Reproduced below is an email exchange from a week ago, between me and someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I responded to this person by interspersing comments into the text of his/her first email to me. (I broke up the paragraphing for easier reading, and am using Mark Harris‘s practice of putting long quotes in a different color.) I’m posting this with the other person’s permission, with certain identifying details redacted.
I get emails like this every so often. There are more than a few people like this out there. As putative followers of Jesus, part of our job, I believe, is to try to help these folks to take baby steps — which might be very difficult for them — in the direction of God.
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First, I’d like to thank you for your wonderful website … I’ve been reading through it today, and it is helping me make some decisions on my faith.
Just to give you a little background on myself, I’m a XXXX living in XXX. Although I was baptized, I was raised in XXXX by agnostic / atheist parents […] who generally scoffed at the idea of God.
Generally that led to me growing up in the same vein, although I didn’t really think of the implications of an agnostic lifestyle until early adulthood.
Around that time, I considered the subject more, and I would say that throughout my 20s I vacillated between a belief in some sort of “spirituality” and fairly strong agnosticism.
I should also say that I’m highly scientifically minded, and have had a very difficult time accepting many of the stories as set forth by the Bible or the belief in a God that I could not scientifically verify.
[…]
For whatever reason, over the past few months (and certainly more so, weeks) I’ve once again become interested in the topic, so I launched a full-scale research effort.
I’ve looked down various atheist rationales, read the theories of some philosophers and looked at religion (mostly Christianity).
Unfortunately, most religions simply do not seem to acknowledge reality and what science has taught us.
That being said, I think that your visions of Christianity and religion reconcile rather nicely with modern science. The Big Bang does seem to me to indicate some variety of beginning.
So, as I first mentioned, I’d like to thank your for you website. I don’t know how much “faith” I truly have, but as you present it, God seems plausible to me, and I’d like to explore further. At the very least, it is comforting. [DCT: Thanks!]
I have a few questions that I was hoping you could help me answer, if not, I understand. [DCT: I’ll try ….]
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How do you reconcile all of the unconverted souls throughout history with Christianity? … [H]ow do you envision them fitting in under your vision of God?
[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that. Orthodox Christians claim that to be saved, you have to believe X, Y, and Z (for example, that Jesus is God Incarnate and his suffering and death atoned for the sins of mankind). Jesus, on the other hand, reportedly told the inquiring scholar of the Law, in essence (Luke 10:25-37), that if he followed the Summary of the Law, then he’d live eternally — “do this and you will live.”
Inasmuch as we can’t control whether we ‘love’ God and our neighbor (at least I can’t), I usually paraphrase the Summary of the Law as entailing:
• striving to put God first — which entails, among other things, as best we can, facing the facts of the reality he wrought, along with keeping in mind that whatever God might be, we ain’t it; and
• seeking the best for others as we do for ourselves.
It seems to me that on the whole, individuals and groups that follow these two basic principles are far more likely to have their descendants survive to reproductive age, and for their cultures to continue being practiced.
In other words, in emphasizing the Summary of the Law, Jesus put his finger on what I think is a crucial part of the fundamental fabric of Creation.
Getting back to the question of the afterlife: It also seems to me that a super-intelligent Creator, who set up so many interacting natural processes that have produced us, his ‘created co-creators’ (in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner), would not just consign us to nothingness when we die.
Why? Because eventually we’d figure out that there was no future for us after this life. That would be pretty demotivating, no? Such demotivation likely would make us of little further use in the continuing creation.
That might be just fine with God, but in the absence of evidence to that effect, I’ll go with my speculation that he won’t just discard us like so much used sandpaper.
By no means do I assert that for sure this is what’s happening; I just say it’s as plausible as any scenario posited by the virulent atheists.
In any case, life is full of gambles. The evidence appears pretty compelling that the Creator has set things up so that, on the whole (and not without horrible exceptions), life doesn’t seem too terrible for us, and it seems to be getting better over time.
I’m willing to gamble on trusting the Creator that, in the very long term, things will work out OK for all of us.]
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Also, I have always had a difficult time understanding how mentally impaired people fit into the religious fold. In instances of schizophrenia for instance, who is the soul?
[DCT RESPONSE: I don’t worry about that either – “it is what it is”; see also the response above about life after death.]
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Perhaps these questions are too mundane, but I’m trying to reconcile these ideas with a Christian view of God.
[DCT RESPONSE: If by the Christian view of God you mean the Trinity, who (sometimes) answers prayers, rewards the ‘good,’ and punishes the ‘bad,’ I place that view in the same category as the Ptolemaic view of the universe: it explains a few things in an OK way, but ultimately it’s unsatisfactory.
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Also, I’ve briefly looked at the churches in my neighborhood, and most appear to be fairly traditional in the teachings of Christianity. Do you know how I could find some that are more along the progressive lines that you seem to represent?
[DCT RESPONSE: … If I were starting from scratch, I’d look at the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalists (although from what I’ve read, the UUs have been pretty much captured by the atheists, agnostics, Wiccans, etc., and theists are made to feel like a distinctly-uncomfortable minority).
As it happens, I’m an Episcopalian and can’t see that changing, even though we’re far from perfect. If you haven’t already done so, you might look at my blog posting Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian.]
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Finally, is it ok for
me to reach out to a priest in a local church to discuss these ideas, or would he / she be upset with my uncertainty of faith?
[DCT RESPONSE: By all means! Keep in mind that there are great priests like my rector (in the blog posting just cited, I tell a story about one of our conversations), but there are also some real duds, who get threatened if you even suggest that their worldview might be suboptimal. If you run across one of the latter, don’t get discouraged.]
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