would be rationally required to believe when taking into account all arguments except the AfC itself.

(This of course, includes on the one hand the positive arguments for Christianity; on the other hand, all other arguments against Christianity, including that portion of the AfE that doesn't intersect with the AfC).

Now, what should I conclude in this case?  Unless perhaps I am very close to the threshold credence t—it seems to me that the AfC shouldn't make much difference at all in this case.  After all, the premise, that God has left me in confusion, isn't really true if I admit that I otherwise have enough evidence to rationally compel me to believe in Christianity.  In that case, the premise, that I am religiously confused, isn't sufficiently true to make a convincing argument.

Surely, the AfC isn't allowed to just exist as a circular self-fulfilling prophecy!  As in: "The AfC is sound because the AfC is sound because the AfC is sound..."  It can only be valid if it is based, non-circularly, on some other reason to disbelieve, other than the AfC itself.  But by stipulation, this is not true in case (a)(i).

The only way I can see that the AfC would still work in this scenario, is if I believe something much stronger about God's actions, than simply that God should give me enough evidence to rationally warrant belief.  I would need to believe that God is obligated to make me even more certain than this.  In other words, I would need to believe something like the following objection:

Obj 1. God is not allowed to place me in a situation where I have to exercise the virtue of faith.

That is of trusting in God, even in the face of whatever psychological uncertainty remains.  And in this case, everyone should concede that such faith would be a virtue, since we are stipulating that AFTAFC there is sufficient evidence to require me to rationally believe in God.  (In particular, not believing would be morally wrong, again AFTAFC itself.)  But this assumption is quite implausible.  Especially if we are considering a religion like Christianity, which claims that faith is one of the most important theological virtues and something that brings us closer to God.

It follows that we can drop the assumption AFTAFC.  In this scenario, faith is simply rationally justified, and the premise of the AfC is simply invalid.

(a)(ii) Now let us consider the scenario where I think I am not AFTAFC-justified in believing in Christianity.  In this case, the premise of the AfC now appears to be correct, but now it doesn't seem to be doing any useful work.  That is, by stipulation I already have a good reason not to believe.  Adding the AfC doesn't change this, so it doesn't change my decision to disbelieve.

You might think, well it at least gives me an additional reason to disbelieve, so as a result I can be more fully confident in my disbelief.  But a moment's reflection shows that this isn't really true in any sense that matters for decision making.  Suppose that on some grounds g, I disbelieve in Christianity, and then I try to take comfort in that fact that even if g ends up being incorrect, the AfC still works.  Well, but if I ever lose my confidence in g, that again will retrospectively invalidate the AfC, putting me back in situation (a)(i)!  After all, I would be discovering that I was wrong, and that I do in fact have sufficient rational evidence to believe.

OK, but could I make an argument about how God should have revealed himself to me at an earlier time in my life, while I still thought that the reasons g were good?  But that won't fly, unless I believe that:

Obj 2God is not allowed to wait for the most opportune time to reveal himself to a person.

But this objection also seems highly implausible.  Human life is a chronological thing, in which we develop our capacities progressively over time, starting off as a baby who can hardly do anything.  And anyone who eventually comes into a relationship with God, has by definition resolved their confusion sufficiently to obtain this relationship.  See the discussion here on Just Thomism (especially the 1st comment by St. Brandon).

Furthermore, if salvation implies that we get to live forever with God in the next life, then we get this benefit even if we have a deathbed conversion.  Furthermore, the period of time when we were living apart from God, might well have served some sort of educational or other purpose—and by stipulation, it has culminated in coming to see that (AFTAFC) it is rational to believe in God.  So in this case again, the AfC should have very little force.

Because of this chronological consideration, I cannot even take the AfC as an additional reason to think it is unlikely that my grounds g for disbelieving in God will later be removed by divine action!  Because, if they are removed, that would retrospectively invalidate the AfC, making the scenario no less plausible than it would have been otherwise.

Now when we turn to case (b), a new problem presents itself.  Specifically, it is very hard for us to know the spiritual state of another human being.  For me to look at another person and judge them by saying Deep down, this person secretly knows that God exists but he is intellectually dishonest, and thus suppresses the truth in his heart vs. This other person is totally honest and not resistant to God's grace, is something very difficult for human beings to know (except perhaps in a few, very rare cases, where the behavior of the other person makes it totally obvious).   And Christianity itself, at the very least strongly discourages us from judging other people in this way.  As if we ourselves could look into their hearts the way that God can.

Furthermore, Christianity also says that we are all sinners, making it clear that no human but Jesus was completely non-resistant to God's grace.  So, the category of human adults who are totally non-resistant to God's grace is presumably the empty set.

Nevertheless, we can still abstractly consider the 2 possible cases:

(b)(i) The argument involves other people, and they are rationally obliged to believe in God—they just irrationally (and perhaps culpably) don't do so.  This case is thus resolved the same way as (a)(i).  By definition these people aren't sufficiently confused here, they are making a willful decision not to believe in God even though they have enough evidence.  Only if you buy something like Obj 1, is the AfC convincing in this case.

To be sure, this isn't the end of the story for people in this class.  "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23), and resisting grace is indeed one of the ways that this sin manifests, both in the lives of non-Christians and Christians.  But, "Christ came into the world to save sinners" (1 Tim 1:15).  Most Christians have stories about how once they were once running away from God, but God came and saved them anyway.

So, I am not saying that all such individuals will be condemned in the end.  My point is only that, by the definition of class (b)(i), their present disbelief is their own fault and choice.  So it has an adequate moral explanation, in terms of human freedom.

It is certainly true that God could have appeared with such dramatic and undeniable miracles so as to force everyone to believe.  But apparently he doesn't (yet) want to do that.  St. Pascal wrote somewhere that God,

...wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and hidden from those who shun him with all their heart, he has qualified our knowledge of him by giving signs which can be seen by those who seek him and not by those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.

Pascal thought that God hid himself in order to condemn those who were unworthy of his mercy.  But in my view, on the contrary, God hiding himself from those who don't want to believe in him is itself an act of mercy and compassion.

If God revealed his holiness to us with total clarity, our only choices would be to accept him as he is, or rebel like Satan and become utterly wicked.  But instead God gives us enough space that we don't have to believe, in this life.  (The same applies, of course, to the various ways in which Christians are still faithless—the point here isn't just about atheists.)  This allows even atheists to still seek out a good life in earthly terms, one that still allows for the pursuit of ideals like truth and justice and benevolence.  Perhaps eventually, some day, they will come to realize how these qualities point to God.  But in the meantime, they don't have to think of themselves as rebels defying God.  Instead they can live what they think of as a normal human life, in friendship with other people, trying to follow whatever they perceive as good.

So, if God gives to people who really don't want to believe in him, sufficient space to live their lives without such belief, I don't feel that such people are in a position to complain.  They are getting what they wanted!  And—conditional on them not wanting to believe—it is quite plausibly spiritually better for them than the alternative (being forced to believe by overwhelming evidence) would be, as I don't think this is the sort of belief that God is looking for.

(b)(ii) The argument involves other people, and they do not in fact have sufficient evidence to rationally believe in God.

Except in some cases involving young children, and/or people-groups who have never heard the gospel, it is difficult to know for sure who belongs to this category.  But I don't doubt that there are some people in it.

A person might then without logical absurdity say, well I myself have AFTAFC-justified belief, but I see that other people do not have enough evidence to believe.  And all things considered, I think that tells against Christianity enough that—by taking into consideration the AfC—in the end, I don't believe.  Thus, here at last we have a case where the AfC could logically have some force.

But I don't think it is a lot of force.  The reason is simple: how are we in a position know that God will not form a saving relationship with such persons at some time in the future?  If we have good reason to think a benevolent God would always do so, why then that is a good argument that he will.  We simply aren't in a position to know that he won't.  If the main obstruction to a person's relationship with God, is simply a lack of evidence, then we have every reason to believe that (when Christ eventually makes his reign obvious, through his Second Coming in glory) this lack will eventually be remedied.

So again, this is only a problem if we think that 1) there are intellectually honest people who sincerely would want to seek God, but 2) they do not have enough evidence to rationally believe, and yet 3) God will never reach out to them in the future.  I can see how we might come to believe (1) or even (2) about someone specific, but how could we ever come to be confident in (3), which involves a blanket statement about all future time?

We might be in such a position to know (3) with high probability, if we additionally subscribe to the following doctrines about salvation, commonly held by many Evangelicals:

Doct I. It  is impossible for any adult to be saved, without an explicit and conscious faith in Christ, of a sort that (apart from rare cases, like e.g. last-minute deathbed conversions) is usually clearly observable from the outside.

Doct II. This faith must come before death; there is no possible chance to be saved after death.  All those who die without such faith necessarily go to Hell.

I do, in fact, concede that doctrines (I) and (II) would together make the AfC very concerning, as it does seem to be an empirical fact that the majority of people on Earth are not saved if (I) and (II) are the criteria.  But I don't believe that the Bible in fact teaches these doctrines, when it is properly understood.

In particular, (I) implies that we are often in a position to negatively judge the spiritual state of (those who are not in any obvious way) Christians.  But the Bible specifically says we aren't in a good position to judge other people's hearts: "Who are you to judge another man's servant?  By his own master he will stand or fall." (Romans 14:4).  In some cases I think we can be reasonably confident in a positive view of another Christian's salvation, but in this life I don't think we can ever look at a non-Christian and say, God has given up on this person.

Secondly, there is surprisingly little support for (II) in the Bible, and some passages (such as 1 Peter 3:18-4:6) appear to say the opposite.

My view is that, while salvation does come through faith in Christ, we should reject (I) and (II) in the specific forms that they are stated above.  Then it seems like the AfC is only a major concern if we have something like the following objection:

Obj 3.  God has to reveal himself to everyone (of a given generation, I suppose) at the same time.  He isn't allowed to reveal himself to humans in some particular order, so that some persons have sufficient reason to believe before other persons do.

But I also don't see a good reason to subscribe to this.  Why should it be true?  Revealing himself to some people before others, would be fully compatible even with a Universalist scenario where all are eventually saved!  (Indeed, the very notion of "generations" already implies that some people come to God before others are even born.)

It will be noted that all three of Obj 1-3 involve thinking we know better than God how to construct a world, and that he is obligated to conform to our expectations.  But a God who has to conform to our expectations isn't a God at all.   In fact, the notion of a crucified Messiah, the central paradox of Christianity, would not even be possible in a world with no religious confusion!  If there were no such thing as religious confusion, there could be no Christianity!

Furthermore, by revealing himself first to the prophets and apostles, who in turn evangelize others, God makes Christians into a community (the Church).  This is a great good, that would not so obviously occur if we all received our understanding from God in a direct way from heaven, that was totally disconnected with the witness of others.

Speaking of witnessing, if it is our Christian responsibility to share the good news, and make it credible by our lives, then it seems inevitable that our (many) failures to do so will result there being some people who don't yet have good reasons to believe.  You could imagine God making a world where our actions couldn't affect anyone else spiritually, but I don't think such a world would be better than the one we live in.  (Indeed it would be less of a "world", in the sense of a system of interacting persons and things...)

Again, this is not the end of the story.  But it is a reason for things not to be 100% clear right here and now.

To summarize: If there is enough evidence for me to rationally believe, the Argument from Confusion is unsound and thus should be rejected.  But if there isn't enough evidence for me to rationally believe, the argument is redundant with my other reasons to disbelieve, and thus serves no purpose.

Or suppose I think there is enough evidence for me, but not enough evidence for other people.  In this case, the Argument from Confusion only speaks against Christianity if I put myself in a role of a judge and say that I know who is intellectually honest, and I also put myself in the role of a prophet and say that I know that God will nevertheless reject such people.  But in fact, I am not in a good position to know that God does indeed ultimately reject such people!  Instead, I should pay attention to the insight that I do have, and follow it as best I can.  Without getting sidetracked by saying to God: "What about this other person?"  Why should God reveal to me his plans about somebody else?  What matters is if I myself have enough light to come to Christ.

Therefore, in none of these configurations is the AfC particularly convincing.  And of course, if the subcases (a) and (b) are unconvincing when considered separately, they will also be unconvincing when combined together into a single argument.

Posted in Ethics, Theological Method | 9 Comments

How to Cope with Obsessive Religious Doubts

I. Introductory Remarks

From time to time people email me with questions about Christian theology, or about how various aspects of modern physics relate to God.  Although I am extremely busy these days, I do sometimes try to answer such questions, especially when it is clear that the topic is related to a spiritual struggle that the questioner is going through.

(If I have not answered your email I am sorry about that.  Between caring for small children, an academic career, and some health annoyances, I've had less time to answer everybody who writes to me.  When I do answer people, it is often after a delay of weeks or months.  Thanks for your understanding, and please don't assume that because I don't reply, that I therefore didn't read your email or pray for you.)

If your question is more philosophical and less personal, it might be better to post it to the comment sections of this blog rather than to my email.  For one thing, this gives other people the chance to post their own answers, and also to benefit from any replies.  We can all learn together!

However, sometimes a person's question is deeply personal, and in this case it is natural not to want your question to be exposed to the public.  In such cases, writing to me by email might be more appropriate.  However, it is still somewhat inefficient if I see the same issues over and over again...

Because of this, I've decided to collate some things I've written to some people struggling with one very specific spiritual problem, which can cause great suffering to the person afflicted.  If you don't have this particular problem, then great!  This blog post is not for you.  But I am sure there must be thousands of people out there who need to read this post.

