Encountering the Divine

Encountering the Divine
(A New Journey and My Softer Side on Religiosity)

What is God? What is God like? From Jesus to Paul, from Irenaeus to Athanasius, from Scotus to Luther and from Schleiermacher to Tillich, no matter whom I come across on my journey, the concept of God seems very much like humanity’s introspective journey rather than an object or being.

If we take a time traveling magnifying glass and zoom in on various stages of Christian history and development, we would probably see different sets of Christianity basically unrecognizable to modern eyes.

Throughout Christian history we observed the battle fought between the Marcionites and the Ebionites Christians over the validity of the Jewish bible, we saw the disagreements between Docetism and Arianism over Christology, we welcomed pre-orthodox Christianity in the empire of Constantine, we journeyed through the controversial ecumenical councils, we watched the emergence of Greek philosophy and apologetics, we encountered Scholasticism in the Middle Ages, we saw the rise of the Enlightenment and Modernism, we observed the prominence of liberalism and its fall after the second World War, we journeyed into post-modernism and Neo-Orthodoxy. All that we see in the present church in general is simply the culmination of everything the Christian community has experienced. Much of that experience was bloody, violent and arguably in many instances, glorious for the justice it brought to humanity.

The Christian idea of God has been shaped and reshaped by our cultural ancestors. When we rightfully critique that we just have too many denominations right now, we simply have to remember the fact that the majority of Christian denominations in their historical forms already ceased to exist.

Today, we have come to another period in time when God is about to take on yet another form. In my previous articles I have described a world with a significant increase in scientific knowledge. The knowledge that we gained has rendered a theistic definition of God no longer sustainable and meaningful for many people. The reader may disagree with me, but it is not my purpose here to argue that point.

Knowing the limitations of theism, I have come to a point in my spiritual journey where I must say that I continue to love and have “faith” in God, but I also have some serious explaining to do. The biggest question the reader might have at this point is “how can I rely on rationality and still have faith?” Or “why do I still use language about God if I no longer hold a theistic view?”

The word “faith” may have different connotations depending on whom you talk to. For some, faith means to believe despite the absence of evidence. To another, faith means to believe in spite of counter evidence. For others still, faith means believing in conclusions as a result of inference from limited evidence, such as that of trust in friendship. When we say the word “faith”, we mean quite different things; therefore it would be a mistake to suggest that everyone subscribes to the same definition.

So what do I mean by faith? When I use the word faith I mean having a basic affirmation about a fundamental building block of values. When Secular Humanists affirm that every human being has value, dignity and that morality should be consequential, we affirm something without apparently logical reason or proof.

Some may suggest that perhaps we have value because we can experience pain and pleasure, so if what we do maximizes pleasure and reduces pain, it is morally justified. Some might even suggest that our consciousness, self-consciousness and drive for meaning and survival give us value.

But to take a stance on life on the basis of what is natural, we are indeed falling into the trap of natural theology when we have come to understand nature as amoral. Nature rains on the just and the unjust and nature creates both life and pestilence.

If we look at the affirmation of human value closely, we would see no apparent reason for that affirmation. Why would it matter if we all commit mass painless suicide right now (hypothetically)? Why are we altruistic? Although we have many good hypotheses on the origin of human altruism, it is still mainly built on the model of survival. If that is the case, we must inevitably ask why is survival important? Could it be that because it is programmed into our DNA? Perhaps that is one of the reasons, but to the self and social-conscious human mind, which doesn’t strictly follow biological rules, something more must be at work: something more than can be described by language and can only be understood by our abstract mind.

We choose to live because we believe there is something worth living for. After all, how can we prove that human beings have value? We must affirm the value of life and the importance of survival for other reasons that are not easily describable.

Therefore, I believe there is something more than just rationality in this world. I am not a neuroscientist, but I know the reality of music and art on the effects they have on our mind and emotions. The creativity of our humanity might have survival contributions in our early ancestors, but they have evolved to be far more advanced than to just be serving that purpose. In other words, our need for the incomprehensible gave rise to our ability to comprehend the incomprehensible.

We can scientifically analyze music and art, but we can never rationalize what they are and why we like them. All we know is that it affects our being and touches our very soul (in symbolic language). Maybe enjoying music is a delusion itself, but that doesn’t make it less real than anything else.

A brain that evolved to crave for meaning must have a way for it to feed itself, therefore it gave us an awareness to see what is meaningful. It is almost like pornography, you cannot define what it is, but you will know it if you see it.

Part of our brain is programmed for survival, but another part of our brain seems to lust for meaning. Now, I would like to suggest that the concept and symbol of faith fills the need of that lust, it serves as music to our ears and art to our eyes. We as human beings begin with a fundamental affirmation, and then we continue building our meaningful lives. Perhaps meaning is an illusion, then in that case, we are all somewhat deluded, but that does not make the reality of meaning less real to our conscious mind. Perhaps not all unobservable things are illusory.

