”¦how can we know that any of this [Christian teaching] is actually true? So far, I’ve been trying to clarify what the words mean. But how does anyone ever get inside this language, get to the point where they can make it their own? Christians may be talking about a trustworthy God, but how do we know that this is a real God, as opposed to an impressive character in a book? In other words, does God exist?
You won’t be surprised to hear that I haven’t yet found the decisive new argument that will prove once and for all that there really is a God; but we do need to remember that the number of people who come into a living personal faith as a result of argument is actually rather small. Many centuries ago, a great theologian and pastor, St Ambrose, said that ”˜it did not suit God to save his people by arguments.’ Of course they have their uses. When people argue against the existence of God, it helps to have some points you can make to counter the idea that belief is just completely irrational. But what is it that shifts people’s imagination and vision and hope?
The Bible has no arguments for the existence of God. There are moments of conflict with God, anger with God, doubt about God’s purposes, anguish and lostness when people have no real sense of God’s presence. The Psalms are full of this, as is the Book of Job. Don’t imagine that the Bible is full of comfortable and reassuring things about the life of belief and trust; it isn’t. It is often about the appalling cost of letting God come near you and of trying to trust him when all the evidence seems to have gone. But Abraham, Moses and St Paul don’t sit down to work out whether God exists; they are already caught up in something the imperative reality of which they can’t deny or ignore. At one level, you have to see that the very angst and struggle they bring to their relation with God is itself a kind of argument for God: if they take God that seriously, at least this isn’t some cosy made-up way of making yourself feel better.
And that is actually quite a serious point about where belief in God starts for a lot of folk. It starts from a sense that we ”˜believe in’, we trust some kinds of people. We have conï¬dence in the way they live; the way they live is a way I want to live, perhaps can imagine myself living in my better or more mature moments. The world they inhabit is one I’d like to live in. Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.
It puts quite a responsibility on believing people….
–Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2009), pp. 20-21
I wonder why the good Archbishop didn’t say “I haven’t yet found the decisive new argument that will prove once and for all that there really isn’t a God.” Frankly, the atheists, I think, have the more difficult position – to posit that all of this something came out of nothing, and by a multitude of random accidents not caused by anything, at that.
+++Rowan is quite right, at least from what I’m gleaning in this excerpt. There is no real line of argumentation that is helpful. Our God is experiential and one of relationships — relationships that He initiates and through which He reveals Himself. But one must be open to receiving the invitation. Famously, Pascal’s Wager provided such an opportunity.
Humanity is imbued with a spiritual sense. The ancients intrisically knew that there was a great Power and Intelligence in charge and sought connection, answers, appeasement. What I find interesting about modern humanity is that, on one hand, there is quite a bit of interest in discovering ancient remedies and methods for cultivation and such but when you point to ancient attempts to define the spiritual, to connect with God, it is dismissed as ignorant superstition.
Umm, Your Grace, I believe it’s a little thing called [b]FAITH[/b].
#3: I think that’s his point.
C.B. Moss, an entirely orthodox Anglican of a previous generation (you can read him [url=http://www.katapi.org.uk/ChristianFaith/master.html?http://www.katapi.org.uk/ChristianFaith/II.htm%5Dhere%5B/url%5D) had this to say:[blockquote]Our belief in God is not founded upon argument. As St. Ambrose [De Fide, 1. 42.] says, it was not God’s will to save His people by dialectic (Non complacuit Deo salvum populum suum per dialecticam facere).
…
When Nathaniel doubted whether any good thing could come out of Nazareth (St. John 1.46), Philip did not try to convince him by argument. He said, “Come and see.” This is what the Church says to the doubter today: “Come and see; try it for yourself.”
The witness of Christians is of supreme importance. What convinces men of the truth of the Gospel of Christ, is the changed lives of those who have accepted it.[/blockquote]
One may legitimately ask what “the witness of Christians” looks like to the outsider today, but I believe Moss is on to something.
regards,
JPB
I can’t help thinking of the classic lines from [i]The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy[/i]
[blockquote]
`I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.[/blockquote]
Jesus never called us to win arguments, but to win souls (“you will be fishers of men”) for His kingdom. I heard A. W. Tozer say once in a recorded sermon that he stopped years before trying to argue people into faith. He said when he seemed to have argued someone into faith, some atheist would come along the next day and argue the person right out of it again! C. S. Lewis’ [i]The Screwtape Letters[/i] are full of such arguments. A soul-to-soul encounter with the living God as Isaiah had in the Temple, Moses in the desert at the burning bush, and many others, trumps all arguments. For “His Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God”, and by Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, we may “cry out (to God) with a spirit of adoption as a son, ‘Abba, Father!'”