Just Believe

Hello,

I just came across your faith-journey clip, and I want to start off by saying this video of yours was the first of yours I’ve seen. I found your openness to having people answer and guide you refreshing, and as someone who likewise would describe themselves as living in the logical, reasoning, and frontal-lobe, part of the brain. I think I can help narrow the skepticism down for you. However, before I get to it, I want to clarify a couple of things.

First clarification, even if and when you are sure and certain in your faith and your relationship, it is still something to cultivate and grow and build. Continue to seek the Truth, continue to read scripture, commentaries, and exegesis. Don’t just stop at “I believe.”

On Fauci and blind faith

Second clarification, in regards to your point on Fauci, I fully understand, but this is also where you apply those logic skills and separate out context. Fauci’s claims were evident lies for anyone looking because while he said, “trust (the science),” “believe (the experts),” etc, the things he was asking you to trust and believe in were re-definining what those terms meant. Science has never been a dogma or an outcome, but a process, a process specifically built on questioning and challenging; in flat out testing the claims in the most rigorous (and sometimes ridiculous) ways to rule out any other possibilities. So “trust the science” was not internally consistent (important later).

Similar with the “believe the experts” mantra where “expert” went from being someone who was regarded in a specialised field or had significant experience in that field to being “someone who didn’t question and parroted the official narrative” while people who were experienced and long credentialed “experts” in relevant fields were being blackballed, cancelled, and ignored. As such, the “believe the experts” was actively discarding evidence to the contrary. They were asking you to believe without questioning and trust without verifying; to have blind faith.

What “believe” actually means

Which now brings me to the real meat of my reply. It is all about faith. The Bible, from start to finish is “repent and believe” “repent and believe,” “believe,” “believe.” The two consistent narratives of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation are “believe” and Jesus. The Old Testament is a constant pointing to the need for a Savior, how the Saving process will work, and describing Jesus as that Savior and how to recognize him when He comes. The New Testament is showing that Jesus came and describing how He fulfilled the saving work and that He was the promised and described Savior for us to recognize. Throughout both the Old and New Testaments it is consistent in faith and belief in Jesus as the principal function of receiving the blessings of His saving work (Salvation). So yes, you just need to believe.

The parent analogy

However, I know where you are coming from, so I will explain further how this works. First, think of it as a parent. It’s not always prudent to give your children, especially young ones, full details on why you are giving them specific instructions, but you are asking them to trust you, to have faith in you, and to believe in you and what you say. If they do, things will work out. If they don’t there are usually real world consequences for them not believing/trusting/obeying. You can see this frequently in the Old Testament where God frequently tells Israel do not do X or Y will happen, they do X, Y happens. They complain about Y. God reminds them: “repent, believe, follow my commands.” As a parent with young children I encounter the same frequently, “don’t do X or you’ll be grounded” [Do X] -> [Grounded] -> [complain about grounding] -> [“say you’re sorry, do what you’re told, don’t do it again”].

Connecting this to the above clarifications with Fauci, this is where the internal consistency and relevant expert matters. You have a history with your parents/child that builds as the life-expert in that situation; and the more consistent a parent is in their directions and consequences, the more likely that child is to follow those directions and trust the parent. It’s about the context, evidence, and the relationship.

Second, it still comes down to faith regardless. No matter how much evidence you have, no matter what you set as your personal burden of proof you have to have faith in either the outcome being proof of God, proof of your method, proof of the authenticity, etc… you have to have faith the historian recorded correctly, the scribe copied correctly, the lottery number was going to get drawn regardless, is the fact that X proof of God or just something that was going to happen anyway?

The God box

Years ago in a no longer existing web forum I was asked a similar question tied to a theoretical scenario the asker called “the God Box.” In their scenario they were proposing that their burden of proof for God was that He prove himself through a quantum oracle problem. In essence, they would use a quantum device to generate a random number and I would use a quantum device to generate a random number and if the two numbers matched it would be sufficient evidence of God.

While I believe God is capable of causing that outcome, I also believe God doesn’t need to. There is evidence for God everywhere you look: geology, biology, physics, chemistry, permaculture, logic, mathematics, history, etc. So I asked how large of a number for the odds would he accept, and if that matched, would he then still accept it?

In the medical world many treatments have side effects with seemingly rare outcomes 10,000:1, 10,000,000:1, and yet there are people who come down with those side effects regularly. What might seem like insurmountable odds are real world 1:1s for those people. The big lotteries have odds of roughly 300,000,000:1, and we have winners nearly every month. When these rare outcomes occur it’s easy to hand-wave away because “someone had to win” “there’s so many people, even billion:one means a few people will come down with it, etc… “there was the possibility of that outcome.” Because it was within the realm of possible, it becomes easy to justify the result as something that would, or at least could, have happened anyway, God didn’t need to be involved, so there’s no proof He was even if He caused the number you asked for to come up. So, with a quantum oracle problem, or God Box, you’re not removing that, you’re just adding a few zeroes to one side of the odds ratio. A number still has to come up and the one that does would, or could, have come up whether we were invoking God or not. As the great and wise Lloyd Christmas once said, “So, you’re saying there’s a chance!”

The Kierkegaard problem

Which brings us to the Kierkegaard problem. A professor at Phoenix Seminary once summed up Kierkegaard’s philosophy as “every time you think you have God figured out He gives you the finger and throws a wrench in your understanding of Him.” And I think that applies well to faith.

Is your faith dependent on a specific dice roll holding steady and you lose faith if you roll a 4 instead of a 6? Or is it dependent on not getting side effects from a certain medication that you take every day? Or on not having to face your own sin head on? If so, then yeah, faith will be a problem because ultimately this comes down to pride. Centering the decision on whether you were rigorous enough or whether it will impress those that question you… that you truly weighed the evidence and didn’t find it lacking, etc… quoting the above, “proof of your method, proof of the authenticity, etc… you have to have faith the historian recorded correctly, the scribe copied correctly…” or that “the chemical, biological, and physical world would have or could have occurred this way with or without God.” Each of these can be hand waved away if that’s what you want and what you want to believe.

Which means all that really matters in the end is faith. Do you believe? And it’s not blind faith. There’s mountains of evidence (literally), but do you have faith in what God says about who God is and how to have a relationship with Him “repent and believe” or do you have faith in your ability to excuse each piece of evidence to say you were rigorous and it wasn’t enough for you?

God says to test the word, to throw it in the refining fire, iron sharpens iron, etc… These are all analogies to weighing the evidence and filtering out the truth He’s provided so that it isn’t a blind faith, but it is still just faith.

So yeah, all that to say, “you just have to believe.”