The Thin Ice of Faith Without Facts

When you read the word "faith," what do think that means? How would you define it? Do you change it's meaning depending on whether or not it's relating to a religious matter? What does faith in any one particular religion mean? Why does it matter what you believe in as long as you believe it whole heartily? Ok, enough rhetorical questions. Hopefully I've at least got you thinking, which is of course, at minimum, the goal of this blog. So on to the main event. Take a quick look at the picture here... go ahead and laugh. There's a reason that we find it funny because no one (I hope) would actually take up the offer to walk out onto thin ice after such a clear warning, no matter how much the rest of the sign coaxed. In addition to being amusing, this also serves as a great set up to discuss some key concepts of what it means to have faith and why it's even more important to know what that faith is in.

If I only had Faith...
At the heart of this discussion is the definition of the word faith. Once this word was looked at with admiration and respect, but lately the culture has distorted this notion and many recognize the word to mean something completely opposite to what it once was. If you type "faith definition" into Google, you can practically see the skid marks of the alarmingly sudden shift between the two definitions provided:

1. Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
2. Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

The first definition often has an underlying basis for this trust. The second definition clearly spells out a belief without (or even in spite of) such proof. While many would look approvingly at someone who claimed this first manner of faith in a particular person or object, the moment someone tries to apply it to a question of a religious nature, we perform connotative Aikido and suddenly this quality seem foolish. But when you think about it, this move doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. As discussed (often) in prior posts, all religions make claims on the nature of world. When you claim faith in a particular religion, what you're really saying is that you believe those claims to be true. For that reason, these claims should have a logical support and grounding in our surroundings. Otherwise, you end up having a misguided faith or even believing in something that goes counter to what we all experience everyday. Now I hope we all agree that this manner of faith is unreasonable, but when talking about spiritual matters most people will only have this definition in mind. Some would even promote this definition as a virtue. If you try to engage in a meaningful conversation while this is running through someone's head, you've already lost.  In light of this, I prefer to use the "trust" when talking about what I believe as it holds closer to the original position more clearly (and also illustrates a traditional biblical view of the term). In fact when we use the word in the second way, we often make a distinction by qualifying it with the addition of the word "blind." This should be a clear indication that original meaning has been distorted. Despite this fact however, many people still believe that a blind faith is all that's needed.

Running on Blind Faith
So what happens if we continue to see faith as merely believing what we want or hope is true without any support for this manner of blind fervor. To illustrate just how dangerous this can be, let's go back to the frozen lake above. Let's say there are a total of two possible scenarios with two possible forms of faith. The first scenario will be someone who sees the frozen lake and walks out onto a sheet of ice that's well frozen, thick and solid. Now imagine if this person has checked the temperature, tested the ice and even visits this lake every winter without falling into the icy waters. This person would then have good reasons to "trust" that the ice will support him. This is a good example of the first definition of the word faith. Now suppose another person takes the modern definition and blindly walks out onto the ice without any prior knowledge or checking of the surface. What happens? Well, nothing really. He ends up being just as safe and supported as the first individual. He's perfectly okay in spite of his blind faith.

Onto the second scenario. What if the ice is too thin and can't support the full weight of a person? Well, if someone blindly walks out onto the lake with a blind faith in it, the obvious outcome is an ensuing swim in the freezing water. But what happens when this person claims a solid and noteworthy "faith" in the ice? What if they just hope and believe and convince themselves with all their heart that the ice will support them? They may really like the idea that the ice can support them. They may even just be going out onto the ice for the sake of curiosity. They may possibly see "ice walking" as a great experience that everyone should try, at least once. What happens when someone with a fervently hoped for "faith" (as illustrated by number 2 above) steps out onto the ice? Simple answer, they fall. Ultimately, it won't matter how much they hope or like the idea of a solid sheet of ice. Reality will always catch up in the end. It's for this reason that what you place you're faith in is ultimately the most important factor.

Frozen feet?
At this point you may be thinking "Well the safest option here would be not to go out onto the ice at all." In the scenarios presented above, I would agree with that. If we are unsure or don't have sufficient reasons to believe the ice is solid, it makes sense to not go out onto the lake and risk the potential danger. When you engage in this manner of agnosticism, you try to play it safe by not testing the water. You may not even care about faith and claim that it's not important to you. If you're standing on a shore looking at the ice, this actually makes a lot of sense. But the major problem with such a stance comes when you realize that we're not on the shoreline. We are all already on the ice. You're in this world and playing the metaphysical game whether you like it or not. If you're on the ice already, the real question then becomes "Is the ice you're on a solid patch or a brittle one?

