Introduction to Psychology

This is the first lecture of a really good course on psychology:

Has Science Knocked the Bottom Out of Miracles?

Some anti-theists say, “Is belief in God not a little antiquated? When people were still ignorant, they used to attribute all natural phenomena to the activity of a God. But surely this time is past? We now have the laws of nature to explain everything that is happening in the universe.”

This was one of C. S. Lewis’ pet peeves. He answered the objection on numerous occasions, even writing a fictional dialogue about it in which he talks to a friend.

“Miracles,” said his friend. “Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know now that Nature is governed by fixed laws.”

“Didn’t people always know that?” said Lewis.

“Good Lord, no,” said his friend. “For instance, take a story like the Virgin Birth. We know now that such a thing couldn’t happen. We know there must be a male spermatozoon.”

“But look here,” said Lewis. “St. Joseph—“

“Who’s he?” asked his friend.

“He was the husband of the Virgin Mary. If you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?”

“Wouldn’t most men?”

“Any man would,” said Lewis, “provided he knew the laws of nature—in other words, provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. But according to your theory people in the old days didn’t know that nature was governed by fixed laws. I’m pointing out that the story shows that St. Joseph knew that law just was well as you do.”

“But he came to believe in the Virgin Birth afterwards, didn’t he?”

“Quite. But he didn’t do so because he was under any illusion as to where babies came from in the ordinary course of nature. He believed in the Virgin Birth as something super-natural. He knew nature works in fixed, regular ways: but he believed that there existed something beyond nature which could interfere with her workings—from outside, so to speak.”

“But modern science has shown there’s no such thing.”

“Really,” said Lewis.

“Which of the sciences?”

“Oh, well, that’s a matter of detail,” said his friend. “I can’t give you chapter and verse from memory.”

“But, don’t you see,” said Lewis, “that science never could show anything of the sort?”

“Why on earth not?”

“Because science studies nature. And the question is whether anything besides nature exists—anything ‘outside.’ How could you find that out by studying simply nature?”

A Little Aphorism about Religion and Atheism

“If religion is perpetual childhood, then atheism is perpetual puberty.”

(I’m not saying this is true of many or even most  people, religious or otherwise. The aphorism is rather meant to express that if one of these charges is made, the other charge can be equally made. Personally, I’m trying to be cautious with any such charges. And perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that “anti-theism” is perpetual puberty, but that wouldn’t have sounded as well .)

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis: Two Different Paths to Faith and the Bible (2 of 2)

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis: Two Different Paths to Faith and the Bible (1 of 2)

Why Do Muslims and Jews Not Get Along?

A CELESTIAL LOTTERY: Pascal’s Wager, the Atheist’s Wager, and Job’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager

I grew up in a church where life was all about having a personal relationship with God. Over the years, however, there were many indicators that this personal relationship was probably an illusion. Authority, experience, and argument all failed to provide me with the assurance of God I was craving.

What kept my faith afloat for a while—even after my quest had failed—was a pragmatic calculation. Did I, after all, have anything substantial to lose by believing in God? Was it not rather a win-win situation? If there was a God and I believed in Him, I may be welcomed into eternal bliss. If there was no God and yet I believed in Him, my faith might still comfort me in my mortal pilgrimage. Most of all, it would help me face death with a sense of hope for yonder, and thus my last moment before being snuffed out was not going to be one of despair.

I like books with happy endings; this seemed a happy end worthwhile to pursue.

Plus: I would never find out that I’d been wrong. I would never find out that there is no God, as there would no longer be any “me” to find out anything.

Neither would an atheist ever find out he was right. After death, an atheist could not turn to me and say, “See, I told you there is no God.” If there was an “I-told-you-so” at all after death, it would be entirely in favor of the believer.

Why, then, abandon my belief in God? Because I’d like to “sin” a little more on this earth? Because I’d like to overthrow the Heavenly Autocrat and live the life of a libertine? But what kind of liberty would that be? Would it not be the liberty of flying without wings—which means not to fly?

