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Loading...One of the questions I get asked the most frequently from blog members is how someone can possibly continue to be a believing Christian if they understand the enormous problems presented by the critical study of the New Testament. I always tell them that in fact it’s not only possible – it happens all the time. Sometimes they are incredulous, but it’s not only true, it’s so true that my friends who know everything I know about the Bible and are still believers often find the question / issue completely puzzling. They have trouble understanding why anyone thinks it’s a problem. As we learned from “Cool Hand Luke” (a great movie, btw, with tons of Christ-images), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I have asked my former student and long-time friend Rev. Dr. Judy Siker to write a couple of posts from a personal standpoint, indicating why/ how she continues to be a believer and faithful church person even though she is, at the same time, a critical scholar of the Bible.
I first came to know Judy thirty years ago, when she applied for our graduate program in New Testament/Early Christianity at UNC Chapel Hill. She did both an MA and a PhD here, and developed a number of academic interests, including especially the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew in particular) and Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity. Her dissertation dealt with what we can know about the tensions and conflicts between followers of Jesus and the non-Christian Jews in the community behind the Gospel of Matthew.
Judy had a long and distinguished career in teaching, with positions at Meredith College, the American Baptist Seminary of the West, the Graduate Theological Union, San Francisco Theological Seminary (where she was also Vice President of the institution), and Loyola Marymount University. In addition to being a professional academic, she is also an ordained minister. Here is a first post in which she begins to explain how both are possible.
Judy Siker is author of Who is Jesus? What a Difference a Lens Makes.
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…and you still believe?
I am a recently retired professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and an ordained Presbyterian minister (PCUSA), and I have enjoyed a rich and fulfilling career in both fields. As someone who has spent decades teaching in the area of New Testament, I love the Ehrman blog, the questions Bart raises, and the discussions his work (both on the blog and in his many publications) engenders. I am continually intrigued by the academic discourse and debate on issues in the field of New Testament and Christian Origins and have enjoyed exploring those with my students. And yet…
Throughout my teaching career folks have asked me how and why, given my scholarly pursuit of the Bible, do I continue to believe? My response is, “How or why would I not?”
This answer, of course, is not satisfactory for those who see insurmountable contradictions between the academic pursuit of the biblical text and the life of faith. I suppose at this point it goes without saying that I do not. So, when Bart asked me if I would be willing to write a couple of posts about how I can both acknowledge that there are serious problems with the Bible (more on that to come) AND continue to live in my faith tradition, I agreed.
As you the readers know, guest posts are often about a specialty of the guest, the topic of a recent book or an invitation to delve into a detailed question by one of the members of the blog on a matter of New Testament or other ancient texts. This guest post is none of those things. Rather it is a very personal reflection on a question that I have been asked since I first went to seminary and throughout my career as a NT professor: How can you know what you know about the NT and still believe?
In this post I will introduce some of the factors that went into my development as a woman of faith and in the next post I will address more specifically how, in my experience, the scholarly world of the New Testament and my Christian beliefs are mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive. These reflections are not designed to convince or convert; they are simply one woman’s reflections on how she lives both in the academy and the church.
I was raised in eastern North Carolina in a moderate protestant church. From the time the pediatrician said this baby can be in public until I left for college, I was in church. We were there on Sunday mornings and sometimes Sunday evenings, and–not infrequently–other days of the week as well. I went to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and Youth Group. If we were visiting my North Carolina grandparents, the visit included attending church, a Baptist Church. If we were visiting my Minnesota grandparents we were in church, a Lutheran Church. We were in church.
I sometimes think I was born believing. I do not remember ever feeling pressured to go or to believe; it was simply who we were and what we did. There were prayers at meals and prayers at bedtime and in my little girl brain, it all made sense—as much sense as it could to a child.
I have vivid childhood memories of my paternal grandmother and her Bible. She did not have the privilege of extended formal education but her knowledge of the Bible was enviable. I can see her now sitting in her chair, Bible in hand, preparing to teach any number of lessons. It was a well-used, well-worn book filed with old church bulletins marking favorite passages. Its pages were dog-eared, many of its passages highlighted or underlined. It has only been in later reflection on these memories that I have realized the strong unspoken lesson of this familiar scene. The Bible is a book to explore. The Bible is a book that calls us to read it over and over again.
