There’s always a bit of an awkward momentum when someone asks me what I do. There’s usually one of two responses to telling someone that you’re studying philosophy. Either people don’t really know what philosophy is; maybe they’ve heard of it, perhaps it rings a bell thanks to a famous duet from a singing meerkat and warthog: “it’s our problem free....philosophy”. And even when you explain to them that philosophy is all about studying ideas and asking difficult questions, or perhaps more pretentiously “the pursuit of truth and wisdom”, they still don’t really get it. Or, even more commonly they think it’s a bit of a pointless exercise. My brother for instance tells me that I’m doing a degree in ‘bull***t’. The other group of people understand what philosophy is, find philosophy really interesting, perhaps they’ve dabbled in a little part time philosophy and generally like to take the opportunity to have an interesting conversation with me. It’s fair to say I like meeting the second group of people a little more.
I remember once talking to a woman in my Church back home before I left to go to university. She asked me what I was going to be studying, so I told her. She told me that I should be careful; she’d known someone who went off to study philosophy and ended up coming back without believing in God. “Philosophy is dangerous”, she told me. Apparently there was a chance that I might suffer the same fate if I wasn’t careful. I found this quite amusing; as I saw it, Philosophy was the quest for the truth and if it turned out that Jesus wasn’t really the truth then I didn’t really want to believe in him.
I spent a lot of time in my first year trying to ‘seek the truth’, to get to the bottom of my belief. I doubted a lot and went through a similar process to Descartes of starting at the foundations of my beliefs and working out was actually ‘true’. I’ve got a lot of scraps of paper stashed away into my draw with flow charts of beliefs, I’ve got files on my computer titled “why I believe in God” and “can I really be a Christian?”. Honestly, its great fun, you should try it some time. But it’s not an easy ride. As I wrote in my blog last week, I would really struggle to believe anything very well at all if I hadn’t confronted my doubts, sought answers to my questions.
Needless to say, I’m now more than two years through my philosophy degree and it hasn’t really destroyed what I believe, the woman at my Church wasn’t completely right. But I am a very different Christian today than I was this time two years ago. I think about things very differently, I like to think that my faith is more reasonable than it was.
In a sense the woman was right; philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Before I came to university I was very much a Christian who ‘experienced’ God. I was the guy that would shake ferociously when people prayed for him, when I was meant to be playing keyboard in the worship band I would be so ‘lost in worship’ that my hands spent more time in the air than they did on the keyboard. I had ‘words’ and ‘pictures’ for people all the time, I spoke in tongues. I felt very ‘close’ to God. Some of the time, I’m still that person, but not very often. I’ve lost some of that experiential side of my faith since I’ve questioned it more. Instead of closing myself off and flailing my hands around when they play worship songs at Church, I find myself screening the songs for decent theology. Whenever someone gives me a ‘word’ from God, I am very doubtful that it didn’t come from their own head. It’s fair to say philosophy has changed me and my relationship with God.
It leaves me with two options. If philosophy is the seeking of the truth and some of my beliefs and my behaviour won’t stand up to the scrutiny of investigation then they’re irrational and I should abandon them. Or the other option is that my beliefs are the firm truth and philosophy is somehow defective in getting to the ‘real truth’. Honestly, I think there’s a bit of both going on.
I find it useful to think of a “pendulum of faith". There are two extremes of faith; we can be like I was pre-Philosopher; experiential, swayed by impulses and experiences. Our beliefs are built solely on experience and ‘closeness’ with God. The problem with this is, when our experiences fade, when we fail to be able to experience God like we used to, what is left is just a set of ungrounded, shallow beliefs. If we never take the time to investigate, to know what we believe intellectually, when experience fades (which it usually does), our faith goes with it. I think it’s also really difficult to know the difference between God speaking to us and what is just human ideas if we never take time to question. If every ‘word from God’ that I’ve ever heard is from God, if every spiritual instinct I’ve ever had was God talking to me, then I think God is probably in the business of contradicting himself an awful lot. And when the atheist philosopher comes knocking and tells you that your experiences can be explained psychologically, you are in trouble if you don’t know your faith very well. Like I said, philosophy can be dangerous to faith. Experiential faith is passionate, it feels ‘close’ to God, it can be exciting but ultimately it is without foundation, and often irrational. Because of this it pretty flimsy.