The bird should not throw away its feathers, and I should not throw away my God.

Thus far my reasoning. I did not know it at the time, but I could boast no originality for it. The concept is commonly known as “Pascal’s Wager,” named after the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). He said that since reason is useless in deciding whether there is a God, we need to wager. And who would risk eternal damnation for the sake of a little unbelief? Indeed, “there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.”

Don’t be stupid. Wager for God.

The Failure of Pascal’s Wager

Soon, however, my pragmatic faith ran into problems. I realized that faith was not solely dependent on a simple choice. If, for instance, I made the decision to believe in a flat earth, real belief in a flat earth would not automatically follow. The mountain of evidence that had convinced me of a round earth could not so easily be swept aside.

Likewise, after authority, experience, and argument had failed to substantiate my belief in God, I could not simply snap my finger and say, “Still it’s useful to believe, and therefore I do.” It just didn’t work. I could, conceivably, maintain a pretense of faith in this way, but not real faith. For other people, such pragmatic faith might work—people who make no distinction between what is useful to them personally and what is true universally. But I am not one of those people.

There was another reason why Pascal’s Wager did not work for me. The options from which I had to choose were just too many. Pascal gives the impression that there are only two choices. There are not. My wager did not simply lay in the choice between God and no God, but rather in the God of my particular branch of Protestant Christianity and countless other options. My God was not a vague notion of God, but the concrete God who had revealed Himself most fully in Jesus Christ and was today best understood by (preferably Charismatic) Evangelical Christians.

Now the gods and their worshippers have a long history of sending each other to hell. It is no different within Christianity. According to the Catholic Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, every Christian who goes to church carrying a Protestant Bible (meaning one with sixty-six books rather than with more than seventy) is by that token “anathema,” which is to say, “deprived of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, … separated from the society of all Christians,” excluded “from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth,” excommunicated and anathematized and judged as “condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate.”

Such, at least, was the not quite ecumenical standard pronouncement of anathematizing Christians who held gravely wrong doctrines, a criterion which, according to traditional Catholicism, all Protestants fulfill simply by bringing the wrong Bible to church.

Protestants have returned the kindness. Starting with the Reformation, we have a long tradition of seeing the Antichrist in the robes of the Pontiff and trying to “save” people from the demonic deceptions of Catholicism.

If I wager for God, then which God do I choose? Do I not run the risk of being “condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels” by having a heretical Bible in my home? And conversely, may I not end up in the claws of Antichrist and ultimately in the same eternal fire by becoming a member of the Catholic Church?

Not to mention all the non-Christian religions. By accepting Christ as Lord and Savior, I run the risk of getting on the bad side of Allah, who is One and only One, and who abhors the misconception of God as Three.

And so forth, and so forth. Zeus might just as well meet me across the fateful river and strike me with lightening for never having brought him any sacrifices or even the slightest form of recognition.

If there were but one religion in the world, but one concept of God, then Pascal’s Wager would hold slightly more weight. As it is, our multiple religious options turn his Wager into a celestial lottery in which the majority is bound to lose.

But even if different gods did not send each other to hell, even if the choice was really as simple as “God or no God,” Pascal’s Wager is problematic at best. Which leads me to the Atheist’s Wager.

The Atheist’s Wager

Pascal’s Wager turns God into a vending machine in which you insert the right coin called “faith” and—plonk!—the elixir of life is ready for your grasp. Where you got the coin from is no concern of the machine’s. You might have worked hard for it, you might have stolen it, or it might even be a convincing counterfeit. The Vending-Machine God doesn’t care. All He asks for is faith in Him, whatever the motivation of that faith.

But if there really is a God, and if He is ultimate Truth itself,

would He not value honesty more than a doctrinal coin? Even honest unbelief? Such a God might say on Judgment Day: “You have refused to profess something outwardly that you could not bring yourself to believe inwardly. Therefore I welcome you. Your love for truth was—unbeknownst to you—love for Me, for I am Truth.”