Therefore, in the twenty-first century maybe faith isn’t such a bad idea, not in a sense that we believe in a non-existent theistic God, but rather that all human beings are loved and are endowed with dignity and value. But faith must be practiced under one condition to prevent its inherent danger: that it must be informed by science, reason and our innate intuition for beauty, creativity and relevance.

After exploring the meaning of my faith, it leaves me with an even tougher topic, God.
Personally, God is intrinsically grounded in reality. But what defines reality you might ask? We who live in the twenty-first century use science as the best tool to understand this material world, but what about the part of reality that is intangible? As we discussed before, science cannot tell us how beautiful a poem or a piece of art is. With all the knowledge we have, we continue to misunderstand dreams, consciousness, art, music, poetry, rhythm and love.

Why is it that when we look at the self-sacrificial love of Jesus and the courage of Martin Luther King Jr, we see human beings living their life to the fullest? Even if it means life is cut short. Isn’t it a paradox that humans who live their lives to the fullest are the ones taken from us in their prime? There is something about the stories of deliverance, self-sacrifice, love and friendship that touches our very being, humanity and yearning.

A sharp and rational mind can always explain all our hero’s actions, but there is also more than just reasons. The beauty, elegance, and the fullness of their lives became a symbol worthy of remembrance, admiration, and even imitation. How can rationality fully capture reality in its entirety?

Yes, Science and reason are the best tools ever devised to extract provisional truth about this complicated world, but I believe it would be a mistake to think they are the only proper ways to experience this reality.

Humanism affirms the dignity of every individual and that we are a part of nature interconnected with the web of life, but behind the rationality there lies a substance of spirituality.

We can examine the science behind a romantic candlelight dinner and provide a comprehensible understanding of the psychology and chemistry that interacts underneath this intimate moment. If we take away the magic of art, symbols and charming language the moment quickly fades away. Informative as science and reason may be, we can never ignore the humanity and the elegant spark of symbolism that lives along side it.

Our consciousness, which is the culmination of our brain’s intricate mechanisms, is not wired to understand its processes, but it is quite capable of distinguishing itself from the rest of the world (self-consciousness).

It is documented in several studies that when our right temporal lobe is stimulated electromagnetically, we tend to experience the transcendent: that experience usually consists of gods, white-light, out-of-body experiences and even aliens. Those experiences are often reported indistinguishable from reality. But does it mean that science has proven religious experiences to be completely meaningless?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that those experiences cannot be dangerous when taken literally without careful examination, but what if the stimulation tells us that the brain is quite capable of experiencing something that is quite different apart from the obvious and the observable?

A brain-imaging device called SPECT was used to observe the state of the brain during meditation exercises. This experiment yielded some very interesting results. As it turns out, when the brain has been deprived of all sensory signals from the outside world such as noise during a meditation session, our brain’s ability to distinguish itself from the world fades and our feeling of being one with nature emerges.

I am sure one can argue that this whole feeling of being one with the universe is illusory, but that is just as good an interpretation as the brain experiencing a profound symbolic reality that is just as valid as any other experience. After all who can say our feeling of being separate from the universe is not in itself an illusion. Maybe we are at one with the universe. Monkeys cannot think about themselves, but that does not mean that thinking does not exist.

When I listen to Brahms, Piazzolla, Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy I experience beauty, excitement and stirring of indescribable emotions within me. Some may hear the same composers and feel the exact opposite. Maybe what I feel is just an illusion, but I would like to think that they are just as real and valid as any other experience.

God to me is a symbol that encapsulates all that we love and cherish. When we see a human life fully lived, we experience God. When we received love when we least deserved it, we encounter God. When we experience passion, purpose and altruism and hear to voice, which calls us to be all that we can be, we have engaged God. God is the “ground of all being” and the “process of becoming”. To rid the world of that symbol is to destroy the symbols and language that made so many of our lives meaningful and enjoyable. We might not like this language because of the religious radicals we meet everyday, but why not transform it and still live in faith and at peace with our rational mind. After all, we are both rational and spiritual animals. There is no reason to discard one for the sake of the other.

Are We Hopeless without God?

Are We Hopeless without God?

(Finding Meaning in the Midst of a Violent World)

One Hundred and Fifty years after the publication of Darwin’s famous “The Origin of Species”, the overwhelming evidence supporting the theory still manages elude the public as a recent study on the public scientific literacy shows that 46% of Americans still believes the world is less than 10,000 years old and God created human beings in our current form.

As a former believer of literal biblical creationism, I have to say that I am not at all surprised by this poll. After all, I came through elementary school, high school and college without a proper education on arguably one of the most important scientific theories in human history.

Many laymen like myself often take the term theory for granted. Theory is not the equivalent of a hypothesis. A scientific theory must withstand rigorous debates and scientific scrutiny. In the case of evolution, it enlisted in the boot camp of scientific investigation for over a century. Today, the theory of evolution is one of the most tested and robust theories in science.