The other end of the pendulum is pure intellectualism. This is the kind of faith that any philosopher would be proud of, the kind of faith I was looking for when I started hacking away at my beliefs when I came to University. This kind of faith has a set of coherent beliefs; it questions everything and doesn’t believe until there are good reasons for belief. There are problems with this as well though. I think ultimately it is a failed project; we cannot ever have proof or certainty in God, we can’t ever have faith without doubting. We will never get to the kind of firm foundation I was looking for by purely intellectual investigation. Even if we do get to a place where we have some kind of ‘rational’ beliefs, God just becomes a ‘concept’, he is nothing more than a set of ideas. Intellectual faith can lack the passion, the drive, the closeness that experiential faith does. No one ever dies for a ‘concept’. I really don’t think that the philosophical concept of God is really in the business of changing the world. It can often just be a selfish pursuit for reasonableness.
I got to a point this summer where I knew that philosophy fell short of truth in some way. I cannot live my life for a ‘concept’ of God; I need to live my life in relationship with God in some way. Sometimes this involves believing things which don’t quite live up to the scrutiny of philosophical investigation. I think perhaps this is where philosophy falls short of truth. I can’t live my life for reason or intellectualism ultimately because I don’t really think it can change the world. But then I find that pure experientialism is blind and dangerous and I can never justify it from a philosophical perspective. So I’m seeking to find a happy medium in my life; to root out irrational false beliefs, to have a reasonable belief, but to seek God every day, to experience him intimately, to be in a relationship with him. It’s a very hard balance to strike.
If I lived for philosophy, for proofs and rationality then the woman from my Church would probably be right, I might stop believing in God. But ultimately I can’t live for philosophy, I think as much as I love to study it; it falls short of real meaning. I think philosophy seeks truth, and it has helped me to get rid of irrationality and falsity in my beliefs. At times it has stopped me worshipping God, stopped me being close to God. But ultimately I want to live for the truth, not for experience. At the same time I don’t think philosophy can really get me the whole way; it can tell me what the phenomenon of love is in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it can’t really explain why I feel it. It can explain away my experiences of the Holy Spirit in terms of psychology and social pressure, but it can’t explain how and why these experiences have shaped my life. Philosophy is limited to the facts, to the intellect of faith; and if this is the only grounds on which I believe, then the faith that I now have is irrational and wrong.
However, I do really believe that God exists, that Jesus is bringing about kingdom transformation today, but I cannot believe this by pure intellect alone. Reason falls short of real meaning and ultimately I cannot live for it. My life has meaning in Christ but I need much more than philosophy to achieve this. To me faith is all about finding the balance between believing with my mind; doubting and questioning but still seeking relationship with God in my heart, trying to be obedient to him even when I can’t explain everything. But then again there's always the chance that I'm just wrong....
I’d be interested to know if anyone else struggles with this, how you find the balance between intellect and experience. Looking forward to reading your comments.
Interesting read. I think I've gone the other way - from intellectual based/biased faith to a more experential faith as you've described it. My comment would be that there's a lot in your blog that suggests things are a balance between two opposing sides (e.g. intellectual/experiential, doubt/certainty, philosophy lovers/haters!!). I think there's something more than a bit wonderful in Christianity that allows two sides to be fully true (see freewill-predestination debates, Jesus as fully God-fully man, God as trinity and one). These are just three of the bits of Christianity that are problematic for philosophy, as both sides have to be true and held as fully true to both experience and know God's love fully. Yet our tendency to say 'we have two seemingly opposing ideas, so there must be a compromise between the two which lessens both sides' means we lose the truth of the original statements. Take freewill-predestination. God loves us and shows us that he loves us by specifically choosing to love us. We can love God completely by having the freewill to choose to love God. Without the freewill, it isn't our love for God, without predestination, God's love would be dependent on our first loving him - an abhorrent thought!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there's a late night thought to add to the thread. I think my point was to do with the idea that it's possible and even should be our goal to have fully intellectual and experential faith and love. Am thinking 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind soul and strength'
But David, surely this mistakenly confuses Christian doctrines with how we can know them. So sure there are these paradoxical doctrines about God that we can't fully understand, like for example, that Jesus is fully God and fully Man. But it's precisely BECAUSE these things are paradoxical (to us) that we can't embrace them purely intellectually.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that Josh is more on the right track - at one end of the pendulum my faith is based entirely on my intellect. But if God can be reduced to concepts then he ain't God at all. At the other end, if my faith is based fully on experiences of God, then these by their nature would defy rational explanation.
So to say that faith can be both fully intellectual and fully experiential is not a 'doctrinal paradox', it's just a misunderstanding of how we acquire our beliefs.