My recollection of church is that questions were not discouraged but neither were there long, in-depth discussions of the biblical text. So over the years growing up I felt both a freedom and a sense of incompleteness. I remember having lots of questions about the stories in the Bible, and I was curious about lots of things I was taught at church. Yet I was also moderately satisfied with the answers that came and so I just kept on believing.
Similarly, there wasn’t a great deal of discussion about the Bible at home, but it was clear that my parents’ faith was important to them, that the church community held a prominent place in our lives, and that God had certain expectations of us as His (my understanding as a child) children.
For whatever reason (I cannot explain) I did not rebel. I continued to stand in this tradition in which I was raised, faithful but filled with questions as I headed off to college.
The women’s college I attended required six units (two courses) of religion. It was only when I landed in that first religion course my freshman year that I began to tackle my latent questions head on from a scholarly perspective. I remember quite well sitting in that course and being so excited by the lectures. I was delighted that some of the questions I had carried for so long were beginning to be answered. (I especially remember my relief at learning that the first eleven chapters of Genesis were considered by many scholars to be primeval history or etiologies and not actual recorded history suggesting that there was at some point in time one man and one woman and then voila an entire world was populated.)
I also remember quite well that my delighted response was not that of all my classmates. In fact, a number of young women who had been raised in conservative Christian homes and churches were greatly distressed by the lectures. Some of them were angry that the professor was spreading lies; others were angry that they had been lied to all their lives. I was puzzled by all of this as I continued to drink in these thought-provoking lectures.
Intrigued by the field and always thirsty for more, I decided to add a Religion major to my Early Childhood Education major. It was a decision that would serve me well, for after teaching elementary school for a number of years and beginning to raise three children, I longed to go back for more studies and it was the field of biblical studies that I wished to pursue.
I had been active in churches in my young adult life, teaching classes and leading studies and I wanted to be equipped to teach at the college or seminary level. So much to the bewilderment of family and friends I headed off to seminary for a Master of Divinity degree and then on to the university for a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. I remember the warnings of well-intentioned friends when I set off to seminary. They feared I would lose my faith if I started studying the Bible from a scholar’s perspective. Their fears were not realized, however, and my curiosity about the text and my belief in God were not, and did not become, mutually exclusive.
As I sit composing this post, I realize happily that I have spent an entire career exploring the biblical text (mostly NT), dealing with the issues and contradictions within the pages of these ancient texts, and I continue to be a believer. And not only a believer, but a preacher and a teacher within the Christian community.
So that’s a bit of the history of my journey, and in the next post I will tackle more specifically how I can know what I know and still believe, how believing makes more sense to me than not believing, and how I can stand firmly in my tradition with arguably more questions than answers.
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This is such a fascinating post -thanks so much and I can barely wait for tomorrow’s episode.
Thanks, Phil.They will actually be spaced out over a few days, so keep on the lookout.
thank you!
I look forward to Judy’s next post which would explain how she maintained her faith despite knowledge of biblical problems. I have never taken the view that the Christian faith depends on inerrancy or even the related but weaker notion of infallibility (i.e. concerning matters of doctrines, as per Catholic theology). Historical inaccuracies in the gospels and myths in Genesis creation story (as per Metzger, there is no reason why God couldn’t inspire myths) don’t seem to challenge central tenets of the Christian faith as formulated by the patristic creeds (e.g. affirmation of God as creator of the world, Jesus as unique Son of God and saviour of the world, forgiveness of sins through the cross). Yet, some findings of biblical scholarship do challenge the basis of Christian faith: Jesus as an apocalyptist who expected imminent end of the world (a compelling but not conclusive thesis; if he got this crucial detail wrong, it opens the door to thinking he got other details wrong as well); much of the pre-Exile Israelite narratives in the Hebrew Bible are legendary. I think devout Christians who view Jesus as fully God will always struggle to come to terms with the contention that Jesus got wrong a central premise of his earthly mission. Sure enough, a kenotic God incarnate may not know about quantum mechanics and everything about botany such as the relative size of the mustard seed. But how could God incarnate get wrong the central background premise of his mission on earth. While presence of myths here and there in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Jonah & the whale, a talking donkey, a talking snake) can be accommodated by a sufficiently nuanced biblical hermeneutic, the likelihood that the big picture of the story of Israel as depicted in the Hebrew Bible is legendary does undermine how the Bible can be an authoritative source of faith, given that Jesus, Paul and other NT authors presuppose the broad picture in the Hebrew Bible (e.g. calling of Abraham, the deliverance of God’s people via the Exodus, the origin and history of the Israelite people, the law given to Moses). Given evidence of human fallibility is found throughout the Bible, the traditional believer who acknowledges findings of historical-critical scholarship, will struggle to present an evidential case for divine inspiration of the Bible. In other words, why still believe that God has anything to do with the Bible? Perhaps Judy will address this problem in her next post.
