How Unbelief Can Survive the Miraculous
By Rod Dreher
Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and novelist-philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein are, as Salon.com once called them, “America’s brainiest couple.” They are also atheist materialist — that is, they do not believe in God, nor do they believe in the soul. Yet in that 2007 Salon interview, they both admitted that if they were to see evidence of the paranormal — communication with the dead, say — that could not be explained naturalistically, then the materialist stance on the mind-brain question would instantly collapse.
I admire their willingness to identify conditions under which a core belief would be falsified. Atheists who say that there is no evidence that could shake their materialism have gone beyond the bounds of science, and have taken a religiously dogmatic position. Not so Pinker and Goldstein, who are in theory open to being wrong.
In truth, I doubt very much that anything could sway the minds of these eminent intellectual unbelievers. In human nature, we have powerful reasons to reject belief in ideas that shake up our preferred credo. In the Gospel story of Lazarus, a crowd of Jews watched Jesus raise his friend from the dead. Many walked away believing in Jesus, but others ran to the Pharisees and said, “Look, we have to stop this guy. If he keeps this up, everybody is going to follow him, and we’ll lose everything.”
Notice that those who sought the Pharisees’ help didn’t deny that Jesus raised a man from the dead. They only focused on what they stood to lose if others who saw this miracle believed that the man who worked it was who he said he was. Their reaction calls to mind the final stanza of the great W.H. Auden poem, in which the poet meditates on a famous painting and the light it sheds on humanity’s tendency of humanity to ignore or dismiss startling events that would unsettle our convictions:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.It’s like that with us, isn’t it? Christians today marvel at the shortsightedness of those pious Jews, but those frightened men’s concern is entirely understandable.
When confronted with signs and wonders, it is not easy to discern the meaning of the events. If one is too credulous, one risks being led astray from the truth (as the saying goes, you don’t want your mind to be so open that your brains fall out). If one is too skeptical, one risks persisting in error. Twenty years ago, I experienced a true adult conversion to Christianity, after experiencing an answer to prayer so unexpected and inexplicable that it would have taken more faith to dismiss it as a coincidence than to believe it was a communication from God. I chose to believe, for once, and it changed my life…
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RealClearReligion – How Unbelief Can Survive the Miraculous
This article is somewhat calming to me. I struggle with extreme unbelief on a day to day basis. God has orchestrated everything in my life and I am sure of it. Yet I countinue to be a skeptic, throwing out the hard evidence, the proof that Christianity is real; that God is the one true God and Jesus is His only Son. And I relate somewhat to the author in this article because of this stubborn unbelief I have and choose to put my faith in (which really takes more faith than to believe in Christianity). I really do think there is something holding me back from fully believing the truth. Maybe it is my depraved flesh? I’ve been praying for Jesus to have mercy on me to conquer my stubborn, arrogant flesh but I don’t know if he will choose to do so. And what an anxious road this has been waiting to see if He will…. Anyway, thanks for the article!
@Cody, I know how you feel. Satan has been attacking my heart all throughout this week with doubt and often times we feel that we are going through the motions on our own but we’re not. I think that these doubts come from the sin that dwells from within us as Paul says. The most important element in a relationship with Jesus is faith. Faith is a huge theme throughout the whole Bible. I’ll be praying for you.
@Cody,
When I was struggling with unbelief I thought “there is no way I am good enough to be a Christian because there is no way I can live up to God’s standards”. I thought I would never be able to overcome my sinful desires to become the kind of person that I felt God wanted me to be. Faced with the reality of a sinful, evil world, my own sin, and the reality of his exeistence, I felt his pull so strongly. I had tried so hard to be an agnostic, but when the descriptions in the Bible of the sinfulness of mankind began to line up in my mind with the way things truly are, I realized that there was no hope for anyone outside of the grace of God which he demonstrated to us by sending Jesus as our remedy for sin. He came and payed the penalty for our sin in our place because he desires to have an intimate relationship with us. One misconception about Christianity is that we have to somehow become worthy to become one of his followers. This is impossible, regardless of how sinful we are or of how good we ‘think’ we are. I have a scripture reference on one of my tattoos; it is Romans 5:8, which says that God PROVED his love for us because he sent Jesus to die for us while we were still in our natural state of sinfulness and rebeliion towards him. I finally decided that I had to trust (have faith) in Jesus for this forgiveness of my debt that he offers at his expense. I thought, “Lord, I’m going to follow you, but I’m probably going to be the worst Christian ever because I am such a rotten person.” But I found out that when we truly trust in him that he gives us his spirit to help guide us into becoming the kind of person that he wants us to be. I am still a sinner, but when I look back over the yearssince I made the decision to follow Christ, he has brought me miles and miles from where I once was. I am praying for you right now that you will make the decision to follow him and trust in him for the forgiveness of sin. another scripture reference I have on that tattoo is John 19:30, where Jesus, with his dying breath on the cross, cries out “It is finished”. Another wording of this from the original New Testament Greek is “The debt has been paid”.