So why are we so resistant to this relatively “old” idea? Maybe we are not proficient in Paleontology and as a result are unaware about the fact that fossil records are always consistent with the different stages of evolution in history. Maybe we are not well versed in microbiology and therefore fail to understand how evolution accurately predicted the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Maybe we just do not quite understand how genetic mapping (Unknown to Darwin) illuminated evolution the same way a photograph from space verifies the earth is a globe. Maybe we have failed to discern evolution happening in our lifetime as HIV-resistant human beings begin to emerge in AIDS infested Africa.

Why is the theory of evolution by means of natural selection so repulsive? After all, this is one of the most tested and proven theories in history not simply an infantile hypothesis. Why can’t we just look at the facts and come to terms with it? After all, Darwin himself was hesitant to publish the findings and it took an Alfred Wallace to scare him into publication.

After a fair amount of exposure to the topic of Darwinian evolution by going through books, articles and numerous lectures, I believe I might have found the provisional answer to this question.

In Dr. Michael Shermer’s book “The Science of Good and Evil”, he demonstrated an important concept of human psychology with an interesting survey done by a social scientist.

The survey contains two questions with somewhat similar hypothetical scenarios. The summary of the first scenario is this: “Imagine a train going down the track at high speed and ahead of it stood five individuals. Before the train collides and kills those people you have the option of flipping a switch and redirect the train on a different track killing only one person on the way. So you are left with the option to kill one and safe five, what would you do?”

The summary of the second scenario is as follows: “Imagine the same train going down the track at high speed and ahead of the train stood five individuals. You are walking down the side of the train station and can observe this dire situation. You are faced with two options, you can throw the stranger walking next to you on the track and stop the train or you can watch the five die. What would you do?”

Needless to say, an overwhelming majority picked “kill one safe five” for the first scenario, but to the researcher’s astonishment most people pick “kill five save one” for the second scenario. What does that tell us about our conscious decisions to accept or reject certain concepts?

The choice to kill one in order to save five is logical: sacrificing one for the greater good makes perfect sense. On the other hand, killing five to spare one seems incredibly illogical. Now, the difference is that the first scenario does not require one to actively commit the act of murder while the second does.

This study tells us how the human need for emotional security can easily override our ability to make logical decisions. The act of pushing someone on the train track and killing that person threatens our emotional stability and as a result our mind resents and resists that possibility.

Now, the secular view of Darwinism presents a worldview that is bleak, sad, violent and meaningless. It tells us that life in all its rich variety did not happen by accident (natural selection is not a random process), but at the same time it has no goal or ultimate consequences.

Many human beings in their quest for comfort, certainty and happiness cannot accept the reality that everything we enjoy and have is so fragile. We take comfort in the idea that even if we lose it all, we might get it back in the afterlife.

We want the animal kingdom to be innocent like “Winnie the Pooh” or at least believe it was that way before. Also, we are comforted by the story of Adam, the rascal responsible for the calamitous state of affairs and the possible regaining of paradise lost through divine intervention. Our childhood quest for emotional security became the fairytale standard that we use to measure reality instead of evidence.

Even though many theists have developed intricate theological systems to incorporate this theory into their faith (cf. theistic evolution), I remain skeptical about its validity because the theory does have some serious theological implications.

The theistic evolution still has to take into account that for nearly 200,000 years a deist God watched humans and our ancestors die of famine, starvation, miscarriage, barbarianism, and natural disasters before stepping into uncivilized Palestine (deistic God turned theistic) and called a group of illiterates to be his chosen people. Just imagine what kind of God that would be.

The ultimate question, then, would be: “Can a worldview that incorporates evolution be hopeful and meaningful?” I would like to humbly suggest “yes” to that question. But first I would like to explore a moral objection of the theory.

One of the biggest moral critiques of Darwinism is the erroneous belief that evolution somehow justifies genocide and tribal killing. I think Darwin himself answers that objection quite convincingly.

In Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species” the author compared natural selection to that of pigeon breeding. Even though the idea of evolution did not achieve scientific significance prior to Darwin, many breeders of dogs or birds already practice what Darwin called “artificial selection”.

When a breeder sees an appealing trait in a bird or a dog, they artificially select those particular animals for breeding. After a few generations, those traits would have been enhanced and preserved due to genetic reasons unknown to the pre-Darwin breeder.

When Darwin compared “artificial selection” with “natural selection” he was by no means equating the two. Darwin was simply suggesting that “artificial selection” can shed some light on how “natural selection” might be understood. The breeders make their selection of species based on various characteristics favorable to human eyes, in a similar manner, nature select life based on characteristics most favorable for survival in the environment.

Individuals like Hitler and companies like Enron practiced “social Darwinism” which is not Darwinian evolution, but a form of “artificial selection” similar to that of the breeders. Natural selection does not encourage or justify ruthless killing or ethnic cleansing by any means. Natural selection is a natural reality but humans can easily exploit that reality the same way we exploit gunpowder and nuclear technology for war.