Disclaimers

This blog post is not about me, specifically.  For some reason it is hard to write a blog post about mental health problems without people assuming it is some sort of cry for help, or a round about way of confessing something that I have been struggling with recently.

It's true that I wouldn't have been able to help people struggling with this problem, if I were not also a fellow human being, who has suffered from my own doubts and emotional anxieties and struggles (Hebrews 5:1-3), which bear some similarity to the problem the other person is having.  But the descriptions in this post are based at least as much on seeing this pattern in the lives of others, even if some of the advice is based on things that have helped me in the past.

If you are one of the people who has written to me about your spiritual struggles, please be assured of the following:

(a) Nothing in this post can be used to identify you; your confidentiality is always assured unless you explicitly tell me otherwise.

(b) Although I might quote my own words from emails that I wrote to you, this post is not about you as a specific individual, but rather about a common pattern that affects many people.  That is, of the N people who have written to me about this issue, even if we leave you out of it entirely, I could still have written this blog post based entirely on the other N - 1 people.

This blog post is written for people suffering from a particular sort of spiritual anxiety.  If in the last 2-3 months, you have spent less than 1 hour / week worrying about whether your religious beliefs are true, then this blog post is probably not for you.  Or, if you spend more than 1 hour per week thinking about this topic, but both of the following are true:

(A) you usually don't experience significant negative emotions while doing so, and
(B) you are usually able to set these thoughts aside, in order to engage in other important activities (such as work, hobbies, interacting with family/friends, or sleeping),

then again this blog post is probably not for you!

(Indeed, if you hardly think about the question of religious truth at all, then you might be better served by a stern warning about the importance of the subject!  If there might be a God who loves you and wants you to be eternally happy, but who also expects you to live in a certain way, shouldn't you want to know if this is the case?  But, I assume the people who need to hear this sermon probably don't overlap very much with the Undivided Looking readership.)

II. What it looks like

The pattern I want to discuss is the case of a person who becomes obsessed with Christian apologetics (i.e. the defense of Christian beliefs) to an extent that becomes emotionally unhealthy.

Something triggers them that is either an event (e.g. the death of a friend), or an argument (e.g. reading an atheist cosmologist who thinks God obviously doesn't exist because the universe [did/did not] have a beginning); or perhaps they are reading the Bible and see something which seems to them to be a contradiction; or perhaps they have a meloncholy or anxious temperament, that is inclined to dwell on doubts about God's existence or goodness.

Usually the person with this pattern of doubts is a devout religious believer, but in some cases they might also be an irrelegious person who doesn't like Christianity, but can't seem to get out of their mind the idea that the judgemental God they perceive in the Bible might somehow still exist, and so they seek a dialogue with a religious believer to voice their fears and anxieties.

For concreteness, let's invent a concrete fictional questioner named George, and I am going to suppose that he is a devout but struggling Christian.  (By this blog's eccentric canonization policy, I suppose I ought to therefore call this fictional character Saint George.  This is fitting since he does have a dragon to fight.)

Let's suppose that St. George was raised in a church with a somewhat insular and fundamentalist worldview.  He was led to believe that Darwinian Evolution is just atheist propaganda, invented by people in order to attack the biblical account of creation.  For a while in high school, he was fed some young earth creationist material which led him to believe that there was some actual scientific evidence that the world is actually only a few thousand years old.  But after he went off to college, he realized that it is difficult for a scientifically literate person to believe in this.

This leads St. George to a crisis of authority.  The people who taught him made some really bad arguments for Christianity.  But maybe there are also some good arguments?

In his spare time George tries to assuage his fears by reading Christian apologetics (or watching videos), as much as he can find online.  He discovers that there are some intelligent seeming Christians out there, with a worldview more open to scientific knowledge, who nevertheless believe that there is good evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.  Or, he might get interested in various arguments for the divine creation of the universe, for example Cosmological Arguments (based on contingency or based on Big Bang theory or whatever).

But in order to be fair, and to seek out challenges to his worldview—and perhaps also because of the fascinating attraction of opposites—he also consumes anti-religious works on the other side, in order to compare the quality of the arguments.  So far, so good.  But while St. George finds some of the answers given by the Christians seem to be persuasive, others may not seem so convincing.

Or the answers raise a whole new crop of issues and objections.  OK, we know that the disciples didn't steal Jesus body because there were guards at the tomb, but how do we know that St. Matthew didn't just invent the story about the guards, or that the Gospel was written by somebody else entirely?  And here's an atheist on the internet who claims that some random paper on the arXiv shows that the universe might not have had a beginning.

Nothing ever seems to be fully definitive.  (How can it be, when it seems that the justification of Christian faith depends on so many different historical and philosophical factors, which people have been arguing about for centuries?)

George starts to wonder if the problem is with himself or whether the problem is with what he was taught.  How can he resolve these perplexing doubts and difficulties?  Does he really need to be an expert in quantum cosmology and biblical criticism in order to decide whether God exists?

Does he simply need to find the right experts, and trust them to give him all the answers?  But what if the experts disagree, or if he picks an expert based on the fact that they are telling him what he wants to hear?  It was a shock when he first learned that there are bible scholars with PhD's from top universities, who think that what he believes about the Bible is dead wrong.

Patterns of Addiction

To assuage these worries, St. George increases his consumption of the product.  After all, some of the articles he read by Christian apologists did seem to be helpful for resolving many of the sillier atheist objections.  So it seems like if he can only ask enough questions, and watch enough smart people debating the issue, maybe he'll reach a state of realization or enlightenment where his intellectual (and spiritual) problems will be resolved.

Unfortunately, this is a potential pathway to addiction.  Apologetics is obviously not chemically addictive, but anything can be psychologically addictive if the right conditions are met.  That is, St. George is in a situation where doing activity X causes him to feel bad, but where his beliefs are such that it seems the right way to respond to these bad feelings is to do X again.  This can cause a feedback loop where X grows and takes up more and more of his thoughtspace.

Now let me be clear.  I don't mean to imply that being interested in Christian apologetics, or deeply caring about its outcome, is in and of itself psychologically unhealthy, and that researching apologetics is necessarily a wrong thing to do when faced with religious doubts.  Obviously not, or I wouldn't have written a bunch of apologetics posts!

It's perfectly reasonable to want to do some research to find out whether what you believe rests on a secure foundation.  For the vast majority of people, that's all it ever is and this blog post is not about you.  Please keep doing what you were doing before, and if you were happy before, please don't become unhappy by wondering if you have some sort of apologetics neurosis.  (Just because you might say, in a causal conversation to a friend, that you are "obsessed" with some hobby or interest, doesn't necessarily mean you are obsessed in a clinical, bad sense of the word.)

If you really do have the bad sort of obsession with religious doubts, you'll know it because it was already making you miserable—I mean before you started reading this post, and wondering about whether it describes you.  This is not a problem you can have without knowing about it!

As in other cases of addiction, the instinctive response to dealing with the difficulties caused by excess consumption can sometimes be to double down on the tactics that were originally used to try to solve the problem, by "increasing the dosage", so to speak.  So St. George spends more and more time on the topic.  This of course also increases his chances of thinking about the subject whenever he is not reading about it.  In fact, he starts to experience his doubts in the form of intrusive thoughts, which make it very difficult to concentrate on his work, or his studies in school.

Pretty soon the other areas of his life start to suffer.  To quote a psychological criterion for when a mental pattern becomes a disorder), St. George has started to experience "significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning".

[I have omitted the word "clinical" here since this I am not a professional psychologist and this blog post is obviously not formal medical advice.]

If St. George has a tendency towards OCD or an anxiety disorder or depression—again, these conditions are nothing to be ashamed of, and these personality traits can exist in mild forms as well as severe forms—then these may be complicating factors.  It might even be that St. George would benefit from seeing some sort of therapist (although if so, he should try to find one who is able to respect the ways in which religion can play a positive role in his life).  Human beings have both bodies and souls, and each one affects the other in a complicated way.

It is important to emphasize that none of this means that George is crazy, or about to go off the deep end.

In fact, St. George is quite possibly a highly rational person, whose beliefs might in several respects be more accurate than those of other people.  Nevertheless, he has a mental health problem—and this is nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to literally everybody on the planet from time to time!

However, St. George has a problem he doesn't seem to be able to reason his way out of, in part because St. George has a false belief about what his problem actually is, and therefore what is the right way to fix it.

What people want me to say

St. George might stumble across my blog or webpages and say to himself, "Gee, here's a Christian with a PhD in physics, who is an expert in quantum gravity.  I'll write him an email and he can sort me out!

Dear Dr. Wall,

Sorry to bother you since you must be busy, but as a fellow believer in Christ I'm hoping you can help me with a problem.  I've been struggling with anxiety about my faith ever since I heard about so-and-so's cosmological model where the universe comes out of a Giant Trombone instead of having a beginning.  Is the Giant Trombone theory really true?  Please help me!

Best wishes,
George

Now it usually is true that the Giant Trombone theory (or whatever is the flavor of the month) is a highly speculative idea with little evidential support, and I will probably be able to say some things that will reassure St. George about that particular point.

At the same time, I can't help but feel that St. George is putting me in a somewhat false position, i.e. that he expects a certain degree of scientific certainty which I can't and shouldn't provide.  What St. George really wants me to say is something like this:

Dear George,

There is no evidence whatsoever for Giant Trombone theory.  In fact, speaking from my authorative position as a scientist, the data is completely conclusive that the universe had an absolute beginning of time.  Only a person who is totally biased, with an a priori prejudice in favor of atheism, could believe otherwise.  For this reason, you can be quite certain that the universe was created by God 13.8 billion years ago.  I hope this resolves your spiritual difficulty.

Blessings,
Aron

But I will never, ever write this email, because it would compromise my integrity as a scientist and as a theologian to do so.  As a scientist, I need to allow for the possibility that Giant Trombone theory (or whatever it is) might turn out to fit the facts, or that there is some aspect of it which I can learn something from.

And speaking as a theologian, I know that God is allowed to create the universe in whatever way he pleases (either with or without a Giant Trombone) and that the Big Bang theory can't really be the primary foundation of the Christian faith—for the very obvious reason that Chrisitianity is about 20 times older than the Big Bang model (as first proposed by the Catholic priest St. Georges Lemaître), so it can hardly be the reason why anyone before him believed in God.

For me to endorse, even implicitly, the misconception that the existence of God is primarily supported by the Big Bang model, would commit me to thinking that every Christian in history from St. Peter to the time of St. Maxwell believed in Jesus for the wrong reasons.

Admittedly, if the Giant Trombone theory were actually confirmed to be true (which is admittedly kind of unlikely, because I just invented out of whole cloth a few paragraphs ago), it might be a little bit relevant to some questions.  It could potentially push the scales of evidence a little bit, one way or the other, on certain very specific technical arguments for the existence of God.  On the other hand, it won't make any difference at all to several other classes of arguments, such as those which argue that even Giant Trombones would be contingent realities, and would stand in need of an explanation.

In other words it would contribute somewhat to the Great Philosophical Conversation about Everything.  But it is a very serious mistake to think that God's existence rests on whether one very specialized type of argument for his existence is valid or not.

(I think it is probably true that a sufficiently powerful intelligence (e.g. an angel) could point out flaws in any arguments a human being might make for the existence of God, or indeed for the existence of almost anything else that we think is real.  But that does not mean the angel couldn't add: "Yet there is also something essentially right about your argument, if you were able to see even deeper into this topic as I can.")

If St. George thinks that reviving his certainty about Christianity requires becoming an expert in quantum cosmology, then St. George is simply wrong about how the Christian faith works.  And it is more important to correct this wrongness, than to explain to him the particular ways in which Giant Trombone theory is unlikely to be true.

Long before Big Bang cosmology was a thing, someone wrote these words:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.  (Heb 11:3)

Let me be quite clear here that this word "faith" in the New Testament does not mean belief without evidence (as many atheists falsely allege, because that makes them feel justified in rejecting it.)  The central meaning of the word is much closer to the English word trust.  That is, it is primarily a word about relationships, not a word about propositions.  Obviously, there are situations in which trust is justified—it all depends on who you are trusting, and what reason you have for trusting them!

If you trust a friend, then you will indeed believe certain propositions.  Presumably you will have a good opinion about their character and reliability.  Also, if you trust your friend's honesty, and expertise about a given subject, then you will also be disposed to believe whatever they tell you about this subject.

All of this is pretty obvious in a non-religious context, in which case a lot of questions about "faith" just sort themselves out naturally.  Common sense says that faith is sometimes justified, and sometimes leads us astray, depending on who or what you put your faith in.

Faith only becomes a religious matter when the friend you are trusting is God himself, the Creator of the Universe.  Because we can come to know, at least a little bit, the Creator, we can trust that he is the source of all the beauty we can see in the Universe.  This sort of faith actually works in the opposite direction from apologetics about creation.  The Christian faith starts with having a relationship with God (which is potentially available to everyone through his promises), and proceeds from there to become confident in God's ultimate control over everything.

This sort of faith was available even to people who lived before the Big Bang theory, or the disovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Why doubts can't always be resolved in the way you want them to be

In some ways the root cause of the problem is, paradoxically, that St. George is conceptualizing his doubting as an intellectual "problem" which needs to be "solved", rather than a present emotional difficulty, which he needs to find resources to cope with.  But life, including spiritual life, is not really a problem to be solved, rather it is something to be lived.

There are indeed intellectual puzzles which pop up along the way.  These puzzles are important to think about, and banging our head against them helps us to learn what reality is like.

It is indeed true that that the deepest Reality is not an impersonal uncaring force, but rather a loving God.  And that the best way to relate to these mysteries and puzzles ideally ought to bring you closer to God, rather than farther away.

