Basic Space

Sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that the claim "there exists a God" is an extraordinary claim. Especially when we get bogged down in mundaneness of every day life, and every day Christendom we forget how amazing the existence of anything at all really is. 

If you look on my facebook page, and the facebook page of many of my close friends you will see under the tab- 'religion' is the title 'Christian'. That word is very much a part of the fabric of this country and of the world. But the underlying truth statement of that set of beliefs is- there exists a God. There exists a being so unlike human beings that he exists eternally, he created the entire universe, he sees all, he knows all. He is unlike anything we can ever conceive or comprehend. That is a bold claim. 

Yet, somehow I seem to end up in a position of living in which Christianity, spiritual discipline, 'Church' has become mundane and at times lifeless. If I'm honest, it has been a while since I've felt sparked, passionate or fully engaged with the concept of God. But as I sat in a dark room, lying in a bath of luke warm water tonight, it suddenly dawned on me that what I believe, what I have faith in is utterly outrageous. But I believe that it is true. I believe there is something, some being that pre-existed this system, this universe that we now know. 

Somewhere along the line, I have lost my reverence for God. He has become a concept in a shoe-box, an ideology that improves human living that I reach for when I have my 'serious hat' on. But the core claim of Christianity, is not that there is a code of ethics, it's not that there is a way of life which can improve my living, it's not even that I can be saved for eternity- there is a statement that precedes all of that which is this- "God exists". When you strip away all of the teachings of Christ, all of the spiritual disciplines I strive for, when you strip away the Bible, the existence of human beings, the existence of the universe, we are left with God. A being, a power, a person. The question is- do I really believe that. Do I really believe in him, in his existence? 

I cannot begin to comprehend what that question really even means, but my answer is- yes. Yes, I believe there is something, when everything else is stripped away and I meditate on this fact, I am amazed at God. I am amazed that there exists anything at all. And I am so grateful that I have faith. Basic, simple, powerful faith. 

Tomorrow I will get up. And I will pray a prayer of sheer thankfulness, a prayer that I often pray when I don't know what else to say. "Thank you Lord that there is something rather than nothing. Amen". And I will take that prayer into my day, and revel in the simplicity of existence.

Leaders Of The Free World

I quite wanted an early night on Tuesday night. Turns out I ended up talking about free will with my new housemates until pretty late. I've done quite a lot of that since I've been in York; I wrote my final essay of my degree on the subject. After wrestling with the concept of free will for three years, in the end I became satisfied that free will is only really the presence of a felt choice; it's an illusion of sorts (at least compared to what we might usually think it is).

Christians get pretty worked up and frustrated when it comes to free will. It's not surprising if they want to believe in a creator who is both powerful and knowledgeable and who also intervenes in the course of human history. Free will looks like pretty slim pickings if this is the case; if God knew and created the world exactly as it was, then he surely knew exactly the consequences of his creation, which happen to include every choice I make. A lot of Paul's writing in the New Testament talks about us being 'predestined' and 'elect' by God. That bothers people.

I have a few observations about free will that I've come to accept over the last few years.

The first thing is that no one is in a particularly good position. Whether you're a theist or an atheist, free will is difficult to account for. It's not only God that makes free will difficult, the physical world poses some issues as well. The physical world is a world of causes; all physical events are caused by previous physical events. So if all there are is physical things (which I assume most atheists would want to say), then the laws of nature and the past dictate perfectly the contents of the future. It doesn't look like there's much room for free will there either; your actions are just the consequences of a physical system of causes and effects.

So if you want to maintain that there is 'free will' in the strong sense, you must deny that free agents are part of the physical system of events. And even then, you must also deny that there is a God who knows and controls the universe. As far as I know, there aren't many people whose philosophy of human beings and of the universe would allow free will in this strong sense. No one is in a particularly good position to argue for free will in this strong sense of being 'totally uncaused'. Even if we did come to the conclusion that in actual fact human actions were uncaused, it strikes me as a kind of freedom that I don't really want- actions are merely the consequences of randomness if they are uncaused.

The second thing I've noticed, is that we aren't always on the same page when it comes to talking about free will. When we talk about free will, we usually mean it in this strong sense of being 'uncaused'. But actually we aren't very clear on what we really mean by free will most of the time. I think, if pushed most people would be happy with the kind of free will I endorse. I came to the conclusion that all that we can mean by free will is the feeling of choice. And that is quite enough. It's quite enough for me to decide what I'm going to do next Tuesday, it's quite enough for me to choose what I want for my lunch. It's quite enough for me to choose to follow Jesus. It's my intention that matters rather than what caused it. I could never really know what caused my action after all.