A form of natural selection is “sexual selection”. The females get to choose whom they want to breed with and the traits that a female finds attractive in a male gets passed on to the next generation. Unfortunately, if a male fails to impress his female counterparts due to his traits or lack thereof, then his chances of passing on his genes are slim. We can still observe this evolutionary phenomenon in our everyday lives.

You see, natural selection is natural and benign. It does not require nor demand barbaric killing while many religious texts sanction it. So what are we really to fear?

Some may argue that animals barbarically kill each other for food. I would say yes, animals do kill each other for food and whoever is good at hunting or running survives to multiply, but do human beings behave any differently? We kill chicken, fish, cows, pigs and plants for food. The survival of one always means destruction for another, whether plant or animal. Homo sapiens, with our highly developed brain (compared to other animals) rose to the top of the food chain and earned the privilege to multiply.

Our sophisticated brain also gave rise to self-awareness and a greater social awareness. We alone in the animal kingdom have the ability to plan and predict the future on a conscious level. That ability gave rise to a precious gift called reason.

Reason alone can give birth to countless possibilities in the world such as the creation of totalitarian regimes, heartless genocides, world religions as well as democratic and socialistic governments. I am well aware that many secularists argue that dictators are self-declared gods in human form and that they function more like religious leaders, therefore faith, not reason should take the responsibility for their existence. Although that argument may be accurate, we still have to admit that our ability to reason is not nearly perfect. But in conjunction with science and our evolved moral sense, we can rise above our primitive tribal morality. But before we go any further about reason and science, we must also have a fair understanding of the origin of our good moral sense.

Our evolutionary ancestors learned that the best way to survive is to stick together and so we adopted “reciprocal altruism” (I scratch your back if you scratch mine) and “Kin Altruism” (family first). Those two basic principles became the basis of our complex morality as it is passed on from generation to generation: first from experience and then genetically as this concept gets wired into our subconscious.

Although biologists, psychologists and anthropologists continue to argue about the origin of our complex morality such as caring for a stranger and giving money to the poor, many possible hypotheses have been proposed.

Before we move on to some possible explanations, we need to first understand a single psychological phenomenon is rarely the direct result of a single cause. Behaviors are often motivated by an intermingling fabric of neural patterns. Because of the complexity of our brain, it is extremely hard to pinpoint the cause of a complex and seemingly paradoxical behavior.

First, we have to examine our ability to empathize. Human beings are visual learners. Psychologists have conducted numerous research using equipments such as MRI or fMRIs. When human beings see another person in pain, the same part of our brain activates even though we are not experiencing the same event. When we look at a picture of our past, parts of our brain activates as if we are at that place in time.

Our brain unconsciously emulates and feels another person’s experience and makes us conscious about their feelings. The same way we would want to put an end to our own pain motivates us to end the pain other. That instinct works in conjunction with our consciousness as we calculate how much we should get involved and what it would cost us.

All of the instinctive motivations are reinforced by the chemistry of our brain. Our evolutionary roots wired into our brain the ability to reward itself when we do what is favorable by the release of dopamine. When we have sex or enjoy a meal, dopamine is released and causes us to have a good feeling. The same way as we participate in altruism, the double affect of dopamine and oxytocin grants us the ability to feel good and deepen the relationship.

The importance of dopamine can be demonstrated by the psychology of a serial killer or sexual predator. Very often, serial criminals have malfunctioned dopamine releases when performing their cold-blooded crimes. In the same manner, a person with malfunctioned oxytocin receptors is incapable of forming meaningful relationships.

When scientists take into account the instinctive, evolutionary, psychological and chemical motivations behind our behavior they can begin to form plausible explanations of why we behave as we do. As we all know by now, scientists do not currently have a definite answer to our moral behavior, but I can safely assume that good does emerge from a Darwinian outlook.

Our evolved moral sense can serve as a guide to our reason as we continue to accumulate experience and information. Religions in the west and philosophies of the east have successfully passed on knowledge about our morality, although that is not the only thing they do. Our ability to reason continues to develop and sharpen those morale values. I will never be critical about the contributions religion has brought to the world but to make an empirical claim that those moral teachings are divinely revealed is another story.

There is absolutely nothing we know about human morality that could not be conceived with reason and accumulative experience over a long period of time. We don’t need a bible to tell us that Africans are just as human (we are all homo sapiens) or that women are just as capable to be leaders, we don’t need a bible to tell us that mothers should love their children or that husbands should love their wives. In fact, we know those biblical vales are good and we accept them because we already have a concept of what sound morality is. I will, however, credit religion and government, the two earliest moral institutions, for cataloging and accumulating our moral values.

In the modern age, developmental psychology can tell us how to raise a child, social science can teach us how to love our spouses, statistics can help us make informed policy decisions, the medical world can teach us how to live healthily and philosophy can teach us how to love and live in accord.

Now, with the emergence of modern science, we can successfully test the effects of moral teachings, social policies and continue to make this world a better place by providing better health care, improve energy efficiency and bring good values to the rest of the world.