At the same time, answering intellectual puzzles cannot be confused with life itself.  A crossword puzzle can be solved, and then you are done with it.  But a pet dog is not something which can be "solved" once and for all, and then it won't bother you anymore.  It is a living reality which can be related to but not in a way which disposes of it.  You can indeed "fix" a dog, but this only deals with one highly specific way in which the dog might be a nuisance to you.

If even a dog cannot really be related to properly with a problem-solution mentality, then still less is it possible for us to relate to God in that way.

St. George is probably a highly intellectual person, and when he encounters a new problem in his life, his instinct is to try to cast it as an intellectual problem to be solved.  This means he has to recast the problem as a "debate" for which the proper solution is evaluating arguments.  But if the original trigger for his spiritual difficulties was more of an emotional or relational difficulty, then this might be an entirely inadequate response to the original trigger for his doubts.

In fact, it may never be possible for St. George to resolve his problem using his chosen method, because it doesn't address the underlying emotional issue.  In such cases, increasing the dosage of his chosen "medication" won't help, it will just increase the severity of the side-effects.

As St. Dorothy Sayers writes in The Mind of the Maker:

What is obvious here is the firmly implanted notion that all human situations are "problems" like detective problems, capable of a single, necessary, and categorical solution, which must be wholly right, while all others are wholly wrong. But this they cannot be, since human situations are subject to the law of human nature, whose evil is at all times rooted in its good, and whose good can only redeem, but not abolish, its evil. The good that emerges from a conflict of values cannot arise from the total condemnation or destruction of one set of values, but only from the building of a new value, sustained, like an arch, by the tension of the original two. We do not, that is, merely examine the data to disentangle something that was in them already: we use them to construct something that was not there before: neither circumcision or uncircumcision, but a new creature.

In some medieval versions of the legend, St. George finally defeats the dragon, not by killing it as you would expect, but by baptizing it.  Immediately the dragon becomes completely tame, and he is able to lead it into to the village, where it begins to serve the people there.

Perhaps our modern St. George can take the lesson from this, that sometimes a "problem" is best resolved if we jump out of the initial framework we were trying to use to "solve" it.

A Change of Frame

You will notice that I have sometimes been discussing the issue of obsessing over doubts as if it were a psychological problem—a problem of addiction—rather than directly engaging with the contents of the doubts.

By this I mean no disrespect to the important philosophical issues that St. George's questions relate to.  As a writer named Sarah Constantin says in a very insightful post called Sane Thinking about Mental Problems:

There are multiple ways of looking at problems with the mind.  I don’t think that there’s a best one, but that it’s practical to switch between them pragmatically and to be mindful of the local advantages and disadvantages of each frame.

There is a medical model which "speaks of mental illness as a type of disease, which can be treated medically.  The mentally ill are sick, and they can get well.  They are patients."

There is a social model which treats mental problems as disabilities, which require accommodations by society in order to treat everyone fairly.

There is a skill based model which says that "problems of the mind are fundamentally about being weak at a skill, and recovery is about gaining that skill."  About this approach Constantin says:

The advantage of the skill-based approach is that it incorporates the human capacities of learning and trying.  Once you have the lightbulb moment of “wow, I can try to get better on purpose?”, once you start working directly on things rather than waiting for someone to “treat” you, your progress can accelerate quite suddenly. The skill model takes you, meaning your “wise mind” or the part of you that wants to be sane, seriously as an agent, and enlists your effort and intelligence.

But I was most interested in how she described a spiritual approach to mental illness:

What I’d call the “spiritual model” is a final family of viewpoints, which are related in that they take the denotational content of mental problems seriously, especially mood problems.

In this model, if you are having a crisis of faith, then your depression is fundamentally about religion, and you’re going to need to figure out your answers to religious questions.  If your problems take the form of extreme guilt, then you’re going to have to engage with ethical philosophy and figure out a form of ethics that is compatible with life.  If you’re experiencing nihilistic despair, then you’re going to have to find a source of meaning.  If you’re having delusions, you might need to build up a stable epistemology.

The spiritual model takes unhappiness as a normal or even universal part of the human condition, not something exclusive to “abnormal psychology.” People get profoundly unhappy; people have to find a way to overcome despair; the way to overcome your despair is to figure out where you have a misunderstanding and gain the insight that will resolve it.

The advantage of this approach is that it is much more individual and fine-grained than the other approaches.  It deals with your mind, not the generic mind that has similar problems to yours. And it engages with your mind, including your mental illness, as a peer — not as something to fix or to accept, but as someone to talk to and listen to. It allows for the possibility that your strange thoughts while depressed or manic or whatever might in fact be true, at least in some facets.  There’s a sense in which resolving inner conflicts is “getting to the root of the problem”, actually untangling the knots in your mind, rather than “merely” palliating symptoms.  The work of life, from the spiritual point of view, is building a valid and life-sustaining personal philosophy, and almost incidentally, this will resolve many “psychological problems.”

Although I have no particular reason to think that this blogger is a Christian, I loved the way she described the spiritual approach here as taking people's search for truth and meaning seriously—to ask what really does give our lives meaning.  Our hearts demand that this be a legitimate question to ask.

I would add that if it turns out that God is the Deepest Truth, and if our relationship to God defines our truest identity, then it would be a mistake to try to construct a purely secular notion of "mental health" in which the answers to religious questions play a marginal role.  If God is our true Father who loves us, then anyone who is living as an atheist is for that very reason mentally ill, out of orientation, living out a delusion.  Even if they don't go around dancing naked in the streets, or screaming that people are out to get them.

However, this spiritual frame also has its potential pitfalls:

The downside of this approach is that sometimes your problems aren’t really about anything discernible, and it’s counterproductive to try to seek meaning in them, rather than just trying to manage or treat or accommodate them.  Sometimes trying a spiritual approach just means getting trapped in ruminating or becoming an “insight junkie”, with no productive effect on your actual problems.

It’s very rare to see discussions of mental illness that treat multiple possible frames as valid and usable.  I’ve seen personal narratives where people shifted from one frame to another and present it as “seeing the light,” but I think that’s not the whole story. I suspect that successfully living with, or recovering from, mental problems involves being somewhat eclectic about frames.

To summarize: when one frame doesn't work, it's worth trying out a different frame. St. George is trying to treat his problem of obsessive doubts as a spiritual problem.  And to the extent that the doubts raise genuine philosophical issues which need to be resolved, that is legitimate.

But supposes he finds that, even after "resolving" the issue as well as he reasonably can intellectually, that his mind just goes right back to Step #1 and begins the process all over again, so that he is caught in an infinite loop.  And that this looping process is partially involuntary, and occurs even when he wishes it wouldn't.

In that case, he might do better to think of his doubting as an illness which he needs to  recover from.  Or perhaps, as a condition for which he needs to develop skills to prevent these doubts from hijacking the rest of his life.

Not to mention, preventing these doubts from derailing his spiritual walk with God.  (Despite the way they dominate St. George's self-consciousness, in all likelihood these doubts are in some ways peripheral to George's actual walk with God.)

No One is Alone

A lot of people might however be reluctant to take the step of trying on the "illness" frame because of the way in which our society stigmatizes mental illness.  But the truth is that almost every human being suffers from some kind of mental problem or another, and there is no sharp line separating the "well" from the "ill".

Mental health problems are not the same as sins.  According to orthodox Chalcedonian theology, this means that as a human individual, even Jesus was able to suffer from difficulties and burdens of the mind, such as depression.  The prophet Isaiah portrays the Suffering Servant (whom Christians identify with the Messiah) as suffering from depression regarding the apparent lack of success of his ministry:

But I said, "I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all.  Yet what is due me is in the LORD's hand, and my reward is with my God."  (Isaiah 49:4)

and we know from Christ's words on the cross, that even the Son of God was able to feel abandoned, in a world where his Father seemed to be totally absent (even though in reality the Father is never absent).

And this is why the following verse about the Savior is true:

Can we find a friend so faithful
Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.

So the fact that St. George has a mental burden which he finds difficult to bear, does not yet distinguish him from Jesus.

George might choose to reframe his doubts as a form of suffering, treating an episode of spiritual anxiety just as if it were a bout of nausea.  What then?  In that case he would try to avoid things that trigger such episodes whenever possible, and would ask God to “let this cup pass from me” to the extent possible.  But when it must be suffered, to just try to get through to the other side somehow or another, knowing that he will eventually get through it.

Even Jesus was tempted to try to prove that he was really the Son of God, by taking an illicit shortcut by "testing God".  Jesus declined this offer.  (And if you want to follow him, so must you.)

However, unlike Jesus, St. George is a sinner, and this means that he will probably be doubting God in ways that Jesus wouldn't, and he won't be bearing his burden with the same degree of patience and trust that the Son of God would.  Nevertheless, he will become more Chrsitlike to the extent that he prayerfully refers all his difficulties (most especially including St. George's present suffering due to doubts) to the loving care of the Father.

Afterlife Anxieties

[While the whole point of this section is to be reassuring, feel free to skip to the next bold section if you prefer not to think about this topic right now.]

A complicating factor in some cases is the fear of damnation (either for themselves, or for friends and family members), either as an explicit fear, or an implicit motivating factor.

Suppose that St. George has been raised in a church which teaches that God automatically sends everyone who dies without believing in Jesus to Hell.  (His church's teaching might actually be more nuanced than this, but the question is which theological impressions are controlling George's mind, which may not even be the same as the theology that he would consciously state if you ask him what you believe.)

This fear of Hell thus acts as a disincentive for a religious person to accept any possibility of a non-religious perspective being valid.  Yet many intelligent Christians are sufficiently self-aware to notice this effect on their own minds, and worry that it is compromising their judgement.

Also, the doctrine raises its own set of thorny (and emotionally disturbing) questions about the justice and goodness of God (even though God is both our Father and the Supreme Good), so now St. George has yet another set of religious doubts and fears to process at the same time.

Actually, this effect can work in both directions.  A person who might be in the process of journeying from unbelief to Christianity, can find it difficult to admit it to themselves—because taking the possibility of Christianity seriously, could also require taking eternal punishment seriously as a possible outcome.  Conversely, many people raised as Christians deconvert, precisely because they experience the threat of Hell primarily as a form of intellectual blackmail, and the only way to win that game is to take a hard line, by refusing to play.

If only they knew how much God loves everyone, and how much he desires for everyone to be reconciled with him!  That God has no desire to punish for the sake of mere revenge, but would much rather bless us with the richest of rewards.  And that none of the warnings in the Bible were intended to stunt anyone's intellectual or spiritual development—not at all—but only to prevent people from selling their birthright, by refusing to grow and to love by means of various evasions.

One day Christ will return and he will rebuke those who, like Job's friends, tried to use "orthodoxy" (as they undersood it) not in a redemptive way, but as a tool for controlling people, in order to try to keep people from asking honest questions or thinking for themselves.

Anyway, when this doctrine of eternal punishment is introduced in a clumsy and controlling fashion (which is a million miles away from the actual point of the doctrine) it tends to cause both religious and irreligious people to try to repress any spiritual doubts they might have.  Because if they took their doubts seriously then it would make them extremely uncomfortable.

But if you belong to the minority of people, who aren't able to repress these doubts, but also don't yet know how to process them in a healthy manner, then you are one of the people I'm writing this post for.

Suppose St. George thinks he might lose his faith by reading a sufficiently convincing atheist argument.  Now his own eternal happiness also seems to be at stake.  That bombastic, confident, suave infidel on the Internet has become an existential threat.  But on the other side, St. George thinks that, as a Christian and as an honest man, he also has an obligation to seek the truth.  And this means that he should try to believe whatever is best supported by the evidence.  This can lead to a sense of conflict within the saint, between the twin demands of fidelity and honesty.

The conflict really arises because St. George has a false picture of God the Father, since he believes on the one hand that God is just, but also that it is possible that God would punish him for exercising a virtue (namely honesty).  This is a contradiction in St. George's worldview, that he will need to find a way to resolve.

(In fact St. George is probably exaggerating the likelihood of his falling away from the Christian faith.  His fear of apostasy arises from the same place as his other neurotic fears, by imagining a "worst case scenario" and then playing it out in his head.  But in what follows I don't want to dismiss this concern, but rather to face it head-on.)

Some Christian denominations teach that it is not possible for Christians to lose their salvation.  But this makes less of a difference to than you might think, since religious people inclined to neuroticism can always find a way to make their religion support their neurosis, no matter what their explicit religious doctrines are.  St. George will simply transfer his doubts and fears to the question of whether he was ever saved in the first place.  Maybe he never invited Jesus into his heart properly; since if he did, then why is he suffering from these current perplexities?

(This problem can be exacerbated in a church environment that encourages Christians to always give an up-beat testimony about how their spiritual walk is going.  There is a sort of "emotional prosperity gospel" in some evangelical circles, an expectation that if you aren't happy enough then you don't have enough faith.  This is almost as destructive of a heresy as the physical prospertity gospel which teaches that faith in God leads to material riches.  If you are attending a church like this, you should consider finding another place that allows you to express your real feelings.)

It's sort of a Protestantish version of a Roman Catholic with scruples, who might think that he has to go over and over again to Confession, in order to confess the same sins, because he fears that he might not have done it properly and with full sincereity the first ten times.