Stay tuned!
I will be curious to what she has to say. Perhaps she means she believes on some kind of metaphorical level? Can’t wait for the spin.
Discovering problematic or enormous problems in the NT does not prove nor can it conclude to the non existence of God our Almighty Creator.
There are books before the NT( in the NT and outside the NT ), during the compilation of the NT and after its compilation that shed lots of light on the existence of God, believing in God, worshiping God, repenting to God and the eventual meeting of God. ( Lest they know )
I enjoyed this, it’s very interesting – thank you!
Thank you for this first post. I can relate to your childhood as I was also in church whenever the doors were open. We were at church a minimum of three times per week. And I always enjoyed it and never thought of doing anything different. I raised my children the same way and they enjoyed church as much as I did or maybe more.
As an adult now who has read Bart’s books and other similar books and also read Bart’s blog every day, my current struggle is with trying to teach within the community church model. The people that I know in the community style churches take the Bible literally so most of them believe that the world was created in six days, there was an exodus and all the other discrepancies/contradictions that we know. As a teacher in the church, how do you teach people who have these type of beliefs and become angry and defensive if there is a discussion stating that the Bible has discrepancies?
I should say that I am ordained in and teaching in a mainline denomination (PCUSA). That said, I do encounter people whose beliefs are much different than mine and much closer to the beliefs you describe. My style of teaching is invitational. This has worked for me for years in both the academy and the church. While it is quite difficult to introduce the idea of discrepancies in the Bible (along with a wide array of other ideas that biblical literalists find offensive), I have been most successful in creating a dialogue when I invite them to consider some different approaches and then listen carefully to their responses. Minds are not necessarily changed, but the dialogue (when anger can be kept at bay) is beneficial for all.
That is a wonderful answer. You listen with respect, and that builds respect in your listeners. Even if they never come to agree with you, they learn that people who hold your views can be good, reasonable, and faithful. That is so often missing in religious and political discussions these days.
Thank you. I agree with you that there is a great dearth of civility in contemporary discussions of religion and politics. I don’t know how we can expect to learn from one another if we refuse to listen.
I disagree with that language. I disagree that there are “problems” with the Bible. I disagree with this language, because we NEVER use this language when discussing other literature. Have you ever heard anyone describe Homer this way, Dante this way? No. I have not. We simply refer to them as curiosities, fun facts etc. Dante has a geocentric view of the Solar System. Have you EVER heard any scholar describe this as a “serious problem”? Why should the Bible be described as having a “serious problem” if it were true that certain books assume a geocentric view? Shakespeare was influenced by Italian court romances, have you EVER heard anyone describe it as a “serious problem”? Why is it a “serious problem” that the Bible shows influence of surrounding culture? And this could apply to other areas. I just don’t see other literature referred to this way. I am sure atheist activists would like this language, but we, as people interested in scholarship of the Bible as literature/history should employ the same language we employ with Dante. I don’t see why we should call advanced Biblical scholarship, “serious problems with the Bible.” It just doesn’t make ANY sense to me, personally.
I’ll let Judy answer this in full. But I should tell you that other literature is talked about like this *all* the time. I’ve spent the day reading articles on Virgil’s Aeneid book 6, and every article is dealing with the “problems” of the book, it’s inconsistencies, discrepancies, and so on. These problems are very serious and are taken that way. So too with Homer (all over the place) Dante, and so on….
I’m going to disagree with you on that one. Scholars are *always* talking about the “problems” in other texts/authors. I spent the day yesterday reading scholarly articles on Virgil’s Aeneid book 6, and every one of that articles was on the “problems” it poses — internal inconsistencies, contradictions, conflicting sources on and on. Today I’ll be doing the same on Homer, Odyssey 11 — again, all about the problems and how to resolve them. This is simply what scholars who deal with literature deal with. (If there were no problems, there would be no reason for scholarship!)