Like the grounding problem, we return to this notion that we all have to base our lives on something. That something should be carefully considered given what's at stake. It could be that we're all on thin ice and just waiting to fall into nothing. It could be that everyone is on a solid sheet of ice and will end up fine in the end no matter what type of faith was placed on the surface. But what if that wasn't the case? What if there was only a single safe spot on the whole lake that you could stand? Wouldn't you want to know where that safe spot was and get there quick before it was too late?

In the end, it doesn't matter how much you might want to believe in a particular religion if that religion is in actuality thin ice. You can hold to it all you want but you're still not going to be safe. Likewise, you could be blindly following a worldview with a good foundation and just be lucky enough to be on solid ground, but that seems like a poor way to respect such a faith. You could throw your hands in the air and say that it's not important and give your life to chance. I would strongly recommend against this as it's an extremely dangerous route to take. So go ahead and check out your feet to see what it is you're trusting in. In an area of such importance, you should have some pretty solid reasons for believing the way you do. Much like Pascal's Wager, this illustration is not necessarily a case for the legitimacy of any one particular claim, but rather an attempt to bring to the foreground the severity of what's at stake. We should examine carefully the various worldviews in order to find out what's true, not merely what we like. If we are on shaky ground, it could collapse at any time. Why wouldn't you look for the safe place to stand? Even more importantly, if we do find a safe patch, wouldn't we want to help everyone else see that they can be safe also? The more we can understand this worldview, the more we can place our trust (faith) in it as the truth and help other people to see the reason for the hope we have within us before they fall. 1 Peter 3:15




Today's Recommendations

Recommended Reading
Faith is Not Wishing - Greg Koukl
Since it would be impossible for me to adequately cover that concept of faith and what a biblical view of it should be, I'm going to refer you to someone much more qualified. Check out this great resource by Greg.

Recommended Listening
Is the Bible a Science Book? - Straight Thinking Podcast, RTB
Not entirely relevant to the topic at hand, but it does address some previously covered topics about how one should and should not read the Bible in regards to scientific discoveries.

Recommended Research
Reasonable Faith Q&A #298 - William Lane Craig
A short look at Pascal's Wager by Dr. Craig. Again, maybe not exactly on topic, but still worth the read. Especially if you've never looked at Pascal's Wager before.

Today's Challenge
See if you can find or even come up with on your own a different (and probably better) illustration for the importance of what you believe in. Take it to test with friends and family and see if it makes sense to others. Good Luck!

"Say's Who?"

In a continuation of the previous post on the importance of grounding, let's take a look at what makes a good source of authority. As I hope the grounding problem illustrates, it's important to have a fixed point or frame of reference that you can use as a standard. Whatever that standard happens to be then becomes the ultimate source of authority that everything else logically finds as it's foundation. Now, since I can't seem to go two weeks without giving you the etymology of a word, it may (or may not) interest you to know that the word "authority" derives from the Latin Auctoritas, which loosely translates as invention, advice, opinion, influence or command 1 . It's typically used to refer to an ability to exercise power over and above another. In philosophical terms, however, this word is made distinct from mere power plays to a claim of legitimacy, or justification in the assertion of such power. So with this in mind, let's take a look at the question "What is a good source of authority to base your beliefs about the world on."

"Who's To Say?"
Pretend you're walking down the street and find a strange object lying on the ground. You're not sure what it does, or how it works, but it's got lots of fun looking levers and gears all over it. How would you find out the purpose and nature of this object? You could attempt to figure it out for yourself through a laborious effort of trial and error. Another option would be to ask all your friends and see what they think about it. In this more modern age, you'll most likely just Google it. But what if this item was so unique that even the almighty internet lacked an explanation. What if at the end of the day, all you had were all these conflicting conjectures about this mysterious object. Some parts may be obvious to you and there may a general consensus among your friends, but there are other parts of this strange relic that you just can't figure out. The next step should be fairly straightforward: find out who made it and just ask them how it works. Seems simple enough, but what if you finally managed to get a hold of this person and he tells you that he would love to help you, but unfortunately, he can't make it to you to explain it. Your heartbroken curiosity is soon excited again as he tells you that he has the instruction manual and will send it out to you free of charge.

Okay, so I'm sure you've made the connection by now, but in the pragmatics of discourse I'm bound by necessity to spell it out anyway. If we have a universe, that we can't completely explain or discern the purpose of, we need to ask the creator. By the simple virtue of being the author of the object, the one who created it therefore is the ultimate source of authority for that object (see what I did there?). I realize I'm skipping over the debate about whether or not there even is a personal, transcendent creator of the universe, but for the moment let's at least accept it as a mere possibility 2 . If this was indeed a loving god, it would naturally follow that he would provide us with this instruction manual to the world we inhabit. Especially if that manual contained information not only on this finite side of the scale, but also on the vastly more important and impactful infinite side to come. This shouldn't come as a surprise to many people because what we find at the core of almost every major religion is a religious text of some fashion or another claiming to be the definitive Word of God. But if that's the case, how can we judge which of these books is truly endorsed by the highest source of authority?

