Dear Friend,
I apologize for not having written earlier. I have no legitimate excuses. I will admit, I have at times been angry, intimidated and more often than that, fearful of the hatred I expected you to have for me. I understand we come from two sides of a spectrum that have long argued with unmatched emotion and with the sharpest of words. I ask that we put down our petty tricks and shelve our playground finger pointing. More seriously, I hope we can stop with the accusations of the destruction on account of both of our worldviews. I thank you for your willingness to converse with me, opting out of the typical tactics of emotional manipulation or creative word play. It is so easy to judge a world view by its abuse but let us work hard to not let this be said of us.
However, let us also recognize the mutually exclusive foundation of each of our claims. Either there is a God(s) or there is not. I am not aware of a third position. Therefore, let us grant ourselves our prejudice in this area while we also readily admit together that any prejudice influences our perception. One may ask what grounds remain to argue from or to what purpose is further discussion, to which we both shall respond that we are seekers of truth. Wouldn't we want to speak to those that claim to harbor any truths about humanity and our existence? Doesn't an investigator thoroughly interrogate all the eye witnesses to the same event?
My friend David wrote last week, "We must develop the competence and honesty to evaluate our beliefs and judge what we know. The second step is to be honest in communicating our knowledge. If we follow these steps our trustworthiness will nurture an atmosphere in which truth may readily be found." My friend, this is my only wish for this letter to you.
I must begin by saying I have always admired you. I admire your search for certainty. Even further, I admire your desire for rational certainty and a determination to work with our tools of objectivity in logic, science and even mathematics. There is no doubting the contributions your atheist friends have had in these areas. There are unquestionably brilliant minds amidst your camp; my favorites are probably Nietzsche and Sartre. Even more than your approach to seeking truth, I admire your skepticism of beliefs based seemingly on emotional or experiential frothiness.
I empathize with your denial of God. I honestly share that I don't know of many serious believers who haven't dealt with severe doubts during some time in their lives. I can speak from my own experience of going through so many times of doubting God's actual existence, providential design or ultimately, his control in my life. Sadly, more often than not, these doubts were instigated by my disbelief in another believer's experience rather than any internal questions I had. Here I find no greater point of empathy with your view than in your frustration with persons claiming to have experienced miracles, for my experience has not contained any kind of biblical proportioned instances of divine intervention. Instead, if I were to explain where I believe I have seen God guide or direct the path of my life, you would ask me to grab a dictionary and look up the words "irony" and "coincidence."
A friend of mine used to say, "if you have thought a major religion foolish than you have not understood it." I want to thank you for not having kicked all of your Christian friends to the curb and I respect your unwillingness to join the likes of Sam Harris or Bill Maher, who speak of seeking truth but have no apparent respect for those that do not agree with them. I also want to apologize for those in my camp who have not taken your position seriously, especially your questions asking for proof. I wanted to apologize for last year when I merely sent you a lecture to listen to and expected it to change your mind in the 15 minutes of its duration. I have done you a disservice by not meeting with you honestly and by not responding with substance void of dogma or cliches like "if you just believed then you will see".
My friend, it is my desire to be able to share only objective truths with you as a means of providing a pathway to rational certainty that there is a God and moreover, rational certainty of the Christian God. However, you and I both know I will fall short of such a goal. Instead, what I hope you allow me the time to do is share my experience in hopes of striking a note that will ring harmoniously with something in your own experience.
First, I would like to address the view that faith in God is but a convenience or wishful thinking or "the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence," as Hitchens put it. This has with it an assumption of ease and lack of reasoning. If faith in God is reduced to a mercenaries ticket to Heaven or an excuse to judge others on wrongdoings, I would agree with Hitchens. But if faith in God instead leads us to pursue truth, to discover the goodness that lies at the core of existence and to do my best to implement those findings into the daily action of my life, I have found no more difficult task.
As Lewis writes "only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is." Why, I would argue that my life, in some ways, is getting more and more challenging rather than the reverse. For the deepest truths I have discovered in my life have been revealed from my experiencing the deepest joys and the deepest miseries. Both of those experiences are hinting that I should give up more and more of myself. I think of a basic example of a son becoming an older brother, then a husband, then a father. Each step requires more of a sacrifice than the previous step. It is a path of progressive purification. My experience has been littered with examples of the deep truth that sits at this seemingly preposterous itch of sacrificial love, a deep conviction to be consumed by humility and service. On the flip side, I know that the greatest misery in my life has come when I have acted in direct opposition to these foundational truths and done something self-seeking that ended up cheating myself or someone else. This is why I believe, like Chesterton, that "The difficulty with Christianity is not that it has been tried and left wanting, but it has been found difficult and left untried."