Hmm… That is interesting to hear. I still don’t think I personally remember that kind of attitude towards other literature. Like, when we hear that we do not know what the earliest origin of Homeric tales were, or if there even was a single person who composed the Odyssey… usually, we hear about these stories with a sense that someone is telling us a “cool fact”, not some problem that has to be confronted. That was my issue. If we are writing about the Bible from a literary point of view, why should we treat it differently than Homer?
It’s no surprise that many academics, including biblical scholars, check their brains at the church door. All religious belief is based on the most primeval of human fears–fear of non-existence. Religion plays on that fear by using the fantasy of an invisible, immaterial, immortal human soul and the equally fantastic nonsense of an eternal afterlife of pleasure if the believer does exactly what the religious authorities order them to do and the barbaric threat of eternal punishment in fire for those who stray.
In so doing, religion manipulates another universal human weakness, namely, greed, by offering, for the low, low price of your critical thinking faculties, to provide infinite satisfaction of your greed, namely, an eternal afterlife of pleasure. Many people will buy into this bogus deal and fall on their knees believing they are saved and have become eternal.
Religion uses the universal human feeling of guilt starting with the filthy doctrine of original sin (children inherit the guilt of their parents, which is a barbarism that is completely opposed to our constitutional guarantee of innocent until proven guilty). And then religion whips the believer with additional fantasies of sin and guilt and threats of eternal punishment to keep believers in a perpetual state of high anxiety (am I really saved?).
And what is most insidious, starting with the nonsense of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, religion shows its true face by threats of eternal fire for any believer who uses his faculty of critical thought to question doctrine and belief–thought control, the essence of totalitarianism. Apostasy, the unpardonable sin, is the chain that religion uses to keep the believer on his knees, thinking that he has cheated death due to the grace and merit resulting from a single vicarious human blood sacrifice (scapegoating).
Face with this barrage of existential fear, greed, guilt and threats, all of which induce continual anxiety in the believer, it’s understandable that many highly educated believers never cease to be full time residents of the Christian fantasyland.
That is quite the summary/analysis of “religion.” I don’t happen to agree with all you say, obviously; nor do I count myself, as you might, as a biblical scholar who has checked her brain at the door. There are other ways to approach the text and Christianity itself. I will address that in part in my next post.
My goodness, what faith did you come out of? While I may be an atheist, I don’t condemn nor believe that most Christians check their brains at the door. Quite the contrary for many of them…they have thought deeply about their faith and their place in this world. They’ve explored and read extensively. I’ve read many believing people’s views and am amazed at the depth of their reasoning, even if I don’t agree with their conclusions.
I’m very interested in your further posts, Judy. I left religion long ago and it was a heart wrenching process and decision. For me, it was an inability to believe even though I wanted to so very much. I’m still fascinated by those, like you, that have kept your faith when I was unable. Why do people come to very different conclusions? Looking forward to your story!
Thank you for this honest response. I suppose it depends on
what
one believes and what one believes
in
that leads to such different conclusions. In my next post I will try to shed some light on what I mean–and don’t mean–when I say I still believe.
Yes – that’s what it all comes down to. What does it mean for someone to call themselves a believer in Christianity? Ask 100 people get a 100 different answers as mega-church preacher Andy Stanley says.
Certainly not belief in literal eternal torture for non-believers. Anyone with a heart and mind knows that has to go. It’s sadistic to the extreme. The view Jesus was perfect? The NT shows a less than perfect figure – smashing a temple up with a whip, being verbally abusive at times. Even Jesus said “Why call me good ? No one is good but God alone.”
The Scholar Hector Avalos has pointed out he thinks there is a bias in Academic Biblical Scholarship that resists seeing any flaws in NT Jesus at all, even among those who think he was mortal. He lays this out powerfully in his last book The Bad Jesus The Ethics of New Testament Ethics.
To say one is a Christian believer is almost to model ones own religion out of the various contradictory accounts and stories of New Testament Jesus – some good, some bad. Take your pick !
You are certainly correct in recognizing that to say one is a Christian believer leaves an endless array of possibilities for definition. It is among the reasons I find it so unhelpful to label ourselves or others without a conversation or discussion.
“It’s no surprise that many academics, including biblical scholars, check their brains at the church door…In so doing, religion manipulates another universal human weakness, namely, greed, by offering, for the low, low price of your critical thinking faculties…”
I think somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
Great post about a question I have asked for decades. Please keep going. And thanks.
Looking forward to your next post. Thank you for sharing.
