Letters From Timothy

Is not your piety a source of confidence, and your integrity of life your hope?

-Job 4:6

I’ve mentioned before that I have been through several crises of faith in my life. I anticipate more to come. But for now, I do have faith in God, and I believe I will be able to hold onto that faith for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, many people today find it increasingly difficult to believe in God. What follows is a brief story of how I came to hold the beliefs that I do today, a cataloging of my journey of faith thus far. I hope it can help you find confidence in your own beliefs.

I was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother, so I was brought up to believe in God. And I did, faithfully, for many years. In my letter on fundamentalism I describe how I was able to reconcile my faith with my love for scientific inquiry. I remember one time, when I was young and probably still reading my picture Bible during mass, I must have asked my mother why I didn’t see many teenagers in church. She told me that many teenagers tend to struggle with their faith. Sure enough, as I grew older and experienced more of the world, forced out of my mother’s carefully-crafted shelter, I doubts did slowly grow in my mind. Scientific discoveries and assertions that religious phenomena were entirely describable naturally struck at the core of my notions of God and the divine. I believed in miracles, and I believed they were abundant. Before I read about experiments conducted with magnets that induced religious experiences, I thought God and the Holy Spirit were the only explanations.

So what was left to me, then, when it turns out that these allegedly metaphysical experiences seemed to have entirely physical origins? I was at a loss, and a major crisis in faith resulted. I’ll spare you the details, but you can see now that I overcame it. How? I had a Catholic biology professor in my freshman year of college (who of course believed in evolution) who found good words for what I came to believe: when we see rush of blood to the head of a monk in deep mediation, or the tendency to believe in God encoded in our genes, we can see that as a natural rebuttal of religious ideas, or natural support. Einstein once said that you can believe one of two things: either everything is a miracle or nothing is. I choose to see everything as a miracle. I see the entire universe as the work of God and science as a tool to explain how it works and was created. If genes really do have a role in our belief in God, or if religious experiences really are the product of brain chemistry, then those are simply the machinery that God uses to accomplish those things. Evolution was an ingenious way for God to create man, and he set up this universe in such a way so that it could occur. I have a saying: “The world doesn’t run on miracles.” That is, everything that happens on a day to day basis, every religious experience you have, every act of faith, is all completely natural, explainable, and an inevitable result of the world you live in. But, ironically, this can also be rephrased as “The world runs entirely on miracles.” It’s all a matter of perspective.

Of course, my “science” crisis was only one of my crises of faith. Eventually, I was plagued, as many people are, by the so-called “Problem of Evil.” I’m sure you’re familiar with it, even if you’re not familiar with that particular name. The argument is simply: if God is all-powerful and all-good, then how can there possibly be evil in the world? Especially the vast amount that we see every day? If God is all-good, She wouldn’t want evil in the world. If God is all-powerful, then She could certainly stop it if She wanted to. But, because the world is so full of evil, it must be that God is not all-good, not all-powerful, or both. Most people just conclude from this that God simply doesn’t exist. For centuries, theists have devised counter-arguments to this problem, but I’ll save you the time of looking up all of them and say that none of them are completely satisfactory (for a good, thorough treatment of the subject and the arguments, read the book God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist). Naturally, I was hard-pressed to justify my belief in God in face of such compelling evidence against Her existence.

I trust that God has a good reason for allowing evil, and as much as there is of it, in the world. But that doesn’t explain how I can believe in God in the first place. After a long time of thinking on the issue, considering arguments, and talking with my closest friend, I came up with a good reason to believe in God: because I want to.

Because I want to? Isn’t it intellectually dishonest to believe in something implausible just because I want to? I’m sure there are people out there that want to believe in unicorns, too. I don’t think they should. Creationists want to believe that God created the earth in 168 hours. I don’t think they should. Why can I say that it’s okay for me to believe in God because I want to? The difference is this: in the unicorn example, there are tons of evidence against the existence of unicorns, and none for it. While skeptics may assert the same is true for God, I beg to differ. Unicorns do not have billions of followers around the world. Unicorns are a lot easier disproven then an omnipotent being that created the universe. There are not volumes of writings, ancient and modern, on the nature and existence of unicorns. In the case of the Creationists, I believe they are (unintentionally) doing active harm to science and society, and therefore their belief is harmful. Conversely, I have not harmed or mistreated anyone or anything due to my belief in God. If anything, I have been a better person because of it. This is obviously not the case for every believer in God, but it is for me. Not only that, but I believe that my faith in God has made me, overall, a happier human being than if I did not have it. Since I can only be sure that I have one life, why not make sure it’s as happy as I can make it, if I’m not harming anyone else? Once I have this foundation, it is easy to hold onto my faith and expand on it. And, as long as you don’t mistreat others with it, I recommend it to you.

-Timothy