Except that, because Protestantism teaches that salvation is by faith and not by works, a Protestant's scruples are more likely to concern the question of whether he has enough "faith" to be saved.  (If he is a Calvinist he would instead worry about whether he is predestined to be among the "elect".)  As though faith were a psychological state that has to be drummed up with willpower, rather than the gift of God which is granted to everyone who turns to Jesus.  (Ah, says the scrupulous person, but it has to be a sincere turning to Jesus, and how can I ever know that I was really sincere in doing so?)

Actually, the main point of the Protestant Reformation was to prevent people from relating to God in this pathological, neurotic way.  But that doesn't stop individual Protestants from missing the point and doing it anyway.  Rather than saying, along with St. Paul,

"If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?  Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?  It is God who justifies.  Who then is the one who condemns?  No one."
(Romans 8:31-34)

St. George is acting (however much he may try to obscure this to himself) as though his faith is primarily based on some mental contorsion which he needs to accomplish in himself.  Rather than being a work which only the God can do, and which God will do if he waits patiently.

These fears and anxieties can exist side-by-side with a real and genuine love for God, and a desire to enjoy him in a less self-centered way.  But in St. George's case this love has not yet fruitioned into the mature state spoken of by St. John, who writes that:

There is no fear in love. But perfect [i.e. complete] love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  (1 John 4:18)

When St. George reads a passsage like this, his instinctive response may be to feel guilty because he doesn't measure up to this standard.  He may think that the doubts are his own fault, and that he wouldn't be having this problem if he were only capable of the kind of trust in Jesus that other Christians seem to have.

But even if all that were true, it doesn't follow that feeling guilty about it is going to get St. George any closer to perfect love, or that guilt is a useful feeling to have about this.  Yes, God wants to give you this experience of trusting love, but not everyone can expect for it to be be perfectly formed from the beginning of their spiritual walk.  Often it only comes with time and maturity, so there is a need to be patient with yourself.

Maybe it would be better for St. George to try feeling compassion for himself.  The New Testament says:

Be merciful to those who doubt. (Jude 22)

St. George would probably be more charitable towards another person who told him about similar spiritual struggles.  St. George needs to realize that if he would have compassion on another person experiencing the same struggles, then God must feel even more compassion towards those having these struggles—including compassion for George himself.

And that is why George is more likely to resolve his anxieties by means of growth in love for his neighbor, than by any amount of religious reading.  If George becomes the sort of person who loves his neighbor unconditionally, then he will also find it easier to understand how God can love him unconditionally.

Exiting the Loop

In order to make progress, St. George needs to make a conscious decision to exit the mental loop and to decide how he is going to live the next portion of his life—either as a Christian, as a seeker, or as a skeptic.  And once he makes this decision, he needs to stick with it for the time being, and not simply go around and around and around in the mental-doubt ferris wheel.

(Let me be clear once more that I am talking to people who have been stressing about this issue for a long time, and are suffering as a result, and trying to give them permission to take that feeling of pain as a legitimate reason to do something different.  If you are encountering Christianity and the arguments for it for the first time, or if you are currently enjoying learning more about the arguments on both sides, then this blog post is not for you.  God might still be asking you to make a decision to give your life to him, in which case you should trust him with that.  But you aren't suffering from the type of obsessive doubt that I am describing here, and depending on your personality and a gazillion other factors, maybe you never will.)

If you are in St. George's position, it might help to ask yourself what you would do if you were actually forced to decide now.  Suppose you needed to cross a scary bridge in the Amazon jungle to bring supplies to help missionaries translate the Bible, or you were trying to comfort a dying child asking you questions about Jesus and Heaven.  Suppose there were a clear difference between the course of action you would take if you believed it was all true, and if you didn't.  What would you attempt to do?

In fact, since there are always ways to obey Jesus's commands more faithfully in any life circumstance, this isn't really a hypothetical question.  You are always in a position to make a decision and act!  The verse:

Trust and obey, for there's no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

isn't just for children, but for adults also.  If your intellectual ruminations aren't oriented towards active trust in what you believe—towards some actual actions—then it should be no surprise if your mental processes have gone of the tracks.  Trying to force yourself to to "trust" in some way that is decoupled from obedience is total nonsense.  Trusting Jesus doesn't mean managing to execute some complicated mental gymnastics in your head.  It means doing what he said.

(I mean, to the extent that you understand what he wants you to do.  I'm not advising you to initiate a new series of doubts about some part of his teaching that you don't understand yet, say about whether he really wants you to sell all of your possessions and give them to the poor.  But rather to pick one thing Jesus said, however small, and start doing it.)

Perhaps you could start by forgiving one enemy or buying clothes for one homeless person.  The saints in the Bible who were praised for their faith, like Abraham or Rahab, always expressed that faith by some specific action.  Otherwise how would we know about their faith?

As another St. George (MacDonald) wrote,

Obedience is not perfection, but trying.  You count him a hard master, and will not stir.  Do you suppose he ever gave a commandment knowing it was of no use for it could not be done?  He tells us a thing knowing that we must do it, or be lost; that not his Father himself could save us but by getting us at length to do everything he commands, for not otherwise can we know life, can we learn the holy secret of divine being.  He knows that you can try, and that in your trying and failing he will be able to help you, until at length you shall do the will of God even as he does it himself.  He takes the will in the imperfect deed, and makes the deed at last perfect.  Correctest notions without obedience are worthless.  The doing of the will of God is the way to oneness with God, which alone is salvation.

Making a decision isn't going to magically make it so George never experiences the emotion of doubt again.  Time and patience are required.  But as long as his will is in the right place, he will get to the right place in the end.

If St. George wants to be happy while journeying towards that destination, then he needs to do whatever it takes to exit the infinite loop that is making him suffer mentally.  Admittedly this cannot always be done immediately, by direct willpower alone.  Hence, at least some of the time when he has spiritual anxieties, he needs to be willing to resolve these anxieties by engaging in spiritual practices, rather than by re-hashing the same intellectual arguments over and over again.

Spiritual Practices

Spiritual practices include things like: singing hymns, reciting the Lord's prayer, meditating on Bible verses, physical postures (like kneeling, bowing down, or standing) intended to express reverence, lighting candles or incense, etc, not to mention the great variety of different types of congregational worship services.

There are a great variety of such practices, used by different Christian groups.  Rather than trying to catalogue them all, I will simply note that all Christian groups recommend such practices, and that (assuming theological soundness) you are free to pick whichever practices help you the most.

It should be noted that spiritual practices that reduce anxiety, often involve repetition, which is facilitated by the use of pre-existing material.  (For example, at a moment of severe anxiety, you might recite the same Bible verse over again, until you calm down.)  To avoid possible scruples, it is worth commenting on the compatibility of such practices, with Jesus' teaching that:

"When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."  (Matthew 6:7-8)

Jesus' target here is a superstitious approach to prayer, in which we think that God will somehow be more likely to be swayed if we approach him with the exact right formula, or that prayer is like magic, so that the more you pray the more "power" is generated.

But I do not think these words imply that it is forbidden to repeat yourself while praying, if the reason for the repetition is for your own sake (because you want your soul to dwell in the words more deeply), rather than for God's sake (as if he somehow didn't hear you the first time).

And sincerity is indeed important, but this has little to do with whether a given prayer is extemporaneous, or composed by one of the saints who went before us.  What matters is whether you yourself want to say whatever words that are being said.  Sometimes one discovers that words written by somebody else, say exactly the thing you wanted to say, but couldn't find the words for.  In that case there is nothing insincere about making those words your own.

[Note: if you happen to suffer from OCD, I am not suggesting that you follow any "compulsions" that arise from this source.  Even if these compulsions seem to be religious in nature, they are not true spiritual practices and tend to weaken the will, rather than strengthening it.  In general, a real spiritual practice will be something you want to do, because it is helpful, rather than something you feel like you have to do.  If you have difficulties distinguishing between real spiritual practices and imaginary obligations, please consult with an experienced spiritual director.]

Later in this series, I will suggest a specific set of practices which may be helpful for those suffering from doubt.

Cultivating Perceptiveness

What I am saying does not mean that George can never return to the intellectual arguments.  The greatest questions of philosophy have the feature, that we never outgrow them.  They keep getting richer, and more interesting as we learn more.  So I don't mean to advise anyone to drop apologetics or philosophy of religion forever.  But rather, to set them aside for a period, whenever they take the nature of an involuntary compulsion.

You can voluntarily chose to return to these topics at any time.  If you take a long enough break, then you will be different the next time you come back to the topic, due to the new experiences and thoughts you have had in the meantime.  As a result, when you come back to these deep questions, you will see new things, that you didn't see before.

Choosing to obey doesn't mean closing your eyes to the world around you.  In fact there is nothing better than obedience to God, for shining abundant light, showing who people are, and what they need.

To perceive and to understand, is quite different from having obsessive doubts.  Obsessive doubts, while they are sometimes caused originally by some traumatic situation, really come from internal causes.  If anything, such obsessive doubts actually interfere with clarity of perception, and sound philosophical judgement.

So in addition to strengthening your will with voluntary action, feeling better may also require cultivating a greater connection to your sensory perceptions of the world around you.

(No, I don't mean going to Youtube and downloading yet another video about whether or not Jesus rose from the dead.  Yes, technically that involves your ears and eyes, but the intellectual question and emotional anxiety is still in the driver's seat.)

Shut down your computer, and really look at the room you are sitting in.  Is there any art?  Are there any smells?  Are you hungry, thirsty, or tired?  Are there other people in the house, and if so what are they thinking and feeling?  (It probably doesn't have much connection with your own religious doubts.  That's a good thing!  It's an opportunity to leave your struggles behind and think about something else.)

Are your surroundings boring?  If so, it's no wonder you've gone down an Internet rabbit trail.  What can you do to make your surroundings more interesting?  And when was the last time you went outside?

You might object, "But how does this solve my intellectual problem with religion?".  But God is everywhere, even in mundane reality, even when you aren't thinking of him.  And life is not a problem to be solved.  So do it, and you will feel better.  And after you feel better, you will probably start thinking more clearly as well.

An Oversimplified Model of the "Soul"

Just in case it helps, here is a pictoral model of what I've been saying in the previous section.  In a cartoonishly oversimplified (i.e. mostly false, but hopefully still useful) picture of the "soul" or mind, you can imagine your mind as containing 4 different aspects or faculties: Perception, Emotion, Intellect, and Will.

They are all connected to each other as follows:

I've drawn arrows to show how "information" flows through us:

•  In the first layer our external sense data informs our Perception—by which I do not mean passive receptivity, but rather our active interpretation and understanding of whatever we are currently experiencing in the world.

• Then Perception in turn influences Intellect (which constructs our theoretical model of the world, including "unseen" things we don't directly perceive, e.g. God or the back sides of objects) and Emotions (which generates feelings, either welcoming or aversive, to various things in our model).

• Additionally, each of the Intellect and Emotion strongly influences the other one internally.  If you have a thought about the world, this is likely to lead to some feelings, and if you have feelings about a thing, this is likely to lead to further thoughts.  (Indeed, without some emotion, our thoughts can't function, because you have to at least care enough about the subject matter to bother thinking about it!)

• Then Intellect and Emotion both in turn influence the Will, our decisionmaking capacity. This in turn leads to external actions in the world.

[One could dress this sort of thing up with neurology techno-babble, for example I could say "motor cortex" when I talk about taking actions, but I suspect that this sort of thing would lead people to take the models too seriously, so it's really better to keep things at the level of "folk psychology"!]

Note that the blue arrows actually go in both directions!  The primary direction of influence that we more normally consider goes in the forward (right) direction, but the secondary direction (left), shown as smaller arrows, are also important.  Our Intellect and Emotions affect what we perceive.  And our Will affects our thinking and feeling, as well as which perceptions we choose to pay attention to.  (There should also be some arrows directly between Perception and Will, but the diagram is complicated enough as it is!)

It is possible for mental functioning to flow in a smooth stream from left to right.  When all 4 faculties are fully engaged, this will tend to look like one of 2 patterns:

Perception -> Intellect -> Emotion -> Will;

or:

Perception -> Emotion -> Intellect -> Will,

but with various forms of feedback operating in the backwards directions, to keep things on track, regarding whatever activity you happen to be engaged with.

But what happens in the case of a person afflicted by severe doubts?  In that case it looks more like this:

What's happening here is a sort of feedback loop between the 2 "internal" faculties (Intellect and Emotions), where because you feel strongly about a topic, you keep thinking about it, but this produces more feelings:

...Intellect -> Emotion -> Intellect -> Emotion -> Intellect -> Emotion...

Of course, there's nothing bad about these orange arrows per se, which serve an important function.  The problem is when it leads to obsession and needless suffering.

The conflicted thoughts (shown here as the purple squiggles) go back and forth in a circle in a way that is completely disconnected from your experiences in the actual world.  This in turn causes disengagement from Perception and Will, as the main crisis in your life is primarily about mental constructs in your own head, not your bodily experiences.  [I am not of course saying that God and Jesus are mere constructs in your head, but your obsessive doubting about them is an internal mental activity.]  But this disengagement in turn makes the doubting worse, because it removes from your life anything that might distract you from your cycling anxious thoughts.

It's sort of like how when you get a microphone too close to the speaker, it produces a loud SHREEEEEEE!!! sound.  The good news is that this can be fixed through a repositioning of your mental faculties.  The difficulty involves a feedback look between Intellect and Emotion.  But this feedback loop is a conscious mental process, which means that can only exist to the extent that we choose to pay attention to it.

But you can't stop paying attention to something by simply willing yourself not to.  Because this leads to the "Don't think about a pink elephant!" trap.  (You just did, didn't you?)  The solution is instead to deliberately choose to think about something else.

