Does Faith = Personality + Experience?
I have struggled over the last several months with an honest admission to myself of what I do not believe. Carl Sagan’s Contact had long spoken to me at an almost spiritual level; however, much of the book’s agnosticism was inaccessible to me because I was unwilling to entertain ideas that held the potential to further distance me from the faith of my childhood. A necessary part of my most recent journey has been asking me why some things that no longer makes sense to me once did, and why they make sense to people I know, respect and even love. It is easy to throw stones at people whose beliefs are different than our own: a militant agnostic is no less susceptible to arrogance in his beliefs than is a religious fundamentalist. But this obscures the deeper question of where faith comes from? Why does it come more easily to some than to others? Why, for some, is the idea of faith unimportant, irrelevant, and unhelpful? Is it, as some Christians would say, a “gift from God”, a manifestation of the Calvinist idea that some people are chosen by God while others were created for damnation? It seems impossible to bridge the chasm between believers and non-believers if one holds the other was created by God for destruction and could not believe even if they wanted to. I am less interested in this analysis, and more in the question of whether or not faith is ultimately related to personality and life experience, with particular combinations being more or less likely to result in a believer or non-believer.
Religious answers to why people choose to believe are not limited to the Calvinist explanation but many times argue that people who choose not to live the life of faith are hiding a secret sin. In the act of nurturing their secret sin, these people refuse to accept the idea of an all powerful creator God who can oversee their lives. On the other hand, rational agnostics many times argue that everyone of religious persuasion is unwilling to admit that reason requires us to admit to a Godless world, within which religion can only be a false comfort. Is it even necessary to bring these two worlds together? Perhaps not; perhaps time will force upon both camps compromises that will inevitably draw them together. What matters to me is seeking to understand where my own spiritual experiences and lack of faith comes from, in large part to ensure that my rejection of a personal God does not reside in an adolescent rebellion against a form of religion I now find distasteful. I find the angry anti-religious rebel as distasteful as a vitriolic fundamentalist; the hope for this world is in reason and through conduct becoming people who appreciate other people’s perspectives and seek truth above all else.
Faith is probably best defined by the Apostle Paul who essentially said that faith is what we hope for but can not see. As an agnostic, it is possible to find much to agree with in this definition. It is unreasonable to state that an agnostic has no hope for an afterlife, or that the idea of a loving creator God is something an agnostic is unwilling to accommodate. It is possible to believe that the idea of a personal God is messy, unhelpful and unwarranted on the evidence and yet to be willing to be wrong, and to be joyous in the act of being wrong. It is equally possible to care very deeply about ethics, spirituality and questions of meaning without believing that the answers to any of these lie within theism. It is possible to find common ground with religious people not because of the pabulum of simple religious pluralism, but because we find that when we talk about that which most has shaped us, we share important spiritually transformative experiences. We may engage in conversation over the differences that stem from different interpretations of where these experiences come from, but ultimately their origin is less important than what they motivate us to do here, in this world, in our families, in our lives, in the only reality we know for sure exists.
For people of faith, it can be difficult to believe others would seriously and studiously weigh the evidence and come away unpersuaded as to the question of God. This logic applies equally well to people not of faith. One of the nuanced problems of modern-day religion is its terse balancing act between the impact of rationalism and its desire to keep faith as something especially elevated, set aside from the implications of reductionism. Time has shaped those questions that religions believe faith versus reason best speaks to. In this gradual shaping act it has become obvious that faith has moved away from questions of origins (which the science of evolution answers more persuasively than religion), to questions of meaning (where is God in the suffering?). Within this change is something that is subtle only from the outside looking in; by faith being forced to gradually move from the historicity of the church’s origins to questions of ultimate meaning, faith is acknowledging its inability to speak to questions modernity speaks to more efficaciously. However, in giving up this ground, the role of faith is also changing. As faith comes out of balance with reason, the balancing act between the two will be lost and reason will win; the long term implications to reason being given pre-eminence to faith are just now beginning to be felt. Where some attribute to post-modernism the effect that people are no longer insulated from cultures not their own and truths that go unchallenged within their own cultures, perhaps the longer term impact of post-modernity will be that it has forced upon many religious communities the willingness to acknowledge parts of religion that are nonsymmetrical, problematic, and simply wrong.