The third thing is that at times we all have to hold in tension that our actions are both caused and free. Sometimes this doesn't make much sense when we try to reconcile it. But maybe we shouldn't try and reconcile it at all. I wonder if the problem is one of perspective. Metaphysically speaking my actions are caused; in other words- zoom out to the level of looking at the universe as a whole, on that level everything causes everything else; the future is just a part of the track that the train of the universe hasn't got onto yet. On that level we're caused. But free will is not something which we can discover on that level at all. Actually free will is something which occurs on a very everyday level; we need to zoom in a lot to get to me at 7 O'clock on a Monday morning choosing which one of my housemates' cereals to steal; I'm perfectly free to choose any of them. Free Will is an everyday thing, it is something that occurs at the level of consciousness and human existence, and not at the metaphysical level. I agree that there is still some sort of tension there, but it's one I'm happy to hold.

The fourth thing I think that is important to think about from a Christian perspective is that at times we have been guilty of constructing human theories around Scripture. When Paul speaks about the things God prepared for us in advance to do, or when he speaks about Christ preordaining our salvation, he firstly and foremost makes a pastoral point. The purpose of most of the New Testament, which is where we get a lot  of our theology on free will from, is primarily to encourage and build the Church. It is to build up leaders and fix people's eyes back onto Jesus. It is a great encouragement when we feel like we are worthless, or that we aren't good enough, to know that actually God has chosen us to be a part of his plans. Of course there are theological consequences of this. But I wonder if it's sometimes risky to take these letters of encouragement, and then take poetic lines from the Psalms, which are beautiful pieces of poetry written to glorify God, and couple them together to make complex metaphysical points about our free will. I'm not saying that these ideas are not there in the Bible, I just sometimes wonder if we're danger of skewing the purpose of some texts in order to build a nice, solid humanly understandable systematic theology which ties all the ends together.

The last thing, and perhaps the most important thing I've observed about free will is that it makes little difference. The causal state of my being makes little difference to which cereal I want tomorrow morning. You see the thing is that tomorrow morning the Calvanist, the humanist, the determinist, the libertarian, the Christian and atheist will all live their lives with perfectly free will. What I mean by that is that as soon as we put down the books, as soon as we stop discussing and debating the level of free will of the human being, we discover that free will is unavoidable. It is right there in front of us as Sartre might say- it is at the heart of our being. On a basic, everyday level, whatever you think about free will has little bearing on what you actually do and how you actually behave. I mean this as an encouragement; sometimes free will is actually not worth worrying about too much, it does not alter how you live, it does not come into play at an everyday level really. I guess we'll never really know how free we are, and it strikes me that we ought to not let it mess with us too much, we ought not to let it cripple us. I don't think anyone actually knows at the end of the day.

I'm free on any sort of level that matters. I find it difficult to dispute that. It's pretty obvious to us that we are free, we're free to choose almost all the time. It's what we do with our freedom that's important, it's how we choose and what we do with our lives. 

Limit to Your Love

I've suddenly realised of late that it's all about love. If it wasn't for love, I would have no faith, the words of the Bible wouldn't move me, the evidence for the existence of God wouldn't convince me. Love is so central to faith, that without it, I think faith is utterly inconceivable.

I've just graduated from three years of studying philosophy; it's been such an interesting, challenging three years. I've read so much, I've been exposed to so many different ways of thinking. I've learnt to think differently, to structure arguments well, to read the densest texts, to pick apart worldviews, ideas and concepts. I honestly think that philosophy is such a useful subject for any human being, the ability to think is vital to a life lived to the full. And philosophy is something that the Church needs to learn how to use; as theism becomes a less and less fashionable intellectual position, we need to be able to show that we believe because it is true, not just because.

But I realised something the other day, I was having a late night whisky with my housemate who also studies philosophy. And I asked him “Do you know anything now that you didn't know when you started? Are you any closer to the truth?”. And I realised, actually philosophy hasn't brought me closer to the truth. I might be able to argue why I'm a naive realist, or why I think scepticism is an incoherent position, but it has little bearing on reality. Don't get me wrong, I think those things are useful to think about, I think reason and argument is so useful to our society, but I'm not sure they bring me closer to truth.