I appreciate your sharing your personal experience of Christian faith as a biblical scholar, I really do, but perhaps you would also consider a third guest post on your own scholarly views of the community in which ‘Matthew’ lived and wrote his gospel, the author’s redactional perspective, the problem(s) about the gospel that you think cannot be resolved and why. These are questions that occupy believes and unbelievers alike and are perhaps even more interesting to many here.
Thanks for the comment and the question. I’m happy to consider a third post on Matthew; it just happens to be my favorite!
Bart – if you could permit this to happen, there’s at least 8 of us who would love to read it! 🙂
To understand your position as “believer,” it would be helpful to know what it is that you believe. Is it the Apostle’s Creed? Or some fewer specific things? My personal history through my first year at a Methodist-related college sounds almost the same as yours, but we turned out very different, so what it is that you believe is important to know for me to try to make sense of your experience. Thanks for your contribution.
Absolutely. In my next post I will be much more specific about what I believe and why it makes sense to me.
Great post. Can’t wait to read the next one!
Thank you Dr. Siker! I look forward to tomorrow’s post. The church of my youth was the UPCUSA.
Tom Johnson
Thank you Judy for sharing. I also look forward to reading your future posts. I also thank Prof Ehrman for giving us this opportunity to read your posts.
I personally am not surprised that one can be a critical scholar of the Bible and be a follower of Christ. I personally have been an agnostic all my life, but as long as one thinks that the central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus was Son of God, and he was sent here to redeem our sins, he died on cross and rose from the dead, and whoever believes in him will have an everlasting life, they will continue to believe. It really has to do with how one views and interprets the cause and reasons for the inerrancies in the Bible. Conan Doyle believed in the Spiritualism because he so very much wanted to believe in it after he lost his loved ones, so he can communicate with them. I see an example in my wife who is a strong Christian and wants me to believe in Christianity so I can be saved and be with God for all eternity.
One of the strongest reasons why I do not believe I will go to Hell even if I am not a Christian is this: As parents, we all love our kids to certain extent and when they do wrong, we will punish them, but nothing they will do will make the parents put them in Hell for all eternity. It reasons God must be one mean God to be able to banish his children to Hell for all eternity. Note I am not arguing whether God is being unfair but I am merely trying to understand on a “gut” level whether certain things make sense to me.
Thanks Prof Siker.
I’ve been waiting for this answer for a long, long time. And, would you know it, this blog creates the space for us to give audience to a scholar to shed light on this subject, on which I have pondered and continue to ponder.
More generally though, I wonder why anyone–learned or unschooled–believes.
And, specifically, I find difficulty in fathoming how an omni*-god (if this be a reasonable apprehension of the Abrahamic God) would create a system (if atonement theology holds sway) where a blood sacrifice is required, not just for salvation, but for any reason at all.
Thanks much for this, and I look forward to more.
A good deal of my own unbelief comes from what, I suppose, could be called the epistemological perspective. That is, what we know about the world, particularly that which has been learned in the past three or four centuries, is incompatible with the views traditional religions have of such things. What used to be called materialistic reductionism and now goes under the somewhat ugly name of “physicalism” seems to be the last paradigm standing that’s compatible with the evidence.
Is this something on which you have a view?
JYS, appreciate the time and work you will be putting in on this particular subject, as I often wonder how educated people in today’s times can still believe, what with the ever expanding anthropological and archeological evidence, not to mention what we have learned about the cosmos. I agree with the statement bart made about religion doing a lot of good in society(although I think it has actually done much more harm since it was developed, and every society seems to have created their own versions of gods and religions. but my single biggest question I suppose is this: a perfect god that created mankind, the fallen angels,lucifer, an extremely dangerous earth, seems to have not been particularly adept at creation, and secondly since we were supposedly created in god’s image would (he?) have been anatomically correct, and if so why?(not trying to be funny)
Violence in religion is not subject to religion only as such, but especially to other factors such as geography, politics, culture, and feeling threatened either because of foreigners, immigrants, or by natural phenomena such as an eclipse, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption. Purity and corruption is fundamentally embedded in the social fabric throughout human history.
Thank you Judy. Can´t wait for the post of tomorrow.
Thank you, especially for your candor.
Thank you so much for these posts! I would like to share that having been raised as a Catholic in the 60’s, the Bible was not given the same authority that it had in Protestant churches. I had never read it cover to cover, nor tried to understand it as a whole, before courses at a seminary/theology school in my 50s. So perhaps from that perspective, because of the many problems with Church authority and its behavior through history, it was not surprising to find that the Bible is a creature of humans, trying in our own stumbling way, to point to the Divine.