When a rationalist encounters faith, the most pressing question is why faith is necessary. Faith in a God – whether the holy God of fundamentalists or the loving God of more moderate religious voices – seems to many not only cold solace in a world God seems to be choosing to stay away from. More importantly, God seems irrelevant to the pressing questions of life. To a cynical rationalist, God has been busy in some other corner of the universe for the last couple of millennia. Where once we could count on him embodying a column of fire, or opening the earth to swallow up pesky rebellious people, he now seems to be strangely disconnected to his world. To an even more cynical person, the last time God supposedly walked on the earth in the form of Jesus, things went really badly. Perhaps God is thinking through how exactly to bring his creation into line? For a rationalist, the idea of a personal God is not only unwarranted on the basis of the evidence, but is unhelpful in that it allows us to look outside of the many things in this world that are within our control that we should prioritize over appeals to a distant God.
Within the question of God it becomes easier to see the role personality plays in belief. To reject the idea of a personal God requires someone willing to pull the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz. It is best to do this not as an angry person, because anger ultimately obscures our ability to see things clearly and to seek truth, regardless of whether or not it might be consistent with a way of life that we have found unhelpful or even hurtful. If you wish to begin this path, respectfully ask your fellow believers about their spiritual experiences; ask them about when they have felt God. What you will find are experiences that are lacking in anything concrete; are formless and utterly lacking in any specificity as to content, meaning or clarity. Years of people pursuing this leads many with an inner tension they do not know how to resolve. Of all the reasons people of faith die inside, none are more overlooked than the impact of years of ineffable maybes being substituted for concrete this-world thoughts, actions and disciplines. Very, very few people can live their entire lives reaching for something that will never take on form, and many of us choose to respectfully but directly set aside that which has been distant and unhelpful and care only about that which can be proven to be helpful.
Life’s experiences invariably shape our view of faith as well. It is impossible to look at someone who learned at a young age that those who were supposed to protect them, nurture them, and help them but did not do so will impact their view of religion in general and faith specifically. The various means by which this happens changes from person to person, but suffice it to say that no matter how much some theologians want us to believe that God is a loving God and that all his actions are taken on behalf of our good, people with parental scars will reject this as not only unhelpful, but potentially dangerous. Any child who has built a false world where parental care, protection and relationships were to be present but were not knows the danger of inventing an alternative world when the reality of your actual world is too painful to acknowledge. But even hidden within this enormous pain is something beautiful and special for the wounded seeker: the hope that another reality outside of the one you accept could be, but is not yet. The hope that through something changing you could know safety and security; it is in such a hope that people who desire to pull from the goodness of the teachings of Christ but disavow the abject distance of the theistic God place their desire. The world bears no marks of a loving God, and if Jesus is our key to setting aside the angry God of the Old Testament, it seems we might want to ask ourselves why God walked his own creation only to end up crucified. Jesus has much to teach the world still, but if his teachings must be interpreted through the prism of his deity, we have to wrestle with a God who really did not change the world. As he said, the poor are still with us; wars still rage; to paraphrase Thucydides, “the strong do what they can and the week suffer what they must.” What has changed the world and its underlying human condition has been sustainable agriculture, medicine, economic systems that redistribute wealth from a heavily consolidated minority towards a vibrant middle class, representative democracies and international law. God seems curiously absent in these practical solutions; more pointedly, God was unnecessary for us to make these advances on our own. If he has left us alone so be it, we are better in every way measurable for having finally taken responsibility for our own world on our own terms, with our own appreciation for the limitations of the human condition. Let him, if he be real, intervene and help us further; we are not against him nor are we seeking to shake our fist at him. Rather, we are seeking to do the best we can with what we have and what we know. Beyond that, we are content to let those who want to make unknowable truths primary continue to dig more dry wells, wells too many well meaning people will stumble into.
For many people in this world, the words faith and believe are incompatible. You may choose one over the other, but not both. One trumps the other because of what it requires when we construct our beliefs. For me, after a life time of pursuing God and finding the results exhausting and unhelpful, I would rather reject faith, introduce hope, and build my life based on what can be known, what can be proven, and what can better humankind. While I may hope that certain truths of my childhood are true, I choose deliberately to not say “I believe” they are true. This belief was unrewarded and a trail of tears for me, a path I never wish to walk again. Better I make something of myself in this life for all the right reasons in all the right ways than pretend that which can not be known is the most knowable part of all this reality.
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About MysteriousFaith
“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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November 28th, 2005 at 8:40 pm
Ben, from the first time we met, I knew that there was a lot I could learn from you. There is so much truth is this post, so much I agree with, so many questions I have asked and feelings I have felt, but I feel the conclusion was a gyp. I felt no resolve in your resolve. I want you to stay in the fight.
November 28th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
Yep … you’re 100% right! I wasn’t ready to finish my thoughts forcefully, but I’m near ready to do so now! Let me get finished w/ my 1L finals and I’ll write about this in December. Don’t be a stranger, stranger!