I planned to write a post about Easter and how it is possible for someone sensible to believe in a dead man coming back to life. However, I was in America over Easter and the guy doing the talk on Easter Sunday said most of the things I was going to write about, so I thought I’d save myself the effort with exams coming up and post the video of his talk.

I tried and failed to embed the video on tumblr/edit it so it’s shorter, so instead I’ve had to just link to it.

The video is at http://flagstaffcommons.com/media , and is titled ‘Easter: Are we foolish’. (NB - click ‘watch’, not the youtube link as that is for a different video).

The original video shows the entire service and so is 71 minutes long (hence why I was keen to try and cut it down), but the relevant part is from 23:50 to 50:30.

Iif you have 25 minutes to spare I’d really encourage you to watch it as I think what is said is worth thinking about. For me, rather than being a stumbling block to faith or making God less believable, the evidence for the resurrection is a key pointer to His existence.

You know you have reached the peak of procrastination when, in order to avoid writing an essay for coursework, you instead spend your time piecing together a blog post of similar length. Whatever the reason though, I’ve finally got round to writing this 3^rd entry, with apologies for the long absence since the last one.

I aim in the next few weeks to go through some of the key arguments underlying a faith in God that I have previously mentioned. Before I go any further though, I’d like to make a disclaimer.
     Firstly, as I have previously stated, I am not trying to prove the existence of God, but show the rationality of such a belief. No amount of philosophical discussion, or scientific analysis is ever going to be able to completely prove (or indeed disprove) the existence of God, as what we are discussing is inherently outside of our human experience. Arguments can point us in a certain direction, but will always be incomplete. Returning to the analogy of the remote from last time, we will never be able to completely see the device it controls. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, ‘Now we see in a mirror dimly…now I know only in part…’, yet that does not undermine the validity of faith, as I hope I demonstrated in my last entry. Even in science there is never a total proof - one has to find the theory that best explains what you observe, and it is the same with religion. It does however mean intellectual discussion on its own will always come up short, both in proving or disproving God.

    Secondly, not everything I believe IS necessarily rational. I try my best to think things through, and determine what seems reasonable to me, but that is bound to be shaped by my own quirks and prejudices. As humans it’s impossible to separate your head from your heart and guts, and nor would I want to. Christianity is about relationships, with others and with God, and should not be purely an intellectual exercise. My personal experience of God is not something that can be argued rationally, yet nevertheless has a major impact on my faith. The important thing to realise is that this personal experience that cannot be explained in terms of logic does not take away from the legitimacy of the rational arguments that go with it. Similarly to this, I think people are often put off when they hear Christians claiming things that seem to them to be completely unreasonable, and again it is vital to remember that Christians are people. We make mistakes, we are guilty of woolly thought processes, and although we believe God made us in His image, we often do the reverse, and end up making him in ours. That does not allow you to dismiss faith entirely out of hand. There are still questions that need answering to which I believe God is the most reasonable answer. It would be a shame to dismiss the existence of a God just because you find it impossible to maintain intellectual integrity whilst believing a few of the claims that some people who follow him make. Some of a person’s beliefs may well be illogical, but that doesn’t mean they all are, in the same way that some of the world’s animals are definitely elephants yet the vast majority aren’t.

As I’ve said I will do my best over the next few entries to muddle through some of what I consider to be important questions and pointers to God, but I would ask you to bear the points stated above in mind when you read them. I will do my best to be logical, and hopefully show the thought processes behind what I believe, but at times you may disagree. The important thing is to carefully consider what you do and do not believe, so you are satisfied with why you believe it.

(As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please go for it, either via email or through the ask function on this site. I’d really appreciate your thoughts).

A common response for Christians faced with the challenge to ‘prove God exists’, is ‘prove that he doesn’t’. The aim is to show that not believing in God requires just as much willful belief as believing in him. While I believe this is actually the case, a simple statement such as ‘prove he doesn’t’ causes more harm than good. Science doesn’t work like that - you start from a presumption of nothing, then disprove your null hypothesis to show a correlation exists. The burden of proof is on whatever you are trying to show. As Hermione tells Xenophilius Lovegood, ‘You could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!’