But some may ask, why live then? What is the meaning of life? To me that is the most exciting question to ask. Because we can all answer that question for ourselves. How do we make our life meaningful? Maybe it is in enjoying life, maybe it is in performing public service, maybe it is in studying art, maybe it is in listening to a magnificent symphony or maybe it is in making someone else’s life more enjoyable. I think the notion that a godless world is a meaningless one is the greatest delusion of all. Meaning is not made meaningful with an ultimate and eternal consequence. I think it rather cheapens it because if that were true, none of the present would really matter compared to an eternity. Finally, I would like to borrow a famous question asked by Plato in Euthyphro “What makes God’s plan meaningful in the first place? Is it meaningful because it’s God’s plan? Or is it God’s plan because it is meaningful?” If you pick the first, meaning is arbitrary. If you pick the second, then obviously meaning exists apart from God.

So are we hopeless without God? I firmly say no and conclude that it is more hopeful than ever as human beings begin to see the importance of the here and now rather than waiting for some deliverance that may never come.

Most of us know Fyodor Dostoevsky’s quotation that: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” I would like to suggest that whether or not God exists, all things are permitted. If atheists can perform genocides, theists are just as capable of doing the same. It is an undeniable historical fact that ruthless injustices are done by both theists and non-theists. The world would not look very different with or without the idea of God. The only way to break the cycle is through accumulated reason and science. Finally I will say that I will not be upset if you disagree with me because reason can produce all kinds of possibilities, after all, that’s the beauty of it! Like many of my friends do, I still have no beef with people who believe because it is consoling. Human brains are both capable of reason and spirituality. Who said we could not enjoy both?

Does Education Influence Religious Belief?

Does Education Influence Religious Belief?

(Just a thought before my next article)

In Dr. Michael Shermer’s book “How We Believe?” he performed a critical analysis of a survey studying the top ten reasons why Americans believe in God. The survey consists of two general questions: “Why do you believe in God?” and “Why do you think others believe in God?” When the study was properly consolidated and properly recorded, he observed an interested phenomenon.

The top ten answers regarding the first question “Why do you believe?” consists of answers such as these: “Because when I look at the complexity of nature I see a designer”, “When I love and am loved, I experience something above this world” and “There has a prime mover to begin the universe”.

Now, those are quite rational reasons to believe in God, but let’s also take a look at the top answers to the second question “Why do you think others believe?” The majority of the answers are: “They need to be comforted”, “They grew up in a religious environment”, “They have an emotional need to be filled by the divine” and “God provides them security”.

Notice, the second set of answers is mostly emotional and environmental. More interestingly, what used to be the least frequent answers for the first personal question became the most frequent when we point our fingers toward others.

When human beings grapple with the question of faith, we think of ourselves as most rational people; but when asked about the faith of others, we essentially label them “emotional” and “irrational”.

The reason why this is interesting to me is because of a conversation I had with a close friend last night, but before we get to that conversation let us take a quick look at some data regarding the education distribution of religious traditions.

Considering the data presented by the PEW U.S Religious Landscape Survey, we will see that the number of church attendees relative to education peaks at high school graduates. When students are in college, the number of church attendees drops by about 30 percent and when students graduate from college the number plunge another 10 to 15 percent. This trend continues as the education level raises.

Now, there are many reasons why people leave church. It could be work, family, changes in lifestyle, apathy or increased obligations on the weekends. None of those have to be thoughtful reasons.

My friend suggested that perhaps most of these people who leave the church never sat down to think about their faith and therefore probably have absolutely nothing to do with their education level. Yes, in some cases that might be true, but due to our psychological tendencies as demonstrated by Dr. Shermer, we can easily fall into the fallacy of generalization.

Could it also be just as possible that some students begin to develop credible critical thinking skills at about the same time they reach sophomore year in college? As knowledge about science and philosophy increases and our critical thinking sharpens, students make the rational decision to abandon faith. I am not by any means saying that is the necessary result. Many intelligent and knowledgeable people remain theists regardless of how much they disagree with one another about theology.

After examining this data for some answers, I realized this particular data might not really tell us anything about the relationship between education and religiosity statistically for two reasons

1. The percentage give by this study does not represent proportions relative to a particular group (Cf. X percent of all Master’s degree go to church). It means that the number of church attendees shrink beyond college level because few people actually make it to graduation. 2. Under the assumption that no. 1 is true then making a correlation would be nearly impossible, least of all making any conclusive statements about the data. For the above 2 reasons, we can see why it could be erroneous to make any inferences from the PEW data. The inconclusiveness of this study leads us to another data analysis.

There is one thing we can try to do however, that is, by singling a group of people out with similar education levels. We now turn to The National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS has the membership of about 2100 scientists and about 1950 scientists are atheists or agnostics. That means 93 percent are atheists or agnostics and that leaves 7 percent theists.

People from all over the world can be nominated and elected to its honorable membership. Very few people are elected into NAS for very obvious reasons. The NAS only accept the brightest and most prolific scientists into its membership. We would consider them to be some of the most educated human beings in the world. We can see that among the scientists, there are extremely few theists and that is statistically significant beyond the normal standard deviation.