This requires strengthening the "external" mental faculties that aren't participants of the feedback loop (Perception and Will).  Specifically, this means selecting activities that allow you live more fully in your Perception (paying attention to sensing the world around you).  And also—either separately or at the same time—learning to focus more on your Will (paying more attention to making decisions, leading to concrete actions in the world).

This doesn't mean your Intellect and Emotions will be unengaged, but they will be differently engaged, in a supporting back-up role, to some activity where Perception or Will are taking the lead.

(Of course, my point is not that Intellect and Emotion are unimportant.  Rather, the system has gotten out of balance, and we are trying to restore that balance!  There are other people out there who are imbalanced in a different way, and who would need the opposite advice, but these aren't the people afflicted by obsessive religious doubts.)

III. Shouldering the Weight of the Sky

St. George might sometimes feel tempted to express his persistent doubts by saying something like, "I can't seem to get God out of my head!".  This is a somewhat odd way to put the problem though.

The perpetual contemplation of God, even while going about one's work, is something a lot of religious people aspire to.  Even missionaries, pastors, or monks and nuns often find it difficult to remember God in all things, and now here you are trying to forget him!

Unfortunately, St. George's neurotic loop is a very different phenomenon than mystical contemplation.  St. George can't get over worrying about whether God really exists or not.  Which is a very different thing from contemplating the mystery of the Trinity, or wondering at the humility of the Incarnation, or seeing Christ in the face of the person God has set in front of you to love.

Neurotic Obsession versus Prudent Care

St. George might try to justify his obsessive doubts by saying the following:

"The question of whether God exists is infinitely more important than anything else, and might affect my eternal destiny, therefore I have to put my life on hold until I find out what is true."

Now it is quite true that a lot of normal folks don't take enough trouble to try to seek out the real truth about God and the universe.  Seeing that so many people give contradictory answers, many people without strong convictions assume the problem is insoluble, and give up in despair before they even start.

This despair may sometimes cloak itself in shallow relativism, but is often, I personally suspect, a stubborn will not to know the truth.  For this reason, the chief job of the Christian apologist is not so much to convince people of facts, but to wake them up; to convince them to take personal responsibility for seeking the truth, so that perhaps they open their eyes and grope towards the light.  (While keeping in mind that nobody can ever come to God without God's grace preparing the way beforehand.)

So it is quite commendable that St. George is searching for answers.  But just because some people think about the issue too little, doesn't mean it is impossible to err in the opposite direction, by excessively overthinking it.  As Aristotle pointed out, goodness is usually a middle path between the opposite vices of "too little" and "too much".  For any given virtue (e.g. courage), you can either fall short of it (cowardice) or else overshoot the mark (recklessness).

But God is infinitely important.  How is it possible to be too concerned about something which is infinitely important?

The answer is straightforward: if doing so does not in fact contribute to clarifying your thinking and affections about the issues at stake, but instead leads to a mental illness that places obstacles in your spiritual journey.

Nobody can ever love God too much, since God is utterly and supremely holy, and all good things proceed from him.  Even all the praises of the most exalted angels, all the choirs of seraphim and cherubim, cannot fully describe or encapsulate his sublime glory and beauty.  In this sense, there can be no such thing as an excessive amount of agape/charity towards God.  Even an infinite number of angels singing his praise for an infinite amount of time could not fully understand everything which the Spirit knows about the Father and the Son.  But nevertheless, this same Holy Spirit has been poured out on us, so that we can begin to know him, in his absolute uniqueness.

And yet a particular strategy for dedicating yourself to God can certainly be carried on to excess.  As the Bible says, there is such a thing as "zeal without knowledge" (Proverbs 19:2Romans 10:2).  If your obsessions about theology are counterproductive, i.e. if they have the opposite effects from what you intended, and are the wrong method to reach your goal, then they can certainly be "excessive" in that sense, even if the goal is infinitely important.

Just because you need food to stay alive, does not mean that the optimal strategy for staying alive is to eat as much food as possible.  You cannot have too much God the way you have too much food, but you can certainly have an excess of theological reading or obsessing about issues that don't make any difference to your practical obedience to Christ.

Feigning Certainty

This sort of self-sabatoging excess is more likely to happen if you have unrealistic goals about what can be attained from a given course of action.  Although St. George thinks his doubts are due to his own limitations, part of the problem may be that his role models in the faith may be giving him unrealistic ideas about what real certainty looks like.

One possible mistake here is thinking that in order for your faith to be rationally justified, you have to find evidence which is so strong that it is enough to convince any rational person.  (And therefore, anyone who knows about this evidence, whatever it is, and doesn't agree with the conclusion is irrationally resisting the truth.)   But this is false.

Every human being has a different background, and is coming from a different place.  There are all kinds of reasons why people, who seem reasonable in other ways, might accept or reject various arguments.  In order for your faith to be rationally justified, you only need enough evidence to convince you that it is true, and this evidence might not always be something that you can easily communicate to others; especially if those other people have very restrictive rules for what types of evidence they consider to be valid.

Realizing that there are educated and intelligent people who disagree with you is part of the process of intellectual maturity.  People with PhDs are a lot less intimidating to me then they used to be.  In part because I've learned from experience just how astonishingly silly the claims of certain intellectuals with PhD's can be.  One has to distinguish between the people who are telling you about some field of study that is based on solid evidence, and a person who merely wants to use their academic authority to promolgate their own nutty theories.

(In particular, I've learned to be quite skeptical of the theories of many biblical critics, who read between the lines of the Bible, and based on quite scanty evidence tell you the history of how it actually came to be written.)

It is true that you can find lots of people who reject Christianity, or Theism, for terrible reasons (or for reasons they can't even articulate).  Some of these people are probably being dishonest with themselves.  But that is between that person and God.  Your faith cannot depend on judging the validity of other people's responses!

Sometimes an inability to tolerate disagreement even leads certain people to become amateur Christian apologists, since they have a psychological need to support their position by adopting a façade of total certainty.  Unfortunately, this is not a good foundation for good reasoning.

One sees this a lot in religious (and political) discussions on the Internet, which have a tendency to degenerate into childish attempts to win arguments through pure bluster.  "You're 99.99% certain God doesn't exist?  Well as a result of the ______ argument, I'm 100% certain he does!  In fact, everything I've ever read or seen only makes me more certain that a loving God exists!"  "How can you say that, when in fact there is no evidence at all for the existence of an unfalsifiable invisible sky-fairy."  The messages here on both sides are: Stand in awe of the degree to which I am completely persuaded by my own arguments!  Everyone who disagrees with me must be a total moron!

The people in this conversation are like rookie poker players who, in every other hand, try to take the pot with an enormous and unjustified bluff (and then look totally surprised when this maneuver doesn't immediately convince everyone else at the table to back down).

That's why you can't allow yourself to be bullied by people who refuse to admit any rationality whatsoever in their political or spiritual opponents.  Such people are really displaying their own intellectual insecurities, by constructing a false persona who is unable to be influenced by anything anybody on the "other side" says.  Over time, the fakeness starts to contaminate their real self.  Don't be like that.

(Humility does require that we be open to correction by others, but you have to be careful never to let somebody's fake self try to teach your real self.)

Problems with Debate

Even in classier settings, I'm not convinced that "debate" always has very much spiritual value.  As soon as you start debating, the other person becomes your "opponent", and instead of trying to mutually seek the truth, it becomes a game or sporting event to be won or lost.  Then each party becomes a "lawyer" looking for tricks to sway the audience, rather than laying their cards straight on the table.

In my experience, usually the only way to get through to a person who disagrees with you, is to have them stop thinking of it as an adverserial thing, where you are on one side and they are on the other side, because that makes them feel threatened by what you are saying.  This is one reason why Socrates preferred conversation based on questions, rather than debate, for as he says to the rhetoritician Gorgias:

You, Gorgias, like myself, have had great experience of disputations, and you must have observed, I think, that they do not always terminate in mutual edification, or in the definition by either party of the subjects which they are discussing; but disagreements are apt to arise-somebody says that another has not spoken truly or clearly; and then they get into a passion and begin to quarrel, both parties conceiving that their opponents are arguing from personal feeling only and jealousy of themselves, not from any interest in the question at issue. And sometimes they will go on abusing one another until the company at last are quite vexed at themselves for ever listening to such fellows.

But if you are a Christian, you should know that true conversion never happens as a result of intellectual bullying, but rather by the work of God's Spirit in people's hearts.

So it seems a bit misguided to try to look for a champion Christian debater, to take on all the atheist intellectuals, like Dawkins and Krauss and Carroll and all the rest.  It would be far better to pray for these atheists (as individual people I mean, not just as representatives of an opposing worldview).  That's something you can do right now without needing to recruit a champion (besides Christ, who already shed his blood for them).  If Christ is truly risen from the dead, then he doesn't need anyone to bend the truth on his behalf in order for him to be known!

The best apologists are also able to state the case for the other side, because they really believe in seeking the Truth, so they aren't secretly worried that one real truth will undermine another real truth.  But the fake apologists for Christianity (and Atheism) can never summarize the other side fairly, because they are secretly afraid that if they ever did so it might convince somebody.

There are so many people today who are trying to get to spiritual results, by unspiritual means.  They don't realize, the secret which St. Martin Luther King and Gandhi knew, that to do accomplish anything significant in this world, you first have to change yourself.

If you love the truth more than anything else, I think people around you will notice that, and you will be a witness to the light that shines in the darkness.  On the other hand, if you take shortcuts and try to use dishonest methods to prove the truth, then the foundations will be rotten, and the structures you try to build on that will eventually tumble down.

The bad sort of apologetics effectively denies the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who illuminates and softens our hearts, and teaches us what is true.  The Bible makes it clear that the divinity of Christ is obvious only to those who are given the spiritual eyes to see it.

The Work of the Spirit

As St. Paul said:

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.  (1 Cor 2:14)

and

Therefore I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus be cursed," and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit.  (1 Cor 12:3)

In my experience, the unhappy Christian with doubts (like St. George) is usually a person who does have the spiritual discernment to see Christ on the Cross as the supreme manifestation of the love of God—but has been distracted from this, by looking for certainty in the wrong places, where it is not always to be found.

Christian epistemology, because it is about God, is fundamentally Trinitarian in its structure.  You need Jesus to come to the Father, but you can't see the Father in Jesus, unless the Spirit enables you to see it.  God has graciously chosen to raise us, in Christ, into his own life.  But if God has shared the mind of his own Spirit with us, this must necessarily mean (what else could it mean?) that there are some propositions which we do know, even if we can't explain how we know them.  Only God can perceive God, but God has shared his life with us in such a way that we can participate in his self-perception.

However, St. George might well be confused about what the testimony of the Spirit is supposed to look like.  Especially if he goes to a charismatic church where supernatural gifts like prophecy or speaking in tongues are regarded as the sine qua non of Christian experience.  Or, if he goes to a non-charismatic church where the influence of the Holy Spirit is barely discussed.  Either way, St. George might say to himself: "I don't know what all this talk about the Spirit is supposed to be about.  I've never had any sort of voice in my head telling me what to do, or if I ever did, I was never sure wherther or not it was just my imagination."  (Or in some cases, he might have gone along with a mental voice in his head for a while, and then decided maybe it wasn't God after all?  That could certainly trigger an episode of doubt, if anything would.)

But it is not always true that if something is part of us, that we must therefore be conscious of how it works.  Apart from an Argument from Authority (based on faith in those who study anatomy and medicine), I wouldn't even know that my kidneys exist.  But they are vital to my functioning all the same.  And if my kidneys started failling, I'd eventually start to experience the symptoms of illness, showing (in a negative way) that they were actually there there whole time.

If George is doubting the goodness or existence of God and Jesus, he's probably none too sure about the Spirit either.  So I think it is worth reminding everyone that biblically, the test of whether you genuinely have the Holy Spirit is not blatant supernatural manifestations (most of which could be counterfeited anyway).  The first real test is this: when you look at Jesus, do you perceive God?  If so, that's what having the Holy Spirit feels like.

To give an analogy from the senses, it is impossible for an organism to see without having eyes and a brain and a visual cortex.  In other words, you can't see any object outside of you without having something inside of you which is receptive to that sort of thing.  But if you want to know whether your visual cortex is working, you can find that out most easily by looking at an external object which is outside of you and real.  If you can see it, then you can reasonably conclude that your eyes and visual cortext are (at least partially) functional.  Similarly, a test of whether you have the ability to perceive different pitches is to start singing.  Or if you can reason about different quantities and shapes, then you have some mathematical ability.  You don't learn about these abilities by introspection, but by doing them.

The Holy Spirit can indeed manifest through various supernatural gifts to specific people, but these gifts are neither a necessary or sufficient condition of holiness.  So you don't need to bother about these other gifts too much, unless they happen to apply to you specifically (in which case there is no subsitute for getting advice from an experienced spiritual advisor who knows you personally).

The second test is similar to the first: are you beginning to love other people the way Jesus loves them?  If so, that is another sign of the Spirit's presence.  But of course this test is applicable only if you have been beginning to follow Jesus and obey his teaching.  If not, why would you expect to know anything about it?  A person who never tries to use their musical ability, can't be expected to have very much evidence of its existence.

Jesus' response to the question of why some people doubt, was to remind people that everything depends on obedience:

Anyone who wants to do the will of God will know whether my teaching is from God or is merely my own.  (John 7:17)

Those who really want to do the will of God, will eventually learn whether Jesus' teaching is correct or not.  But if you refuse to live in the Spirit, you shouldn't be surprised if your perception of religious truth is also dulled.  Jesus also said:

Pay attention, therefore, to how you listen. Whoever has will be given more, but whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken away from him.”  (Luke 8:18)

In other words, if you live out whatever insights you have already received (however meager they may seem) you can expect more and more information from the same source.  On the other hand, if you don't live out what you've been given, you cannot expect to even have a good grasp on the doctrines you think you know.  Obedience—that is, being willing to be like the Son of God—is a necessary condition for discovering their essential truth.

