A while ago, I was asked why exactly I believe. I have been pondering this the last few days and I think I can give a semi-intelligible answer. If you had asked me this a few years ago, I would have given my best modernist response. You all know how it goes, right? First, you begin with logical proofs of God’s existence. I would have gone all ontological, teleological, and even cosmological on them.
After establishing the claim that a God exists, I would have moved on to which God exists. I would have pulled out my McDowell’s. You, know, present all the evidence for biblical prophecies coming true, see the prophecy about the city of Tyre, prophecies about Jesus, historical/textual evidence for Jesus’ life, all the standard apologetic answers.
So, after establishing the existence of God and that her revelation to us is the Bible, I would then open the old girl up and start to point out what I believe. After this 30 minute process I would then gladly accept the person to whom I was speaking’s conversion and salvation. Another person checked off the rolls of hell. Right?
No. The person would/should not have believed me. After all, for each claim that I made with evidence, they could/should have presented countering claims to the existence of God, to the authority of the Bible, and to the person/history/nature of Jesus. I could present my claims and they present theirs. Both of us would have left convinced the other was wrong. I can go into the specifics of the various arguments if needed, but my point stands without them.
In addition, if I would ever stop to listen to the other’s claims, I would more than likely leave the conversation with my faith shattered. Why? Because my faith (as was every idea) was predicated on modernist understandings of verifiable truth claims. That is, the only thing my modernist brain was wired to accept as fact was truth claims that could be scientifically verified. I naturally assumed, from a position of faith, that my claims were so. However, (switching to real life, instead of hypothetical’s) when I started to truly evaluate those claims, I found that they indeed were not as verifiable as I had thought them to be. Each of the logical proofs of God has their problems. The Gospels are not histories as we think of histories. The list goes on and on.
What then? My modernist categories through which I have been trained to view the world demand I abandon these unverifiable truth claims. However, if I were being honest with myself, I really could not bring myself to accept the opposite position either, because it too could not be scientifically verified. How do you test for God? What is your control? The essential questions of religion lay outside the realm of science, which can only access observable and testable data. The modernist categories are simply not adequate for evaluating the claims of religion.
For instance, while the Gospels cannot prove who Jesus was, there was also no way to disprove their claims as well. We simply do not have access to that type of information, given the sources available to us. I found that just about everywhere I looked into my religious beliefs, they were not able to be verified (or denied) through this modernist method of verification. I could speak in terms of probabilities, but never in certain terms. As an honest (as honest I could be) modernist, I found myself at an impasse. Given that the modernist categories are inadequate, one needs to find new categories, post-modern categories, through which one can evaluate the claims of Christianity. Doing so eliminates the need for badly researched pop-apologetics and theologies and opens the door for deeper inquiry.
So what then? Enter experience, community, and relationship, stage right. These will be the subjects of part 2.