Now, I cannot imagine why any reasonable people who would say that these scientists never sat down and thought about faith and religion. I am pretty certain that many of these distinguished scientists deal with the issues of faith on a daily basis during their scientific inquiry. Yet, their rationality has rejected the concept of faith. For me, this data can tell me a lot about the relationship between faith and science.

Based on the above two quick and passing analysis, I believe it is probably safe for me to admit that I don’t know if all education negatively influences faith. But science, when observed from the highest echelons of scientific scholarship, theism is “nearly” obliterated. Notice that I said nearly, not utterly, which still leaves plenty of room for debate and reflection. Again, I stand here humbly and ready to be corrected like any other issue. Please point me to some good statistical studies on this subject and I will do a more comprehensive analysis next time for my current data is limited.

Side Note (It is worth noting that many scientists, though not theists, still regard themselves to be religious. They are religious in a sense that they believe in “God of the physicists”.
For clarification of what that means, I would like to borrow a few quotes from Albert Einstein: “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”) (Albert Einstein) (Quotations copied from http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Theology-Albert-Einstein.htm)

Can I Still Believe?

Can I Still Believe

(My Personal Struggle for faith)

Jettisoning Biblical Theism

The world of faith today faces tremendous challenges from the forces of secularization and the increase abuse and misuse of religious ideologies. From my point of view, the power of religion is beginning to waver in the western culture and society. This reality becomes more apparent with the recent atheist movement championed by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

On top of the atheist movement, many long-term or young church attendees that I interviewed foster a severe frustration with the traditional views of Christianity and religion. What are the forces of secularization? What is making it so hard for us to simply believe? My intention is not to give an accurate analysis of where we stand as a church today, but to offer my journey of faith.

Faith has been a constant struggle and has never been easy for me. My journey through the world of faith has been particularly bumpy.

When I first converted to Adventist Christianity I was a fundamentalist. I believed the bible was the inerrant “word of God”. I was serious about my faith and sought to live up to every jot and tittle of Adventist morality.

I worshiped on Sabbath, set-aside time for daily devotions, refused to watch television on this holy day and attended church programs 4 times a week. In addition, I ate healthily and preached in church regularly

Now, my first experience of conversion took place under the starry skies of Hawaii. On the edge of despair and intense agony, God appeared to me, or so I believed. A man ambled promptly towards me after my first solemn prayer on the sandy Ala Moana beach .He began to recite from scripture, “‘For I know the plans I have for you’, declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and hope.’” It was from Jeremiah 29:11. I thought it had to be from God because the man said exactly what I needed to hear: what I needed was simply a word of encouragement.

I must have had a desperate, almost hopeless look on my face. At the depth of my painful anguish, I was willing to reach out to anything for a small measure of solace. It happened to be a street evangelist, whose accomplices saturate the tourist infested Honolulu.

During my emotional and religious high, I was absolutely convinced in my belief in God, but since then my experiences, education and questions have prompted a shift. More and more I leaned towards disbelief and less and less did I see the relevance to believe in God. What brought me to this point? I was so thrilled and content with my faith. More importantly, my faith comforted me and carried me through many grave life struggles.

Those experiences tore my soul apart; it was conflict that caused me to reflect very seriously, and that is why I write this journal entry. Now, many of my conservative Christian counterparts might interpret this conflict as a mischievous temptation from the Devil. I don’t think it has anything to do with the devil since this concerns the struggle to reconcile faith and reason.

After my baptism, I entered the most blissful stage of my faith. I was then a new creation, not afraid of the devil and ready to do God’s work. I dedicated my life to ministry, preaching the gospel and apocalyptic prophecy. I was so certain about the imminent Second Advent that I didn’t care much about anything else.

My friends kindly informed me that if I ate pork I would end up roasting in hell and so I stopped eating pork. I obeyed the Levitical laws without asking any more questions. With this newfound urgency, I began to spread the news that if anybody ate pork that it was against God’s law. When I ran into opposition, I thought to myself “how can anyone reject the written word of God?” But as I studied the bible I realized that perhaps it is not a simple as I thought it was.

The same book that tells us pork is unclean also condones slavery, the stoning of children and the death penalty for infidelity. Meanwhile, Romans 14, 1 Timothy 4 and arguably Matt 15 all uniformly declare very plainly that no food is unclean.

There are also no references that Paul ever required gentiles to keep Jewish ceremonial law, in fact, he spoke strongly against it in most cases as he insists that Christians are saved by faith not regulations. (cf. Rom 3:28, Rom 8:4, Gal 5:6, Gal 3:26-29 and Gal 3:12)

That experience made me reevaluate my own faith. Initially, I dismissed this experience as the devil tempting me and pressed on with my conservative views.

As I studied theology in college, again the contradictions in the bible shocked me beyond comprehension. All the passion stories from the 4 gospels have completely different details and sometimes they even disagree on the date of Jesus’ death (cf. Mark and John).