This does not of course mean that there is an absence of objective evidence for Christianity; such evidence does indeed exist, largely in the places where one would expect it to be if the thing had really happened.  There really is historical evidence that miracles sometimes occur.  And the New Testament really is written in a way that suggests that the Apostles actually had encounters with Jesus after he rose from the dead, and not in the way that you would expect them to write it if they were making up a religion for power and profit.

What there is not, is a God who is willing, most of the time, to perform miracles on demand simply to prove his existence to skeptics.  I agree that that god doesn't exist.  If an entity like that did exist, it would be quite different from the sort of God that is implied by the notion of a tempted, rejected, crucified Messiah.

And as for the world being full of suffering: well (for those with the ears to hear it) this is actually exactly the way you would expect the world to be, if (as Christianity teaches) suffering really were God's chosen means for redeeming a fallen world.  I think that those who, even in deep suffering, look to what Christ does with suffering, will see the answer to many of their difficulties there.

However, it is naïve to think that these evidences will be capable of convincing most of those who are outside the faith.  Unless they are, at the same time, transformed into a different sort of person capable of seeing things in a new way.

Or in other words, the only way to really know God is through the Spirit's revelation of the Son.  As the Eastern Orthodox Christian liturgy says:

"‘Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess:

‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the Trinity one in essence and undivided’."

Without love for one another, it is not possible to know who God is.  The only way to know God is that God has shared God with us.  The Trinity isn't just an esoteric doctrine, it is our only real way of coming to know God in his fullness.  If we try to become acquainted with God in some other way—besides the way that he has provided—we won't come to know what God really is.

The Full Evidence

Someone might say: I thought you were a big believer in Bayesian epistemology?  So how can you now put the Trinity at the center of your epistemology?  Is this some sort of Fideism, or Reformed epistemology, or Presuppositionalism, where one somehow sneaks in the basics of Christianity as an axiomatic assumption?

Not at all.  I do actually do identify as an evidentialist—I think people should only believe in things if they have some good reason to believe in them—but I don't advocate for arbitrarily excluding psychological or spiritual experiences from the class of things which can potentially count as "evidence".

I would say that evidence for X includes any experience whatsoever which is more likely to happen if X is true than if X is false.  And this is true whether or not the experience is one that you are able to convincingly communicate to skeptical individuals, who are not a part of your religious community.

This may mean that different people, who have different bases of evidence, might rationally come to different conclusions about important matters.  Indeed, this is one of the core features of the Bayesian approach to probability theory—that it allows for the possibility that people exposed to a different base of evidence, or with different sensibilities about prior probabilities, might rationally come to different conclusions from each other.

Nor am I advocating that anyone decide whether Christianity is true based solely on psychological factors without regard to anything else.  I would find it hard to believe in Christianity, if the objective historical evidence seemed to refute the Resurrection.  But this is very far from being the case.

In the New Testament, the apostles certainly appealed to the historicity of the Resurrection.  But they also talked about the testimony of the Holy Spirit.  (Much more rarely, they appealed to creation, but obviously none of them mentioned Big Bang cosmology when they did so!)

Different members of the Church may differ somewhat in why they are convinced that Jesus is Lord.  But I think if somebody were to totally exclude from their consideration either the historical concreteness of Christ, or the divine indwelling inside of Christians, they would effectively be denying the manifestation of one of the persons of the Trinity (the Son or the Spirit) and their religion would fall short of full Christian belief.

So I'm not trying to argue that anyone ignore the external evidence, or to exclude any data which they feel is relevant.  But I do think it is worthwhile for people to spend more their time looking in the specific places where God has promised to be found; to take seriously those particular grounds for belief that the New Testament emphasizes.

Put another way, since God is personal he can reveal things in whatever manner he pleases.  It's easy to feel that God "owes" us evidence for his existence, but I think this is only true if we are willing to look in the specific places he chose to put that evidence.  There is the danger of getting so distracted by worrying about whether or not God exists, that we construct an intellectual system of our own to justify this yes/no question.  But that system may not do us much good, if it is disconnected from the actual means God is using to save us.

Anyway, I free admit to some eclecticism, in my choice of different ways to think about how we know things.  That is why I can mention Bayesianism in one post, and the Trinity in another post, and in a third post I can bring them together.  I want to incorporate into my worldview all the truths which I have learned, from whatever source.  Because all truth belongs to God, everything that is genuinely true has to be ultimately compatible.

Obviously, when somebody converts to Christianity, they do so not because they woke up one day and decided to follow a "Christian epistemology", but because Jesus met them on whatever path they were currently following.  The whole point of epistemology is that we can learn something new and surprising.  Many people are quite surprised when that new thing turns out to be Jesus.  But, in retrospect, anyone who learns about God will learn about him in a way which is based on who he is, and what he is like.

IV. Some Spiritual Practices

This section will give advice to Christians like George who are suffering from obsessive religious doubts.

(Some of this advice may also be helpful to spritual inquirers who don't yet consider themselves to be Christians, but not all of it will apply, so you may need to make some adjustments.)

To some extent your problem arises because you've been confusing thinking about the existence of God, with having an actual relationship with him through the Holy Spirit.  You've been learning that obsessing about whether spritual things are real isn't always a very spiritual activity, which is a confusion that some people never get over for their whole lives.

But you are making good progress by just recognizing the issue.  Some people go to the opposite extreme and stop believing in God entirely, because they identify God with their negative psychological responses to religious questions.  But that won't happen to you, as long as you remember that cutting out negative obsessions about whether Theism is true isn't actually the same thing as cutting out God from your life.

A. Pacing yourself

Part of the problem is that you are following a bad script about how to be happy:

"I have to go through a 2 step process in order to be happy.  FIRST I have to work to become completely sure that what I believe is correct, and THEN I will be able to live my life in a productive and healthy way."

But I think this not really possible for most people who are just starting out in their spiritual journey, for several reasons:

1. It is not possible for human beings to think about the same, emotionally charged subject for a long time, without needing a break from it.  You are a body as well as a soul, and your mind is limited and needs to rest and recharge.

Taking a break and thinking about other things for a while doesn't mean you are giving up on figuring out what's true!  It just means you are pacing yourself.  A long distance runner doesn't try to sprint the whole time, because they are hoping to make it to the goal without killing themselves.  In the same way, it isn't intellectual cowardice to take whatever duration of breaks from Christian apologetics you need to keep yourself sane.  Rather, it would be foolish NOT to do so if you want to arrive at your goal.

How long and how frequent these breaks need to be, is something you have to discover for yourself by experience.  But let me suggest (very tentatively) that the breaks should be long enough that when you come back it should be a least a little bit fun to think about the topics again (and I doubt you would have spent so much time on it in the past, if you didn't enjoy it at least a little bit).

If you are learning about the topic in a healthy way, it might still be a little bit scary, but the negative feelings should not predominate, compared to the satisfaction you are getting out of learning new things.

2. The process of deciding what you believe isn't purely a matter of cerebral arguments on blogs. It also comes from lived experience. As Chesterton writes in his book "Orthodoxy":

I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.  The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

So for example, somebody might go on a hike and end up with a profound experience of feeling God's creative power in Nature.  But if they went out specifically with the intention of having that experience, then maybe they wouldn't have had that experience (or it wouldn't be as convincing, because it would feel like they were manufacturing the experience).

So you should make time for the hobbies you enjoy, even (or especially) if they don't seem in any particular way to be "religious".  Make some time to hike, or to run, or to study some thing you enjoy learning about, even though it doesn't seem to have any immediate relevance to religion.  These hobbies allow you to develop your personality, which is part of who God wants you to be.

You may not be able to completely control how you feel, but if you keep doing these things, they will provide some emotional support for you.

3. More specifically, there are some types of evidence about Christianity which can only be acquired by living the Christian life.  Hence the importance of "prayer, regular church attendance, reading" etc.  As you may have realized, when one does these things as a purely apologetic exercise, they become quite different things then when you do them in a devotional way, without worrying all the time about whether they are justified.  That doesn't mean you should cut out apologetics altogether, but it does mean that you need times when you do these things in a more devotional way without worrying about apologetics.

(You  might be worried about whether this is honest, given your current level of uncertainty.  Let me come back to that important issue in a moment!)

Another way that Christianity proves itself to be true is in its wisdom about personal relationships and holiness and love, especially as seen in those who are really seeking God's face.  (Hence the importance of being part of a church community.)  But in order to experience this you have to actually do it (or at least observe other people who are doing it) and this is something that happens over time, not something you can assess in an instant.

It is good for a Christian to be able to develop the skill of giving up the arguments and just reading the Bible and praying daily, when that is called for.  You should also have the skill of thinking about the arguments carefully, and thinking rigorously about the foundations of your faith, when this mode of engagement is called for.  Finally, you need to have the wisdom to pick which skill to deploy at a given moment, based on what is most spiritually important at that time.  This isn't compartmentalization,  rather it's just the obvious point that you can't spend all of your time being distracted by a decision you've already made, when it's time to do the next thing.

4. Recognize that certainty takes time.  "Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened unto you."  If you keep on searching for greater certainty about the truth, I think you will eventually find it, if you continue searching patiently.

But you don't necessarily get to start out with certainty.  Instead, you can start out with just enough evidence to trust God and then work your way up from there.

It is a mistake to think that in order for you to trust God, you need absolute psychological certainty.  Rather, you only need enough certainty to start engaging with God's project to rebuild your life on the foundation of Christ.  For example, suppose you have a phobia of flying on an airplane, but you need to do so for some reason (e.g. to make it to the wedding of a family member).  Then in this circumstance, the minimum amount of "faith" required, is to choose to board the plane.  If you spend the whole flight worrying that the plane will drop out of the sky, and you will crash and burn and drown, you might well have a miserable flight, but you will still get to the destination, and maybe after you've flown a few dozen times, your fear will subside.  (It is not very common to be terrified and bored at the same time.)

On the other hand, if you refuse to board the plane, then no amount of positive self-talk will get you to the destination.  That sort of talk is superficial and has very little to do with having or not having faith in something.

There is a lifelong learning process where you figure out how to trust God with more and more of your life, and in the process come to see that God knows what he is doing and that following him results in spiritual fruit.  But you have to start by trusting him with some area of your life, however small, or how is he going to show you the benefits of doing so?  As it is written: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." (Matthew 5:6)

Maybe it will be encouraging to know that you aren't the only person experiencing these difficulties, but other Christians are also figuring out ways to muddle through, and once you reach the end of the race you will enter the glory that is reserved for you, which will be all the more glorious because of the obstacles that you needed to surmount on the way.

B. An Imaginative Exercise

Here is a visualization which you may find useful for getting back onto the path.  First read the following incident from the Gospels:

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.”  Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him.  A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped.  Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion.  The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

The disciples are fearful and wake Jesus; he is indeed able to calm the storm but he also says to them:

“Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

Note this: the disciples would still have made it safely through the storm if they had allowed Jesus to have a much-needed nap after a day of hard work preaching.  The Twelve Apostles failed to appreciate the situation they were in—it is not as though the Father would simply allow the boat to go down to the bottom of the sea, with the Messiah and all twelve disciples still in it, now would he?  Indeed, as the Father's divine Word—through which the galaxies were made—Christ was still in full control of the wind and the waves, even while his human nature was asleep on a pillow in the boat.

This was a real historical event, but it also contains an allegory for the Christian life.  If you believe in Jesus, then he lives within your heart, so you should think of yourself as the boat containing God's Son.

The storm is the religious doubts and anxieties you face, and all the conflicting emotions and thoughts which turn up as a result.  To some extent you can't prevent yourself from having these doubts.  But, they are the storm and not the boat.

In the same way, Christ is sometimes asleep in your soul, and seems to be doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to save you.  Your trust in him is best expressed by waiting for him to act in his own way, rather than demanding that he act on your timing.  (Knowing that this time does not last forever; there will be times in the future where he is awake and active).

Allow the superficial parts of your mind (the parts you can't control) to toss and turn with the waves, while all the while taking solace in the fact that the upper part of your mind (or the depths of your spirit—the mapping onto the up-down axis is just a metaphorical visualization, so you can pick whichever direction is more meaningful to you) is AT REST in God and cannot, will not, depart from loving and trusting God no matter what.  The depths of your spirit are "hidden with God in Christ".  Your conscious mind is not always aware of it, but it is still there.  Just like how during a storm at sea, the lower parts of the ocean remain calm even while the top parts are being driven every which way by the winds.

C. A List of Things to Do

The second thing to do is to STOP MAKING THINGS WORSE.  If you are digging yourself into a hole, you need to stop digging.  What this means is the following:

1. Stop reading arguments from apologists and infidels, especially as a substitute for other methods of religious devotion.

Stop it, it's only making things worse.  Surely you at least have control over this.  Your mind is trying to trick you here, into thinking that if you just read one more argument for or against Christianity you will somehow change the fundamental reality of your situation and the problem of doubt vs. faith will get better.  This is just like an alcoholic thinking that one more drink will make his life better.  And who then starts drinking in inappropriate times and places.

(During the covid pandemic, a lot of people got disconnected from worshipping in their church congregations in the usual way.  If that happened to you, try to find ways of connecting with other Christians that involve worship or community, not evaluating arguments.)