It has great teaching stories and you can chew on it soul-wise via Lectio Divina, It also contains many associated unknowns that folks can and have interpreted in various ways down through time. And likely that will continue through the foreseeable future.
Sign me… somewhere on the Judaeo-Christian spectrum..humbly seeing through the glass darkly, but not throwing out any guidebooks.
Believe what? I was raised with love and occasional Sunday school. Christianity was all there was in our community, so I had no knowledge of any other religion. Later when I got married I fell hook line and sinker into my husbands family’s religion. Very conservative fundamentalist. Hair up, always skirts, no makeup, jewelry, movies, sports or TV. I raised 6 children and 3 remain. My husband became a minister and then elder of which there are about 50 elders in the churches across the United States, so it w is considered a high calling. This was my life for nearly 30 years, when my mind began to question. It was nearly another 10 years of research and confrontation with God before I had an awakening and no longer believe in Christianity. Believe me it would have been easier, but the Truth I found (in the Bible) through awakening would not allow me to pretend. You don’t have to be a scholar, in fact it is a detriment. You only learn what you are told, and never get away from the literal interpretation. The Bible comes to life when you let go of your ego, and your life for Truth. It’s nothing short of amazing.
“Believe what” is indeed the question. I will address that in my next post.
I am grateful for Judy Siker’s perspective and look forward to the additional posts. I don’t think “faith” in God can be proven, forced, justified, intellectualized etc. You either have it or you don’t. It is fair to say that often you get introduced to God through a religion; faith either sticks or it doesn’t. I have believed in God since age 4, having began my education in a Jewish religious school for the first 4 years. Although “religion” left my life for a very long time, God never did. I always believed He was there. I eventually chose to convert to Catholicism at age 50. Going to church and reading the messages of Jesus Christ were exactly what I needed at the time. I am both educated (MD) and intellectually curious. As I began to read the Bible, the inconsistencies that stuck out were between the teachings of Christ and the rules of the Catholic church, as well as religion in general. (No surprise, I’m sure.) I never did believe the Bible was the inerrant “Word of God” or that the Church teachings were infallible–that’s humanity! I continue to be fascinated and intellectually challenged by scholarly research into the Bible but my faith in God does not waiver, nor do the importance of the 10 commandments and teachings of Jesus Christ, which are simply practical rules to live by for a healthy world. Both the OT & NT give us a complete look at societal human behavior, which we see persists into present day. The modern day Pharisees abound! I consider myself a true believer in God, a follower of Christ, and a very skeptical, struggling, “lukewarm” Catholic. So to any rabid atheists out there–a plea for tolerance, please. You can definitely be a believer and a Bible skeptic at the same time.
“So that’s a bit of the history of my journey, and in the next post I will tackle more specifically how I can know what I know and still believe, how believing makes more sense to me than not believing, and how I can stand firmly in my tradition with arguably more questions than answers. (Judy Siker)
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Judy Siker,
These are the reasons why you believe in Christianity despite the overwhelming evidence against your religious faith.
1º Cognitive dissonance
________________
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.
Most people will — eventually — change their beliefs on a subject after enough contradictory evidence emerges, because sometimes it is so solid and undeniable that it is easier to give up a complex worldview than having to constantly generate excuses why this evidence is false. Other individuals, especially when they have support networks of others reinforcing a delusion or worldview, will go to such great lengths to rationalize away dissenting ideas that after a certain point, an admission of error would cause the collapse of an entire web of mutually-supporting beliefs. This would leave the brain with no ability to do its work, as everything it thought it knew would now be useless, resulting in agony/extreme fear of death and the activation of emergency self-protection mechanisms. Those mechanisms cause the individual to either go into an introverted reaction, with all-encompassing ignorance and cutting off any contact to those conflicting parts of the real world, or an extroverted reaction of trying to attack and destroy the sources of the conflicting information for heresy.
2º About doubting
———————-
Every intelligent and educated person doubts on some occasion – or perhaps always – of their religious faith.
It happens that there are people, the vast majority, who cannot live without certainty, with doubts. They need the security and comfort that gives the hope of an eternal life lived with complete and total happiness, as well as being safe from the fears of the eternal and terrible torments of the condemnation that is basic in Christian doctrine. That is why they believe, without evidence in favor and despite evidence against their beliefs, emotions and feelings.