Miko - My writing's not always the clearest, but basically I think we've written the exact same thing just there!
ReplyDeleteThe point of difference is on this image of getting the balance point of the pendulum. I'm saying that we shouldn't aim for a balance in the middle of the pendulum, as that means we're being neither fully rational or fully experiential in living our faith out.
I am arguing against the picture of a pendulum, or a set of scales or a middle way. Basically the word balance. I think it's really weak and as an aim for life actually stops us from experiencing and knowing fully the love of God.
I want both ends of the pendulum at the same time. I guess I'll need God's help with that!
David- yeh interesting point. I agree with you that 'balance' is a really weak as an aim for faith. I want to seek God fully in all areas of my life.
ReplyDeleteThinking about 'experience' and 'rationality' as a pendulum is an over simplistic way of analysing faith- but I didn't intend to provide a full account of faith. Rather it’s an observation that I've found to be true in my life. I find that when I'm overly reliant on either intellect or experience that I miss out on an aspect of faith which is crucial, and sometimes the pursuit of one seems to push out the other. So I don’t want to have a faith which is just based on experience or just on intellect because it stops me understanding God fully.
I think the problem is that ultimately both are doomed projects and your pursuit to have a ‘fully rational and fully experiential faith’ will not be achieved in this life. Our rationality and experience will always be limited in fully understanding God.
I find when I try to explain God in terms of human rationality, somehow my experiences of him stop making so much sense- when I overanalyse my experience of God, it loses all its spiritual significance. Sometimes to really experience God we have to suspend our rationality, we can’t just put God in a rational box that makes sense to us. My point is a simple one really; that we can’t have faith without either aspect, but sometimes they seem to be in conflict.
I don’t think the fact that sometimes I have to admit that reason is limited or that my experience is limited shows that I’m not fully seeking God as you suggest, but rather that I have to admit that I have limits in my understanding of God. Sometimes seeking God fully means trusting something you can’t explain rationally or accepting that God is still there even when we fail to be able to experience him.
You say that you want to understand God fully intellectually and fully experientially. I struggle to understand what this would really look like.
It is interesting how you are trying to balance your beliefs in God with rationality and skeptical thinking. What I find most interesting is where you say:
ReplyDelete"Reason falls short of real meaning and ultimately I cannot live for it."
This doesn't have anything to do with it's truth value. Believing something because it gives you clarity or motivation or whatever doesn't make it true. You also say:
"I can’t live my life for reason or intellectualism ultimately because I don’t really think it can change the world."
Who cares whether it can change the world? That is totally irrelevant, surely all that matters is what is true and what is not true?
It seems that what you have a more rational approach to your beliefs then when you were younger. You have abandoned some beliefs after applying some critical thinking, but what does that leave you with? A belief in God which you know currently isn't justified with evidence and does not hold up to scrutiny?
If you are genuinely on the quest for truth why not go the whole hog and get rid of all your beliefs that do not stand up to scrutiny? As far as I can tell from this article the only reason you haven't is because it gives you some sense of purpose or meaning. But I may of course be wrong! I look forward to your thoughts on this.
Sidenote -"We cannot ever have proof or certainty in God". I would disagree with your assertion. Currently we don't have any proof or evidence for god that withstands scrutiny, but never say never!
Hi Matthew, interesting comment. Firstly, I agree with you that what is true matters, I don't want to believe in an idea that can change the world if it isn't true. My worry is that rationality is limited to my experience. So when it comes to something like God, my rationality isn't enough to get me to a certain conclusion. I don't see why all things that are true have to be discovered solely through reason.
ReplyDeleteReason seems to be a capacity we can use to abandon beliefs because they don't stand up to scrutiny. In response to the question- why don't I just give up on my belief in God: it's not that the idea of God is incoherent or lacks support, if this was the case I would give up on my beliefs like I have done with others.
I could tell you lots of reasons why I believe in God, but neither individually nor collectively would this add up to a proof of his existence. In the same way, I can give reasons for why I am in love with someone, but these reasons don't quite encapsulate the claim 'I am in love'. There appears to be something above the reasons. It looks like if you're asking me for a proof of why I'm in love, you're asking the wrong sort of question. Do you think we can reduce love to rationality?
In the same way my belief in God cannot be explained solely by reason, this isn't to say it's irrational but that all of my reasons don't get me to a proof. And I stand by my comment that "we cannot ever have proof or certainty in God", I just think this is asking the wrong sort of question.
What do you think?