I mentioned earlier about the lack of monumental instances of divine intervention in my life. I want to clarify that a bit for you. God has not held the sun from setting or spoken to me through a burning bush. However, my life has contained a series of what you call coincidences, continually guiding me to the same path of humility, sacrifice, and love. As much as I can, I would like to live according to these truths that I have found more meaningful than doing something for myself. My reasoning here is based on the continual revelation that what was discovered as a deeper truth once will be discovered as a deeper truth once more. This is the same reasoning you use with scientific observations when you expect matter to behave the same way when under the same conditions. When I am able to respond within the framework of these truths, the contentment I feel overwhelms me to the point of certainty for a loving God, albeit not rational certainty but experientially reasonable belief. Additionally, when I have experienced these so called coincidences it gives me my deepest feeling of honor that I am a part of the ultimate purpose. Why, if there is a God, there would be no greater purpose than in serving him, right?
My friend, I know the questions of origin are frustrating. I know this has historically been an intense point of contention in our feud. Bottom line: I wasn't there and you weren't there. Friend, this is probably a familiar argument but questions of origin around what and why seem to have greater importance than how and when. For example, isn't the reason for a phone call more important than how I dialed the numbers and when I made the call? The why gives you the understanding in order to properly respond. I grant you that I am making a large assumption that you would want to find meaning in the origin of the universe. I guess I am making this assumption based on your devotion and diligence to find the truth (even if it is just to prove us theists wrong). Let's not deny it. Origin has deep implications for us both.
Lewis makes the observation, "Reason might conceivably be found to depend on another reason and so on; it would not matter how far this process was carried provided you found reason coming from reason at each stage. It is only when you are asked to believe in reason coming from non-reason that you must cry halt." Or as my friend Ravi says, "Nothing in this physical universe can explain its own existence. Something does not come from nothing. Therefore, in order for there to be something (and there is) there must be at least one state that is self-existent and does not derive its existence from something else." So if this logic is sound, at the origin of all things, we must firmly believe that there is something containing the capabilities of all things, from the reality of infinity purposed to us by math, to the intelligence of humans to discover such a truth, to even the non-material existence of things like energy and light, and the decision and creative capabilities of the human mind. Aren't we left with a potentially infinite, non-material, intelligent, creative and conscience thing? I grant you this paragraph will demand further discussion and I look forward to it.
My friend, I want to continue with our love for reasoning. Do you believe there are limitations to reasoning? Even if it means the limitation is a result of things we simply can not know? I'm sure you can guess from what I have said previously, that I do. "All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of single fly". Won't there always be more to discover? Not only as to the what of science but the how and the why? Are we not limited by the sheer magnitude of what we can still know and possibly what we never will? My point is that there are things beyond our understanding. This doesn't mean such things don't still exist or impact our lives, right? We still drank water before we knew it was two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. And if God is the infinite creator of all things left to be discovered, would he not be the last thing we come to fully understand, if our minds are even capable of such a thing, since he is the least derivative? Perhaps this point is best suited for people in my camp who believe they have figured this whole God thing out, and then for you.
We often complain that if there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world? Let us not forget the truth, "You can not be mad at God and not believe in him at the same time." I want to end with a rather simple example of what I'm trying to say. The Truman show (if you haven't seen it) is a film about a creator of a television show in which an unknowing individual is living in the midst of a created society. The film ends with the profoundest of statements about humanity. After coming to an understanding that his environment was artificial, the main protagonist is faced with the option of remaining in the safe protection of the creator vs. exiting the set into the dangerous and unknown real world. Our hero elects his freedom over safety.
My friend, this is where the paradigm of the Christian God shines brightest. The Christian God is a protector but he is also a loving God. What is the most difficult and most important aspect of parenting? Establishing a balance of freedom and safety as to foster an atmosphere of maturity in all areas. And like any child who finally identifies and appreciates the background work of his parents in these two areas, their freedom allows for the decision of obedience as the most reasonable thing. You see, I agree with Ravi when he said, "God has put enough in this world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing. But he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason alone." I have found the Christian paradigm and diagnosis of what is wrong with the world and also what is right about it to be revolutionary in every part of my existence. A diagnosis of a broken world that is determined to seek for truth and comfort in everything. A world that seeks to find its remedy for an intentional rebellion from a loving creator, who gave us the freeing option to rebel in the first place and yet provided the potential for reconciliation and ultimate redemption of a creation back to its creator. That redemption grounded on the intrinsic truths of sacrificial love and service, the ultimate design and fulfillment of our decision making abilities.
Please understand I speak to you not as an older brother trying to convince and conquer you as another point to add on a scoreboard of souls, but instead as a younger brother who humbly yearns for my older brother to reconcile himself with our father.
Your Friend,
Tim
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