But there are also people who carry the inquiring skepticism, methodical doubt, love for the truth in the blood; that all this is part of its most intimate nature and reason for being. That is why we cannot believe without the necessary and irrefutable evidence.
This is what Richard P. Feynman puts it with amazing lucidity:
“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit; if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell — possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”
3º Quote attributed to Mark Twain (possibly apocryphal), on delusion:
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
4º Quote by Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Saint Patron of Neurosciences.
“Man has inexhaustible reserves of faith in the supernatural, or simply in the absurd, to which he agrees, reverent and submissive, provided they are eloquently defended by radiant people of dominating will and provided with theatricality and convenient scenography”
5º And I end up with a little humor with “Alice in Wonderland”
“Alice laughed:” There’s no use trying, “she said;” one can’t believe impossible things. ”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
This (and your next comment) are quite lengthy explanations of “why [I] believe in Christianity despite the overwhelming evidence against [my] religious faith.” I do not pretend to have all the answers even for myself, sir, and I find it odd that you would be so well informed of the reasons for my belief. You may not be surprised to learn that I do not find your explanations of me to be accurate.
Dr. Siker,
Your initial post and blog appearance is much appreciated and welcomed. Indeed, the suspense of your forthcoming testimony is arresting and provocative. As for me, I will attentively stay tuned. With the religious you never quite know what they will say next, but please do get on with it already Madam.
Warmly,
Lanni
Thank you for your comments. It won’t be long now.
Prof Siker. Do you think the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus is factual or do you think that it did not in fact happen but some of his disciples thought that it did?
What I think does not neatly fall into an either/or answer. If by “factual” you mean, and I think you do, historically accurate, then I say we have no way of knowing that. Resurrection as a physical bodily resurrection is the greatest of miracles and miracles by definition are contrary to the norm. I do not believe we can prove that all of the events portrayed in the Bible are historically accurate, but then neither do I think that should be our approach. I believe the Bible contains truths that far surpass, and are quite distinct from, historically accurate facts. I believe that God can bring life from death. That is not something that can be proven scientifically, but it can be experienced. When it is, perspectives change.
Thanks so much for your valuable and insightful response. I too believe there are many valuable and insightful moral platitudes that can be drawn from the new testament (and the old). Although Paul said if Christ is not raised our faith is in vain and we are still in our sins, so historicity certainly seems to matter with justification. My position is that we cannot know such things for sure as you mentioned. People of other religions , athiests, agnostics and others who do not believe in the divinity if Christ or a bodily resurrection are, based on traditional interpretation, condemned in some way (whether to hell or annihilation, that being another topic). Do you think that those who do not believe are condemned to a fate any worse than the believers? That is if salvation is not by merit but by faith. And can Christian’s claim exclusivity to God? Perhaps, if there is a God, it is a force. Nonetheless I find the concept of serving God, whether real or not, to be a beautiful and noble one.
Sometimes I imagine two rival groups of 1st-century Galileans — skeptics and dogmatics — who have just heard Jesus tell the Parable of the Sower, and they debate afterwards.
Skeptics: “Was there really a sower? What was his name? Could a crop really have been as bountiful as described? I don’t see any evidence of it, and I think Jesus was lying and his story is worthless.”
Dogmatic: “The was a sower, and he sowed in just that way! What matters most is that you believe every word of the parable is literally true, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t call yourself a follower of Jesus.”
Of course, this is just a satire in my head… but it’s not too different from those who insist on the literal truth of everything in the Bible, arguing with those who think that factual inconsistencies invalidate the message. It frankly amazes me that Jesus, who spoke almost exclusively in parables, has generated so many followers who think literal truth is the only thing that matters.
I agree. I think we lose a great deal of the beauty and impact of the Bible when we try to keep it tightly bound in a box of our own making (literalism).
I could possibly see maintaining some sort of faith, but it would certainly not be orthodox. Faith is not without content– it has to be faith IN something. I don’t see any basis at all for any sort of orthodox something. I’d have to get creative.
Isn’t everybody’s faith “some sort of faith”? Even if one identifies with a faith community, there are inevitably as many variations on the understanding of what that means as there are members of the community. I think we fool ourselves if we believe that there exists a community of believers all believing the exact same thing. It is, in my opinion, the work of each believer to continually be working out just what she or he has faith in.