The birth narratives have critical contradictions with history and with one another. Further, Jesus is portrayed differently in each of the 4 gospels. One of the most dramatic differences is the prominent “I am” phrases in John which emphasized the divinity of Christ that does not appear anywhere else in the synoptic gospels. Those marked variations are evidence that gospel authors took interpretive liberty and were not simply recording history. One only needs to read the gospel stories carefully to discover those obvious contradictions.

On top of the contradictions in the English bible, we also need to consider the fact that we do not even possess the original manuscripts of those documents. Biblical scholars from a variety of backgrounds recognize the fact that the older the manuscripts, the more variants we can find in them. In some cases, we don’t even know what the original states anymore and this became clear to me when I was studying biblical Greek. Therefore I conclude that the documents in the New Testament are not historically reliable.

Some may argue that those variants don’t really matter, but I doubt the validity of that argument. If it was indeed the case, why spend millions of dollars studying the manuscripts? This concept directly contradicts those who claim the bible to be inerrant since we can clearly see countless errors, major or minor.

The Hebrew bible has a myriad of ethical and theological problems. What kind of God slaughters children simply because they were Egyptians? (Exodus) What kind of God would promote the genocide of an entire race including the infants? Meanwhile, the virgin girls were spared for the pleasure of the Israelites (Numbers). What kind of God would destroy the whole world with an impulsive act of supernatural flooding because he regretted creating human beings? (Genesis) What kind of God would condone murder in order to test a man he already knew was righteous? (Job) These are the type of texts that encourage brutal religious conflicts in the world and provide us a sense of delusional entitlement.

Many conservative scholars seek to rationalize those behaviors by demonizing the victims, but if the bible wanted to defend God’s actions, the authors would have done it. We have to remember that those victims of God are just like us. They are individuals with dreams, loved ones, hopes and aspirations. Biblical authors didn’t try to defend God because those allegedly divine actions were acceptable to an ancient and barbaric tribal people. They did not see the need to defend their theology. Seeing the stories as they are, I can no longer accept that image in good conscience.

I felt guilty for letting my sense of justice and morality measure the God of the bible. Then I realized the Adventist church did the very same thing on the topic of hell. Many evangelical Christians believe hell is eternal and forever, but Adventists took a stance against that and sought to reinterpret the meaning of hell using the argument “the wages of sin is death, not eternal punishment.” We reinterpreted hell to be a temporary event that leads ultimately to death. But, if one reads the bible carefully, there are much more references to the everlasting fire of hell and the eternal punishment than texts that prove our own belief.

Adventist cannot accept a God who would torture forever; therefore we reinterpreted or rationalized the texts that say otherwise. No matter how we reinterpret the Greek text or conjure up fancy footwork, which would make any soccer player proud; “eternal” and “everlasting” means forever. If we did not see a problem in this “word of God” in the first place, we would not even take the time to rationalize it.

If we were right about hell, the biblical authors would have chosen a different word. They have a wealth of vocabulary at their disposal. The way Adventists feel about the God who would torture is the same way I feel about a God who intervenes in the natural world.

The majority of the Pentateuch, wisdom literature, Kings and Samuel contains a very prominent theological formula called the Deuteronomistic History. The essence of this Deuteronomistic History is that God is more or less equated with Santa Claus. If you obey God you are blessed and if you don’t you are cursed. Any mature or sensible person should already know the world does not work that way. Sometimes evil triumphs over good.

It might seem as if jettisoning biblical fundamentalism influenced my faith: I would be lying if I said it did not. Although the bible is not a trustworthy historical account, I still believed in the mighty God whose very essence transcends the words of the bible. The bible then becomes a document of beautiful poems, stories and confessions of our cosmic origin. It functions very much like a myth, stories that I could meditate on to discover the deeper meaning of life.

My faith in God was still strong and relatively uninfluenced by the unreliability of the bible. I guess my perspective would be very similar to what Karl Barth describes as “I hear the words of God when I read the bible, but the bible itself is not the word of God”.

Now, what brought the demise of my theistic view was not the bible, but science and the problem of evil.

I used to be a traditional creationist who believed God created all the life forms on earth with all its varieties. I believed that the complexity of life proves that there is a theistic being despite the problem of evil.

While being a creationist, I always treated evolution and natural selection with skepticism, but was always fascinated with why people believe such a flawed and irrational theory.

It was not until after college that I actually read part of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and explored some of the most current breakthroughs in evolutionary biology. I discovered that there were fewer theists in the higher echelons of the scientific community (cf. the academy of science) and even if there was a theist, the validity of evolution wasn’t disputed. Scientists might disagree with the details of the theory, but there is no question that it had happened.

I studied the majority of the arguments made by the recent “intelligent design” or ID movement against the theory of evolution and what the answers to those arguments are. I quickly became aware that intelligent design’s arguments were far too weak compared to the abundance of evidence science has accumulated over time.