   In conversations with athiest friends, it is clear that this is very much how they view faith in God. Sure, they say, you can claim God exists but it’s just as likely that there is a teapot orbiting Mars. After all, we can’t prove there isn’t. A good example of this attitude towards religion is the popular parody religion ‘The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’. They again try to show faith is generally ridiculous and that worshiping an invisible deity made of spaghetti and meatballs (Pastafarianism), would be an equally logical (or rather illogical) world view.

This does Christianity a massive disservice. By encouraging people to frame faith in these terms, through statements such as ‘prove he doesn’t exist’, we allow them to dismiss believers as irrational, and so ignore potential answers to important questions about why we are here. You see, faith in God is not equivalent to faith in the Tooth fairy, or invisible pasta, or orbiting tea pots. Yes, you may not be able to prove through repeatable experiments that God exists, but equally you can not prove through repeatable experiments that Cleopatra existed. Hanson and Hanson, in their book ‘Reasonable Belief: A Survey of the Christian Faith’ argue that the study of religion has much more in common with history than with science. You analyse the sources and what other people have written on the subject, then try and reach a logical conclusion about what you believe happened. You are not deciding to believe something at random.

Imagine you found a remote control for a television. It has buttons on, such as volume, that give you clues about the device it controls. It is true that all you can know for certain is that the remote control exists, but that does not mean it is an illogical position to expect that somewhere there is a television.

In this analogy, arguments for the existence of God become buttons on the remote - the very existence of the universe, the precise nature of physical constants such as the gravitational force to produce conditions that allow life to develop, our own personal relationship with God, the way that, contrary to what would have been expected, the disciples did not disappear after the death of Jesus but preached and died in defence of their story etc*. These do not prove that God exists, in the same way a remote does not prove a television exists - that is why it is called faith. They do however make it a valid position to hold, and not the same as belief in orbiting tea pots.

*For expansion on these and other arguments, I recommend http://www.reasonablefaith.org, or feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to explain why I think they are compelling.

We are exceptionally fortunate to live where we do, when we do. Compared to virtually any time in history, and unlike many places on the planet, we have incredible freedom. We are free to say what we want, believe what we want, and openly worship what we want. This is not something to take lightly. Indeed in light of what people around the world have to go through, it hardly seems appropriate to complain about how faith is treated in modern western life. I do, however, have a gripe, and I believe it is an important and growing issue.

Yes, Christians are free to believe what they want, but not without being labelled as superstitious and ignorant. It is acceptable for faith in general, and in particular Christianity, to be routinely mocked on TV and in the media. The world is divided into those who are rational and those who cling to outdated beliefs, either because they are too scared or too stupid to think otherwise. Atheism, the argument goes, is the only logical and reasonable attitude to take, and hence people’s faith is dismissed as existing because, (to quote Stephen Fry on QI, having been asked why people believe in God) “They are foolish, and ignorant and scared.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mChRblK0WU8)

Admittedly, some of this is deserved. You can hardly blame people for seizing the chance to ridicule faith when, for large parts of its history, the Church was involved in persecuting those who didn’t believe what it told them to. Added to this, a bit of well placed mockery can expose the flaws in our thinking, and keep us from taking ourselves too seriously. I think religion should always be able to laugh at itself a bit and indeed Life of Brian is one of my favourite films.

This does not mean however that I think it’s ok for people without faith to patronise those who have. I respect that people, after careful thought and having examined their own lives and the world around them, decide they do not believe in the existence of God, but it is possible for others to think just as carefully and reasonably and reach the opposite conclusion. It does not mean they are a few articles short of a catechism.

Yes, there are some people who believe in God whilst being ignorant of a lot of things, but religion does not have a monopoly on ignorance. There are atheists who will disbelieve God simply ‘because science proves everything’, and even those who do have a thorough understanding of the science involved will not necessarily have given much thought to the philosophical questions underlying existence. 

So this blog is really partly my response to that - I will try and outline why I believe what I believe, and why I think it is a reasonable position to hold. The aim is not to convince anyone that Christianity is right, merely that it is at least an equally valid view of life.

PS - Victoria Coren says similar things much better here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/05/victoria-coren-belief-in-god