It's hard to explain why I am committed to Jesus, why I have surrendered my life and my will to a deity that seems unknowable at times. It's hard to explain why I can believe in things which I think are genuinely contra to reason and logic, like the doctrine of the trinity or the incarnation. But I do. And I sleep intellectually sound at night. I'm not a deluded fool. I think, I debate, I argue. But I firmly believe there is more to life. I firmly believe that I am created by a loving God. The evidence supports my beliefs; the historical evidence for Jesus the Messiah and his resurrection, the arguments for theism, the change I have seen in the lives of my friends. They're all perfectly reasonable 'reasons' to believe. But it doesn't convince me beyond doubt.

“The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love” 1 John 4:8

I've realised recently that it's all about love. I can't explain love, I can't pin it down, I can't argue for it, I can't argue against it. But honestly, I can't deny it. In my mind, the biggest failure of reductionism and humanism is that it provides a thin vision of humanity. You can tell me that love is a sequence of chemical reactions and releasing of endorphins. But it just doesn't cut it for me. That's such a limit to my experience of love. I don't understand what love is, I don't understand why. If all that exists is this universe, matter, energy and decay, this is all meaningless. There is no love in that world view. But I cannot live without love. It is so undeniable to me. The spirituality of mankind is such a reality to me; the way a piece of music can move me to tears, the way a close friend can hurt me so deeply, the bond between me and my parents, the longing I have for justice. I can't deny that love is central to who I am.

Love moves me to faith. The bible says that God is love. If that's true, it makes so much sense that love is such a tangible reality, but such an irreducible concept. The bible says that everything else in this world will cease, religion will die out. It says that I can be the most moral person, the most intelligent, the most faithful person but if I lack love in my life, it's all pointless.

I know, more than anything else in this life, that love is real. It is inexplicable and it is undeniable. It is all about love. And because I know this, I know God. I know more than any argument could ever show me that there exists something more than what we see, something more than what is reasonably evident. I cannot stop believing until I stop loving.

Living on a Prayer

To be honest with you, I just don't get prayer. It makes no sense to me that when Moses pleaded with God he changed his mind. It makes no sense why God wouldn't just heal anyone who was sick rather than waiting for people to pray. It makes no sense how I could pray for something and it happened even though it seems to violate other people's free will and other people's desires. It makes no sense why he would heal my heart and let millions starve to death every day. It makes no sense.

But I can't deny that God answers my prayers. Three months ago I was so unhappy. I was waiting to go back to University after the end of a long relationship, I had exams to get back to and I didn't really feel any good at my degree, I had to start applying for jobs I didn't want to get. And if I'm honest; I was sceptical that my Church would be as good as it used to be when I got back. I pretty much had no reason or desire to go back to York. So I got on my knees, and I prayed. I prayed with nothing to lose, I pretty much said "I don't really care any more God, whatever you want". If you'd have told me where I'd be on 8th December I wouldn't have believed you. But God answers prayers. He changes things. As much as it confuses me, I can't deny it.

This three months has just taken my breath away how much God has worked in my life. He has totally healed my broken heart; I've been left with this overwhelming sense of joy. God is doing a 'new thing in me'. I'm doing really well in my degree and enjoying it. God is shaping something in me for this next year which is just exciting me so much even though I'm not 100% what it will look like. My Church is just brilliant; it is growing, it is bringing hope to people, even when I couldn't see past an inconvenient afternoon start in a school hall- God had different ideas. God feels closer to me now than he has been, maybe ever. I'm praying like a total nutter. I'm just pretty happy with who I am, where I am and what God is doing in me. That seemed impossible three months ago.

This pretty much sums up my last three months: "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland" God didn't ignore my prayer for help, he sent streams into the wasteland- he sent hope and life where there was none.

Why am I writing this? Just to gloat about how happy I am? Not really. But because I want you to know that God answers prayer. I see it in my life. I can't explain it, but I can see it. The best way I can understand prayer is that prayer changes my heart. It is an eye opener not a magic trick. I pray for God to deal with poverty in my city and then I start to notice the homeless guy at the end of my street. I pray that God would grow my Church and I start to learn how to be a better leader. I pray that God would win battles for me and he makes me stronger. That's the best way I can understand it; prayer is me getting in step with God, it is me learning to notice what he notices, see what he sees. It is being the answers to my own prayers. And I know that God has really changed my heart the more I've prayed.

I think prayer does work like that. But I still don't fully understand prayer. What about when I pray and stuff happens? What about when I pray for a friend who is ill and she is healed? That isn't just my heart that's changing; there's something changing in the physical world. Yet, I've prayed for people who have been healed by God. To be honest with you I struggle to really understand it. But I know that when I pray I increase in faith, I increase in trust and God starts to change my heart. So why wouldn't I pray?

I dare you to pray right now. Don't try and understand it or explain it. Just pray.

The man who knew too much

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.