Why a Book?
At this point you may be wondering why this creator bothers with an instruction manual rather than just coming down and talking to us face to face. There are actually many good philosophical and theological reasons as to why this would be the case. One of my person favorites is touched on in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters,  as the senior demon instructs his nephew, "Merely to override a human will (as His [God's] felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. 3 " An entire post could be devoted to this topic, but for now I'd like to just leave you with a more practical reason. If you've been following the line of thinking that led here, the importance of an objective source is paramount. If God visited everyone at one point, we would all have varying individual experiences that would change over time. If He merely spoke to certain individuals, the nuances of the message could get "lost in translation" and become merely subjective (as semiotics illustrates). Also, it would then be easy for free will agents to distort this word as they saw fit for their own personal gain. The solution? An objective document that contains meaning and messages that can then be referred to by everyone and endure through various cultures and times. Again, this should not come as a surprising concept, as even our founding fathers saw the necessity of writing down a declaration that would then become the foundation that this country rests on. So now we come back to the main problem; that almost every major religion claims the sole authority of a true text. How do we then discern which is correct?

Why Should I Trust the Bible?
Okay, since it would impossible (and tedious) to go over every religious text on a blog, I'm gonna focus on the one that seems to be the most influential. After all, it makes sense that we should start at the top of list and the Bible is arguably the most accepted and/or critized religious script of all time. Also, because this blog is already running long, I'm merely going to lay out the basics of each point and a little bit of information to support why the Bible meets the criteria. You could spend a whole college semester or write an entire book (and many have) on any one of these topics, but my goal here is just to inform you that the arguments are out there. Please refer to the reference section below for links to check out the sources for yourself.

1. Is the book we have today what was originally written?
This one is kind of important. After all, we're claiming that this book came from God and was written by people who were lead by Him to deliver His word to everyone else. If later on down the road, the text is changed, then we would have no idea what the correct instruction manual should look like. Like many other works of literature from the ancient world, we do not have the original manuscripts that comprise the Bible. I happen to think that this is actually good thing, but there are those who then question how we can support the belief that what we have now is accurate when we no longer have an original document to compare it to. There are two major criteria that historical scholars use to verify the accuracy of an ancient work where the original is no longer available. Let's take a look at how the world's three best accounted works of ancient antiquity hold up under these standards. These are the writings of Sophocles (496-406 B.C.), Homer's Illiad (900 B.C.) and the New Testament (NT) (50-100 A.D.). The first criteria is the time frame between when the original document was actually written compared to our earliest known copy. In the case of Sophocles, there's a gap of 1400 years. Homer's Illiad runs laps around that one to come to a final time span of 500 years. Sitting at the finish line waiting on the others to catch up, we have the NT manuscripts having a gap of only 50-100 years (there's some dispute over the earliest possible date, but 100 years is the general consensus of the latest possible time). This is still within the potential lifetime of the some of the original authors! The second criteria is the number of manuscripts that we have for each. Again, at third place we have Sophacles with 193 surviving manuscripts. The next contender, Homer, slides in with 643 copies. This is an amazing amount of surviving texts when you think about it. So how does the NT fare? We have over 5, 686 copies with which to verify the accuracy of the text 4 .  That's almost 10 times more than the next best accounted work of literature in the ancient world. Many of these original manuscripts can even be viewed online at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, whose made it their goal to digitally photograph this work. When compared to other ancient works, if we discredit the bible that we have today as being accurate to the original texts, then we must also consider all other ancient works as laughably insufficient and discredit much of our early history department.

2. Is what was written reliable?
"Okay," you may be asking, "so we have what they originally wrote, but why should we trust these guys?" Many people argue that these authors of the NT were either not intending to recite historical events, or simply created these stories. In situation like this, it's important to understand the value of context and the type of literature these originally documents claim to be. In the beginning of Luke and in 1 Corinthians we see that the gospel writers clearly intended their words to be treated as literal firsthand eyewitness accounts Luke 1:1-4 1 Corinthians 15:15. In this regard, it seems unfair to assert that they must have been writing mythology or merely intended it to be a fictional religious narrative. In addition, due to the early dating, we lack the necessary time gap for a mythology to arise out of the claims of the early apostles. This is especially compounded by the fact that these early accounts reference several specific individuals and places. All the first century skeptic had to do to disprove these accounts would be to ask these people if what the apostles claimed was true. In fact, these early writer's actually encouraged this type of inquiry 1 Cor 15:3-8 .  Furthermore, by checking the accuracy of what information we can confirm, this lends credibility to these authors as being reliable witnesses of what they were attesting to. Within the book of Acts, we see a great amount of very specific cultural, political and environmental details that lead to the conclusion that Luke was an incredibly precise and reliable witness of what he reported. Also, by referencing these independent eyewitness testimonies, we can cross examine them to obtain a very accurate accounting of the original events.