2. In fact, stop reading these arguments entirely for a set period of time, for at least 40 days, perhaps longer.  This probably should even include my own blog, if this also triggers the craving. (Don't worry, all of my articles will still be there when you finish.)

Even though it is important to know why you believe what you believe, that does not mean it is healthy and good to constantly be encouraging yourself to stress and obsess when you know that it isn't going to make any difference to a decision you've already made.

Of course devotional websites and books are still OK and recommended, to the extent that they are helpful for you.  (This should have been the majority of your spiritual reading anyway, I hope you didn't think that apologetics is a substitute for this.)  Whatever is spiritually encouraging to you, do that (as long as it is NOT intellectual arguments).

3. Every day, read a short passage from the Gospels and meditate on it.  The goal of this kind of devotional is to encourage your spirit, not to stimulate your mind, so for example it could be Mark 4:35-41 every single day until you get tired of it, and then you can change it for Mark 9:17-29, or Matt 14:22-33, or Luke 7:1-10, or John 16:33 or Matt 11:28-29 or Mark 4:26-29 or any other other short passage.  (This series of passages is particularly concerned with faith and doubt, but you can pick any passage you want; the one rule is that you must find it encouraging!)  When you are not reading the passage, remember a single phrase from it and hold onto that like a railing, whenever your ship starts to toss and turn.

4. Ask other Christians you trust to pray for you.

5. Listen to encouraging Christian music of whatever kind you like.

6. Take Holy Communion as often as you can, precisely because this way of relating to God with your body, is so different from the ways which are causing you problems.

Recommendations 2-6 are provided as a balm, to provide positive spiritual nutrition to correct the negative thoughts and feelings.  But in no way to I want to encourage the idea that you need to be "thinking about religion" all the time to be loyal to Christ, any more than you need to think about your lungs all the time in order to go on breathing.

In fact:

7. When your own brain becomes an uncomfortable place to live, and you don't want to obsess about things anymore, you need to extend yourself outwards.  What I mean is to do something which requires you to focus on the external world with one or more of your 5 senses.

Perhaps a craft project or hobby, or a physical sport or a video game, anything which relaxes your mind and lets you rest the parts of your mind which are tired.  Try turning off your computer, and going outside into the sunshine every single day.

8. Make sure you are eating right, and getting enough exercise to stay healthy.  Your body is connected to your spirit, and if you are not taking care of your body, due to slovenly habits, you are more vulnerable to spiritual diseases.

(I don't mean to deny the spiritual usefulness of intentional fasting, but fasting is not the right medicine for this particular spiritual problem, and could even make it worse.  Unless perhaps you are able to fast with your body as an alternative to indulging in anxieties with your mind, i.e. as a way of praying with your body while your mind is occupied by something else entirely.  But you may well find this too difficult, so it is easiest to simply refrain from fasting all together.  If you belong to a religious tradition that prescribes fasts at particular times, then either: (a) do whatever is the bare minimum, or else (b) ask your spritual advisors about making an exception in your case, until such time as you can do it in a healthy and sane manner.)

9. Remember that it is by grace that you have been saved, not by any works. Remain in Christ, and he will remain in you and you will bear much fruit.  (Remember that growing fruit takes time, it is not the work of an instant.)

BUT IS IT HONEST?

The question might arise whether this advice is legitimate.  In advising people to simply ignore their doubts, and to go on with living a Christian life—prayer, regular church, sacraments—is that simply a method for tricking oneself into living out an untrue system of beliefs?

On the other hand, if you aren't sure that Christianity is true, would it be more honest to live outside the Church (and not try to do anything which might induce a false belief due to the power of suggestion)?

That is the dilemma.

But I think the correct solution here is actually simple, in principle (even if it is somewhat difficult on an emotional level when one is feeling full of doubt).  You simply make a decision, on the basis of your current imperfect evidence.  Then you move on from there. As St. Blaise Pascal pointed out, you have to place your bet on one possibility or the other.  Not wagering is not allowed!

(I don't mean that you aren't allowed to change your mind later, if you get better evidence, or if the evidence you already have looks different in the light of new experiences.  But you've been thinking about this subject for long enough that, at least in the short run, one more blog post probabaly isn't going to make the decisive difference.  Over the long run, yes, you should keep asking questions including about whether Christianity seems true given everything you know so far.)

The problem with doubts is that they aren't useful unless they lead to action. It does you no good to simply worry incessantly about whether Christianity is true. That's why it's critical to be able to shove emotional doubts aside, whenever they are simply interfering with your faith. I think this is honest as long as you take the actual intellectual question seriously, and process any new data honestly.  But that's something that can only be done from time to time; it shouldn't be relitigated every waking hour.

Imagine a General who has to decide whether to commit his troops to a particular battle. Sure, he needs to weigh the evidence and be honest with himself, but he also needs to come to a decision one way or another.  If he never decides anything—or worse, if he just sends them in one moment, and then countermands his order and bring them back, and then gets worried that was a mistake and sends them in again—he will lose the war for sure.  In the heat of battle it would probably be better to make the wrong decision decisively, rather than waffling back and forth indecisively.

That doesn't mean he can't change his mind if some genuinely new information pops up, like if he commits to the battle but then he learns the other side has reinforcements and he needs to pull back. But normally, he needs to be decisive and stick to something, even if he can't be completely sure it's the right choice.

That is why St. James says:

"Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives to all generously and without criticizing, and it will be given to him.  But let him ask in faith without doubting.  For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind.  That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
(James 1:5-8)

If Christianity is true, then God will give you the wisdom to eventually know it is true, assuming you keep on bothering him about it.  But you have to be able to stick to the truths you already know, rather than constantly wavering between two opinions.

(That doesn't mean God won't answer your prayers just because you are sometimes afraid you are wrong.  Remember the example of the Indecisive General. His doubt was fatal because it was expressed in his actions, not because he secretly worried that he might be making the wrong choice.)

And if Christianity were not true, I think that by trying as hard as you can to live it out you would eventually discover that to be the case.  Spiritual falsehood can be recognized by the fact that it's not possible to really live on it, that it is stones and not bread.

Concluding thoughts

If you are only reading/watching atheist books or videos in order to test your own faith in God, then yeah obviously you'll experience anxiety.  That's exactly what you were looking for, and maybe you should reconsider why you are doing it to yourself. That is, while you have a moral responsibility to do your best to make sure what you believe is true, and while arguably this should include sometimes exposing yourself to polemics by unbelievers of various sorts, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are obliged to read their materials when you don't think they would change your mind, and the predictable effect of doing so is to make you unhappy. In everything there is moderation and a correct dosage.

You should also ask yourself theologically what you are really afraid might happen. Are you afraid that you would come to know an unpleasant truth, for example that God does not exist, and that what you've believed in is based on a lie? Well the truth is whatever it is, and knowing it cannot actually hurt you. As a psychologist named Gendlin once wrote:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Are you afraid that God would judge you for sincerely trying to discover the truth about him? But if God is righteous he cannot punish people for engaging in virtuous activity:

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the Lord, for he comes,
for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness,
and the peoples in his faithfulness.
(Psalm 96:11-13)

Or are you afraid that you would fail to be virtuous in your search for the truth, and thus might fall away from the faith in an intellectually dishonest manner, perhaps leading to your condemnation?  Then pray to God that this will not happen, and he will strengthen you, just as he has promised in Scripture.  Face your fears explicitly and bring them before your Father in heaven, who cares for you.

And then give yourself permission to move on to the next thing.

Appendix: How to Believe in Heaven

A lot of people's doubts concern the question of whether there is life after death.  Death seems like the final abyss that makes human life meaningless, so to many people this seems like the most pressing religious question.

St. Lewis has some interesting reflections about this in Reflections on the Psalms:

"Is it possible for men to be to much concerned with their eternal destiny? In one sense, paradoxical though it sounds, I should reply, Yes.

For the truth seems to me to be that happiness or misery beyond death, simply in themselves, are not even religious subjects at all. A man who believes in them will of course be prudent to seek the one and avoid the other. but that seems to have no more to do with religion than looking after one's health or saving money for one's old age.

The only difference here is that the stakes are so very much higher.

And this means that, granted a real and steady conviction, the hopes and anxieties aroused are overwhelming. But they are not on that account the more religious. They are hopes for oneself, anxieties for oneself. God is not the center. He is still important only for the sake of something else. Indeed such a belief can exist without a belief in God at all. Buddhists are much concerned with what will happen to them after death, but are not, in a true sense, Theists.

It is surely, therefore, very possible that when God began to reveal Himself to men, to show them that He and nothing else is their true goal and the satisfaction of their needs, and that He has a claim upon them simply by being what He is, quite apart from anything He can bestow or deny, it may have been absolutely necessary that this revelation should not begin with any hint of future Beatitude or Perdition.

These are not the right points to begin at. An effective belief in them, coming too soon, may even render almost impossible the development of (so to call it) the appetite for God; personal hopes and fears, too obviously exciting, have got in first. Later, when, after centuries of spiritual training, men have learned to desire and adore God, to pant after Him 'as pants the hart', it is another matter. For then those who love God will desire not only to enjoy Him but 'to enjoy Him forever', and will fear to lose Him."   

There is a right way and a wrong way to become convinced that Heaven is real.  If your faith in Heaven is not very robust, it may be because you are going about it the wrong way.

There is no such thing as a purely intellectual shortcut, whereby you can acquire total certainty about the afterlife, without the need to first put in a proportionate total trust in God.  Such a shortcut might make life easier, but I don't think we are meant to have it.

There is indeed an intellectual component to religion ("You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind"), but it has to be developed in conjunction with the other aspects.  To state it somewhat more provocatively, I think that the process of coming to believe fully in Christianity, is actually the same as the process of sanctification whereby one becomes holy.

This total trust arises by a process of development, or a journey. The question is whether you can trust God, not necessarily with everything at once (which is more than can fit in your brain anyway), but can you trust just a little bit farther than you can currently understand?  If you can trust just a tiny bit more than what you can prove, you will soon understand more, and trust more too.  On the other hand if your trust extends no farther than what you can already prove to yourself, you won't make any progress at all until that changes.

Think of faith as like a light shining right in front of you as you walk along a dark path through a forested mountain to a house where you've been invited to stay.  The question is not whether you can see the entire path to your destination at once, but whether you can see the next step in front of you.  You only need to progress one step at a time to eventually reach the destination, but if you can't see one more step, then you aren't going to get anywhere.

Eventually you may come to a part of the path where there is an outlook to which your final destination is visible, but depending on the topography of the terrain, you might have to travel for a bit before you reach that part of the path.

When you finally see it, your heart may cry out with wonder: "Is everything sad going to come untrue?" [*] And that is indeed where the path is leading.

But you should not be overly concerned if your belief in the afterlife seems somewhat dim and shaky, because that is not really the right place to start.  Sometimes it happens that the way you become convinced of some X is not to try really hard to believe X or find compelling proof of it (which can lead to a manufactured or artificial faith, by tricking yourself in various ways), but rather to deepen your understanding of some other thing Y, and then X will naturally follow.

Just like you make grass grow by watering it and adding fertilizer, not by pulling on the leaves to make them grow faster. If you want to work on your belief in the afterlife, you have to develop roots in some other areas. Here are some of the roots:

A) Learning to trust God with what you have in the PRESENT moment. Not some moment in the past, not the future, but the current situation in the present.  What can you personally do to follow God and to serve your neighbor?  It can be almost anything, as long as it's something you wouldn't do if you didn't believe in God.

B) Meditating on the character of Christ, and his promises to you.

C) Learning to love the saints who are more mature than you in the faith.  Especially those from previous generations.  Either those who have already fallen asleep in God; or elderly Christians who have loved Jesus for a longer time than you have, and will likely be preceding you.  To put it bluntly, the more people you know who are dead here, but alive with Jesus, the more easy it will be for you to believe in their continued existence after death.  Starting with other people besides yourself, makes it easier to set aside our fears, and perceive the reality of how Christ gives the saints victory over death.

If you have a robust faith in God, the afterlife follows necessarily as a corrollary.  If you can look at the seeming annihilation of ourselves and all of our loved ones, and say, "Yes, but God will do something about it, because I know him," then that is a faith which can survive anything else this world can throw at us.

But if you try to find some evidence for the afterlife which is independent of God's promises to his saints, that won't work.  So put first things first, and the "last things" that come after death will sort themselves out.

----
[*] St. J.R.R. Tolkein, The Return of the King.

Posted in Psychology, Theological Method | 9 Comments

Blog Updates

As a number of people have pointed out to me, I haven't been updating my blog much recently.  This is partly because I got into a more conflicted relationship with publication such that I was withholding a lot of writing I was working on.

But right now I have some time to kill recovering from a nasal surgery a week ago—I wasn't able to breathe through my nose for most of the past 5 years, and now I can, thanks to God and medical care!  I'm feeling great mentally, I just have low physical energy.  So I might try to dig out some old writing and post it now.  If it looks like I am suddenly doing a lot more writing, that's an illusion: I'll mostly be editing old stuff.  But maybe I'll sneak in a new thing or two to keep you on your toes.

There also used to be a system to notify people of new posts by email, but it stopped working a while ago.  The root cause is that I really need to take the plunge and update WordPress to a much newer version so that I can use plugins that are still being maintained.  But I'm a little nervous about losing data so I want to be cautious about it.