Again, I don’t have time to explain or describe all the arguments, but I cast aside intelligent design for the following reasons. 1. In order to disprove evolution, the ID movement must propose a much better theory that is supported by an even greater amount of empirical evidence. 2. In order to disprove evolution, the ID movement must defeat all the evidence provided by a variety of “independent” scientific disciplines that converges at the same conclusion. Those disciplines are evolutionary biology, paleontology, evolutionary neuroscience, embryology, genetics, and geology and so on.

The nature of science is discovery of the unknown and the testing of a hypothesis by accumulating evidence. Although bias remains inevitable, the proposed hypothesis does not limit the possibilities for their conclusions therefore limiting the effect of faulty conclusions. ID seems to have made up their minds about the assertion of having a designer and work backwards to prove their conclusions. In that sense, ID is not being faithful to science.

Not only does modern biology and cosmology diminished our need for a theistic being in the universe by demonstrating that complexities can emerge naturally without a designer. It also explains almost all of our current human behavior, economy and biology; such as why human beings are capable of both altruistic and destructive behaviors, why we are so irrational with our money and why we have wisdom teeth, an appendix, tailbone, bad eyes and seemingly uncontrollable sexual impulses. These are explanations that do not require us to berate and belittle ourselves by subscribing to the biblical “fall” story.

Science, with all its benefits to the world, I have to admit that it also has intrinsic limitations. Science will never provide absolute morality or tell us what life is about. A popular objection to science is usually the accusation that science cannot explain everything such as morality, love and consciousness, but the fact that we don’t yet understand something does not necessarily prove the existence of a theist being least of all the God of the bible. In fact, I give scientists prop for having the courage to simply say “I don’t know” and embrace the mystery of the world with awe and reverence.

As I mentioned before, science is not the only reason why I gave up on theism. The second reason is the problem of evil. Theologians call the problem of evil theodicy. It is the age old question many theologians wrestled with. Essentially, the question is how can a benevolent and omnipotent God allow tremendous suffering in the world?

If God really controls nature, then the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, which killed thousands of innocent people, would be God’s act against humanity. If that is so then why send aid or provide humanitarian assistance? That image of God is a sadistic and evil one.

If evil happens because God ordained it then why do we hold criminals responsible for what they do? The most important question is that how can one be comfortable with a God who acts outside of human moral standards and get away with it.

If God is all-powerful and chooses not to intervene, God is malevolent; if God is benevolent but evil still exists, then God is powerless.

I abandoned my fundamental views about the bible as soon as I discovered the fallibilities of the scriptures. I was resistant at first and desired to come up with explanations to defend the bible’s image of God. I soon realized that I was only rationalizing.

Theism in its many varieties generally assumes the active intervention of God in human history. I do not have enough space to go into the details of the debate, but I have not heard one convincing argument because of their limitations and inconsistencies. In fact, most respectable arguments of theodicy are not biblical such as the “choice” argument, which sought to explain the evil in this world with neglected human free-will. (No biblical author made that argument) The weakness of this argument became apparent when it failed to address natural disasters.

For a while I took refuge under the process theologian’s idea that “God is a persuader, not a coercive entity”. This one is by far the most consistent few of God in my opinion. However, there is a problem with this view as well. God as a persuasive entity breaks down when we consider people of other religions are often “persuaded” to do different things. So the persuasive words we hear in our head are really not a uniformed entity telling us what to do, but our ability to reason.

As soon as reason entered the picture I had to ask the question “then what is the purpose of God?” Why should I still believe in God if I have no idea how God works, or what God says? It seems to me that theism is more of a human creation to cope with the uncertainty of the world once human beings became a self-aware species.

I started to observe the world even more closely. I examined my religious path and discovered many places where I experienced God. Those transcend realities that many human beings feel are what gave us the foundation for religious belief. I discovered that it was in church when the sounds of the congregation crescendos into a majestic melody of praise. It was at a friend’s home when we gathered to talk about our fears and aspirations. It was in my loving pastor who embraced me when I reached for him with my tear filled eyes mourning after my first breakup. It was at the beach when we stood in awe of nature and the vastness of the universe. It was in loving my wife, the most beautiful woman, and in striving to make this world a better place for everyone.

I realized that God is not a theistic being who looks down on us and intervenes in history, but God is the reality that can be experienced. It is our natural ability to connect to something greater than oneself and part of our creative nature and insatiable curiosity. God is in all of us and binds us together. Where love is expressed God is there also. In essence, God is life itself.

I do not yet fully grasp that transcendent God. I understand God is not supernatural, and yet God is transcendent. God does not intervene in our lives, and yet God is still part of our lives. I cannot and will not try to define and bind God into my limited language, but if God is life itself, then perhaps the best way to worship God is by living fully.

So, can I still believe in God? Yes and no. Yes, because God is the transcendent feeling I experience on a daily basis through love. No, because I do not put my trust in a non-existent theistic being. God is now more real than ever. My view of this ultimate reality called God allows me to reconcile my spiritual mind with my rational mind. I can now experience God freely and without shame. Only now can I truly worship God, not with songs or words of flattery, but with my life, love, creativity and discoveries.