3. Is it endorsed by God?
At the end of the day, this is the question we're seeking to answer. Anyone can write a book and claim it's from God, but if the big guy himself wanted to endorse such a text, how would he do it? The only way would be to provide evidence of His approval by layering the texts with some level of supernatural elements. I'm not saying that the Bible is magic or that the scripture can be used to invoke fantastic events. I am saying that by examining the history of the Bible's construction and it's effects, we should see God's influence on every page. For this final point, let's look at six lines of evidence to support God's supernatural stamp of approval. Again, there's too much to explain here, so I'll give them in bullet point form with links to additional material.

• Prophecy - The bible is full of many prophecies that have been fulfilled with incredible accuracy. No other religious text has a tract record as impressive. RtB - Fulfilled Propechies
• Unity - Despite covering a range of 66 books by 40 authors, ranging from peasants to kings, over a span of 1600 years, the Bible can be seen as a cohesive narrative with one central theme that doesn't contradict the core doctrines. ChristianAnswers.net - Biblical Congruency 
• Addressing the Big Questions - The Bible doesn't just claim to be an authority of some esoteric knowledge that only affects people interested in that sort of thing. It's a source of incredible relevance to all the questions that have been the concern of every generation and culture.In fact, it's usually at the very center of these debates.  Please Convince Me - The Christian Worldview as the Best Explanation
• Historically Accurate - We've already touched on this one, but if God were to give us a book, it wouldn't make sense for that book to be full of errors. The Bible is still one of the leading authorities of ancient culture and is constantly being confirmed by new archeological discoveries. Be Thinking - Historical Reliability 
• Changes Lives - I realize that many texts claim to be transformative in peoples lives, and most of them are. This is not a definitive proof, since this alone is not sufficient to show God's touch on the scriptures, but if this were lacking it would be a proof against God's influence. I think it's undeniable that the Bible has had an amazing impact on people's lives. No link is needed here, just ask people.
• Survival - This is one of the biggies. There is no other document that has been more scrutinized, more criticized or more attacked then the Bible. This alone should be a major clue. After all, if it were worthless, why would there be so much fervor to discredit it? Despite this, the Bible is still strong and widely believed. That couldn't happen unless there was a supernatural ring of truth in it's pages.

Okay, so I realize that it's a bit like drinking water from a fire hose. If you get nothing else from this particular post, I hope you can at least see that when Christian's claim the Bible as the inspired word of God and therefore sufficient to use as a foundation for faith, that this claim is not made in a vacuum. There are excellent reasons to believe God, both in a general sense, and the God of Christian scriptures specifically. We all are basing our life on something, whether you've looked at that foundation or not. Are you basing your beliefs on personal feelings and desire? Does your life revolve around a subjective authority that easily changes due to popular opinion? Or do you take your life seriously enough to find an objective, well evidenced, fixed foundation that can actually support the entire structure? Matthew 7:24


1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auctoritas
2 - I feel I should note that this is more than just a simple assertion. There are many good reasons to believe in the existence of such a being. For a look at some of these arguments, visit Peter Kreft's Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God.
3 - C.S. Lewis - Screwtape Letters, Chapter 8 
4 - By the last account I heard, this number has actually gone up to 5,842 as more manuscripts are discovered. I didn't have a source for this information so I didn't want to post it. 

Point 1 
http://carm.org/manuscript-evidence
STR Article - Is the New Testament Reliable
Point 2
Please Convince Me - Is the NT Archeologically Verifiable?
Historical Details in Acts - Thomistic Bent
Point 3 -
Apologetics 315 - Articles on Trusting the Bible
Stand to Reason - No Lost Book of the Bible


Today's Recommendations

Recommended Reading
Cold Case Christianity - J Warner Wallace
A cold case homicide detective takes the skills he learned cracking unsolved mysterious to test the verifiability of the Gospels as eyewitness to the case of the resurrection. A very good defense for many of the common objections to trusting the Bible as the authority of God. 

Recommended Listening
The Authority of the Word of God - Amy Orr-Ewing, Ravi Zacharias Ministries
Great podcast on the reliability of the Bible compared to other sources. 

Recommended Research
I think I've given you enough websites to check out... happy researching!  

Today's Challenge
Look at one of the three points for why we should trust the Bible (or one of the final 6 for point 3) . Pick which one you find most engaging and really study it. Visit the provided links and do some research of your own. Also be aware of the criticism provided by opposition and be ready to address those concerns. You don't have to be an expert in everything, but find a field you enjoy and go a little deeper in that area.