On the morning of my surgery, I only had time to read a single blog post, and I providentially stumbled across the following quotation from the Apocrypha:

Honor the physician, for he is essential to you;
for that profession was established by the Lord.
2 The gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and the king provides for the physician’s sustenance.
3 His knowledge gives the physician high standing
and earns him the admiration of those who are great.
4 The Lord has created medicines from the earth,
and no one who is sensible will despise them.
5 Was not water once sweetened by a tree
so that his power might be revealed?
6 He has endowed human beings with skill
so that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.
7 Through them the physician heals and relieves pain,
8 and the pharmacist prepares suitable medicines.
Thus, there is no end to the works of God,
from whom well-being continues to spread throughout the entire world. (Sirach 38)

This seemed providentially appropriate in light of the circumstances...

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Comparing Religions XII: Summary and Concluding Thoughts

This is the summary and conclusions for the Comparing Religions blog series.  We went through a series of questions about what you should ask to identify if a religion is true and good.  In my experience, a lot of skeptics don't even try to answer these questions.  They just assume they know what answer they would get if they tried, so they don't bother...

It was only when this series was mostly written that I realized it maps onto the statement in the Nicene Creed about the Christian Church:

I believe in one holyuniversal, and apostolic Church...

ONE
Regarding the first term "one", I didn't say much about Unity—disputes about this tend to have more to do, ironically, with all the arguments that Christians have with each other—see my post on Seeking Christian Unity for some thoughts about it.  But it is certainly probable that if Christians spent more of their energy on loving each other than fighting each other, as Jesus said we were supposed to do, then Christianity would also look more supernatural to outsiders.  I suppose one could check various religions for their degree of internal harmony and unity, but I didn't.  Of course this would depend on quite a few contingent historical factors, such as how long the religion has had to splinter into different rival groups...

The whole thing kicked off with this blog post: Theology: Less Speculative than Quantum Gravity, in which I came up with a list of questions (quoted below) that seemed reasonable to ask when comparing the merits of various religions.

Then I had the (perhaps foolish) idea, sometime around 2016, to actually try to give my own answers to these questions!  Obviously, I had to start by making various disclaimers:

Part I: Introduction

which at least satisfies the ONE condition by—well read the Roman numeral, it clearly says one on it!

UNIVERSAL
Regarding the universality (also known as catholicity) of the Christian Church, its credibility on this topic could be treated with respect to space:

II. World Evangelism: Has the religion persuaded a significant fraction of the world population, outside a single ethnic group, to believe in it?

or it could be treated with respect to time:

III. Ancient Roots: How does the religion relate to previous and subsequent religions?

APOSTOLIC
The Apostolicity of the Church has to do with its claim to be founded, not primarily on any kind of vague philosophy or mysticism, but on concrete historical events—the teaching, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—which were witnessed and reported by a specific group of people, the Apostles.

(Obviously, this principle is in some tension with universality, as the witnessing of a specific historical event, must happen at a specific time and place, even if the testimony later goes out into the whole world.  It is this type of tension that keeps life interesting...)

The first question is whether a distinctive claim of supernatural revelation is being made at all—there are lots of things out there that people call religions, which don't have this!  (And they might not even claim to.  They may be perfectly nice political, philosophical, or spiritual movements nevertheless, but they aren't competing directly with the main Christian claim:

IV. Supernatural Claims:  Did the religious founder claim his message came from supernatural revelation, or is it only the reflections of some wise philosopher who didn't claim to have divine sanction for their teaching?

The next questions have to do with whether the supernatural features fall under the category known as myths, that is traditional fun stories people tell about gods and heroes in the distant past, that have no real claim to be based on historical testimony:

V: Historical Accounts: This one was a double feature: 

Are the primary texts describing some sort of mythological pre-history, or are they set in historical times?
&
Related, does it sound like fiction, or does it sound like history?

If it does claim to be history, how good is this claim?  Too long of a time interval, and the claim is suspect:

VI: Early Sources: How long was it between the time when the supposed supernatural events took place, and when they were first written down (in a document that has had copies of it preserved).  Is it early enough to suggest the text is based on testimony rather than later legends?

Finally, even if it is history, who cares?  Couldn't it just have been a normal non-supernatural event?

VII: Natural Inexplicability: What are the odds that the purported supernatural events could have occurred for non-supernatural reasons?

Or could it have just been a pack of lies?  If so, there might be signs of it in the historical data:

VIII: Honest Messengers: Another double feature:

Did the main witnesses benefit materially from their testimony, or did they suffer for it?
&
Is there significant evidence of fraud among the originators of the religion?

(I also wrote a bonus post IX: Delayed Return on the issue of Christ's prophecy of his Second Coming, because the overall issue of fulfilled or unfulfilled prophecy tends to come up frequently in dialogue between different religions.  I'm not really sure this post belongs with the rest, as it doesn't discuss the issue across a broad section of different world religions, but I gave it a number so I can't leave it out!)

HOLY
Obviously, while historical credibility is the main concern here, the question of identifying fraud starts to raise more general questions about what is the moral and spiritual credibility of various religious movements.  The Christian Church claims thinks of this function as related to holiness, a certain sort of closeness to God which Jesus enables in those who follow him.  Something related to moral goodness, but which goes beyond mere conscientiousness, into something more like sacred presence.

Although the whole point of holiness is that it mixes together goodness and spirituality in a non-separable package deal, in this series we considered the two aspects separately.  First we looked at moral profoundness:

X: Moral Depth: What is the general moral character of the religious teaching?

and then at the sense of felt spiritual contact with the divine:

XI: Spiritual Experience: Do people who are serious about this religion generally feel that they are put into an actual relationship with the divine?

Of course, this wraps back around to the question of universality—is this religion actually for everybody?  The various topics bleed into each other and can't be fully separated.

Concluding Thoughts

First, I would like to recommend a couple of books.  I cannot give credit to all the numerous material I have read about different religions over the years.   But one particularly interesting book I read recently about minor religious traditions is Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, by a former UN and British diplomat who talks about various (mostly persecuted) minor religious groups in the Middle East: the Zoroastrians, Mandaeans,  Samaritans, Yidzis, and more!  This is not an apologetics book, it is sociology, but if you manged to make it through all of these posts, you'll probably be interested to read about the modern experiences of some of these groups.

More foundationally, in some respects my approach in this series is secretly following St. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man.  I owe to him, the idea that most Comparative Religion proceeds on the basis of essentially false parallels.  He proposes dividing up the pagan religious world on quite different lines:

In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard this modern method of classification, which I feel sure has falsified the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only forced into their place in the other.

To be sure, St. Chesterton does not do so as a professional historian but as an early 20th century amateur relying primarily on the work of Wells, and it often shows.  But he gets something essential right that a lot of smart people get wrong.

I'm not sure I ever responded anywhere to the inane atheist canard: "We are all atheists about most gods, I just disbelieve in one more than you do."  While it should be obvious to anyone who carefully read this series, it is worth emphasizing that this facile dismissal really gets the terrain regarding comparative religion completely and totally backwards.

It is quite false, actually, that religions have to assert that all other religions are 100% wrong.  In fact, as a committed Christian I cannot do so, because any time Christianity and another religion X agree on some proposition P, logically I have to think that religion got P right, because my only other option is to think that Christianity is wrong about it.  This is not sycnretism, it is just logic.

It is NOT in fact true that there are a large number N of religions, each of which believes in N different gods, and disbelieves in the existence of all the other N-1 gods.  Rather, the landscape of comparative religion mainly involves two fundamentally incompatible ideas:

1) Polytheism (worship of multiple gods, usually viewed as beings of limited power and goodness who were born at some finite time in the past), and

2) Monotheism (the belief there is only one God worthy of worship, who is viewed as the Creator of all things and supremely good).

Within each of these two groups, the atheist canard is inapplicable.  When educated members of two different monotheistic traditions meet, we do NOT typically assert that the other group's God does not really exist.  Rather, we recognize that the term "God" (or "Elohim", "Allah", "The Great Spirit", among some ancient philosophers "Zeus") is a reference to the one actual God who created everything.  We may have somewhat divergent beliefs about this God, but we also typically agree on quite a lot, in terms of divine attributes!  (When one of my Muslim friends offers to pray for me, I don't say to him "No I don't believe in Allah".   Because "Allah" just means "God" in Arabic, and whatever important things we disagree on, we both agree that God exists and answers prayer.)

Somewhat similarly, when two groups of pagan polytheists meet, they seldom assume the other nation's gods are not real.  They might identify them, or add them as new members to their pantheon, or claim that "my god can beat up your god".  But there is no need to deny their existence.  The whole point of poly-theism is that you can worship (and a forteriori, accept the existence of) multiple deities at once!

The only time claims of "nonexistence of deities" come up, between different theistic traditions, is when Monotheists critique Polytheism.  In principle Monotheism and Polytheism could be combined in a henotheistic setup (one chief Classical Theist God, and also lots of little-g Homeric-style gods).  But the Monotheistic tradition of Judaism and its descendants also adheres to Monolatry, the exclusive worship of one real Deity.  Even though no denial that spirits higher than human beings exist (e.g. angels and demons), they are regarded as strictly finite beings, unworthy of being worshipped by free men and women.

This implies that polytheism is, at the very least deeply confused about the spiritual realm.  Which is not to say there are no truths in paganism, either.  As a Christian I do still see a lot of value in pagan myths at the level of imagination, and even foreshadowing of Christ!

Certainly, no decent pagan would agree that we owe no respect or piety to whatever beings are responsible for our food, rain, and birth.  That is in fact an important proposition P that Christianity and Paganism are in agreement about.  In other words, I would regard even pagans as being much closer to reality on this point, than atheists are.

For a sympathetic expression of pagan values—and for an understanding of the "agnostic" way that most pagans relate to the divine—it is best to consider an example from somebody who actually understands such a religious tradition from the inside.  Miyazaki, the greatest animated film-maker of all time, gives us a glimpse of the psychology of the thing, in his iconic My Neighbor Totoro.  (One of the few movies suitable for both 3 year olds and adults.)

I am not referring to the perspective of Mei in the film, who has actually met the big Totoro (there are three), but rather the perspective of the Dad, who I think provides a more typical Japenese attitude towards religion.  Earlier in the film, the Dad says he "believes" his little daughter when she claims to have met the forest spirit Totoro.  So they all take a bike ride up to the giant tree that Mei fell into earlier...

Father: What a beautiful tree it is. This tree's been here, oh, since before anyone can remember. You know, a long time ago, men and trees were the best of friends. It's actually because of this tree that I decided to buy our house in the first place. And you can bet Mommy'll like it when she sees it. So, what do you say we thank the king of the forest and get back for our lunch?

Satsuki: I have to meet Michiko after lunch to get ready for an exam.

Mei: I'm coming too!

Father: Atten-tion! (to tree) Thank you for all you've done for Mei. Please look after her and protect her forever.  (All three bow.)

Mei & Satsuki: Thank you so much.  (Father turns and runs)

Father: Last one home's a rotten egg!

Satsuki: Hey, that's not fair. You cheated!

Mei: Wait! Hey! Hey, wait up!

This is neither a creedal statement in the Christian sense, nor is it disbelief in the Atheist sense.  It occupies a sort of in-between, uncanny space, of respect to higher and unknown powers, but without any sort of clear dogma about what those powers look like.

As Chesterton explains paganism:

Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions.  First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local.  So far from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images almost concentrated into idols.  The poet feels the mystery of a particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department of woods and forests.  He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not the abstract idea of altitude.  [...]

The second consequence is this; that in these pagan cults there is every shade of sincerity—and insincerity.  In what sense exactly did an Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athena?  What scholar is really certain of the answer?  In what sense did Dr. Johnson really think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to collect orange-peel?  In what sense does a child really think that he ought to step on every alternate paving-stone?  [...]

But he who has most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.  They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed.  A man did not stand up and say 'I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty,' and the rest of the Apostles Creed. Many believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others, or only in a very vague poetical sense in any.  There was no moment when they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and be tortured to keep intact.  [...]

The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all.  It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations.  It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them.  But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.  Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.  The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers [...]

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful.  He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed.  Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and even maim him for ever.

To be absolutely clear, I don't, in fact, have the same dismissive attitude towards paganism that the New Atheists claim I should have towards pagan religions.  I just don't think they are revelation in the same sense that the Bible is.  Nor do I think that, for the most part, pagans made such claims, even though they did of course mostly believe that the gods were real.

But the amount of religious commonality becomes much greater if you look at the other Abrahmaic religions, which between them share about 50% of the world population.  If Christianity is right, then the teachings of Judaism are approximately 100% true (just not complete).  And Islam is perhaps 90% true, if you focus on essentials.  (Even though obviously Christians can't accept Mohammad's claim to be a true prophet, it's obviously not a big fat coincidence either that so many of his teachings—the ones that agree with previous monotheistic prophets—were correct!)

But, this does not mean that Jews and Muslims—let alone monotheists on purely philsophical grounds—have 100% of the full truths that Christians have.  It makes a difference that God came in human flesh.

The doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation and Resurrection and so on, are indeed revolutionary and important and salvific religious truths.  But accepting them doesn't at all require saying that everybody else is 100% wrong about everything!  In fact, they build on other ideas, that are broadly shared by a wide variety of religious traditions.  Which is why, when Christians share the good news, they can and should assume that their audience typically already has some idea of what they mean by "God", and the idea that we need some sort of forgiveness or redemption.  These ideas might require correction, but not total repudiation.  That's what it looks like when somebody has part of the truth, but is offered even more.

Nor, of course, do Christians claim to know 100% of the truths about God.  Far from it!  Like everyone else, we only know what was revealed to us, and there is plenty that remains mysterious.

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