This thought is sometimes called the “Atheist’s Wager.” The atheist lacks belief in Zeus, Allah, Jesus, or any other god, and wagers thus: “If, contrary to my lack of faith, there is a real God, a personal One who is in the position to determine my eternal fate, He is likely going to appreciate my hesitation to align myself to one of the many pretentious gods that are out there. And as I can see no light in these thick woods of pretentious gods, I will be my own light and live without any god.”

Makes sense.

So what am I to do? Go back to the business of daily life and henceforth eclipse any notion of God from my earthly existence?

I can certainly understand why some people do so. Still, I propose a third way, one which I would like to christen “Job’s Wager.”

Job’s Wager

In the biblical story of Job, we find a man whose sudden suffering is irreconcilable with the kind of God he was raised to believe in. Some of Job’s friends arrive on the scene to comfort him, or rather: to raid to God’s defense against Job’s accusations. They are the apologists, the keepers of orthodox doctrine and proper faith.

Job, in contrast, dares to question God. He hurls his doubts into heaven, even when heaven remains silent for longer than he thinks he can bear. He also tells his friends that their defense of God is dishonest: “Will you defend God falsely? Will you show partiality toward Him? Will you plead the case for God? Will it be well with you when He searches you out? Or can you trick Him, as one person tricks another? He will surely punish you—No hypocrite shall come before Him” (Job XIII: 7-10, 16).

Here Job voices the basic idea of the Atheist’s Wager. God might actually punish those whose faith in Him is rooted in dishonesty, and He might welcome struggling souls who honestly question Him.

But Job doesn’t stop there. His conclusion is not, “Therefore I will live without God.” His conclusion is instead, “I don’t have much faith in God—at least not the kind of God I was brought up to believe in—but I will put my doubt in God.”

Putting my doubt in God, expressing my unbelief toward Him, is Job’s Wager. It asks, “What do I do with my lack of faith, with my questions about ultimate existence? Shall I bottle them up? Shall I go on a mission of telling others how unreasonable their faith is? Or shall I cry the questions out into the night? Even if there is no answer?”

Job’s Wager makes me weigh the options and conclude that putting my doubt in God is the best choice. If there is no God, the exercise will have helped me to get in touch with my innermost feelings, live authentically, appreciate my existence more consciously, and not take the world for granted. In a word, putting my doubt in God will have made me more human. It also keeps me from the dangers of uncritical faith, in which people follow pretentious gods too easily. And if there is a God—one, furthermore, who actually cares—will He not hear my cry and eventually meet me as He met Job?

This was an excerpt of my illustrated booklet Job’s Wager: An Alternative to Pascal’s Wager and the Atheist’s Wager.

Seek and You Shall Not Find: Disappointment with Prayer

One major disappointment in my life as a Christian has been unanswered prayer—so much that I have actually grown quite cynical about petitionary prayer. When I hear someone asking God for something, I cannot help but think, “Yeah, right. Nothing’s going to come of it anyway.” It is not that I want so badly to be cynical; it’s only that my experience with petitionary prayer, both first-hand and second-hand, has been mostly negative.

My most fanatical and embarrassing prayer “crash” occurred as a teenager when I prayed for my mole eyes to be healed. I actually convinced myself that God would heal them and accordingly began a complete fast (including liquids) until my healing would materialize. I genuinely thought I had received supernatural faith for the healing, and that I only needed to persevere in prayer to see the healing through.

I even smashed my glasses “in faith”—only to humbly buy new ones a few days later.

This is just one of many examples of my wayward religious zeal back in my teenage years, and its bitter disappointment has been deepened by many other prayer failures. Nor am I only speaking of myself. If that were the case, I might conclude that something’s wrong with me and try to fix it. But I’m speaking of most Christians I know.

Take the church I grew up in, for instance. It’s a lively congregation whose members firmly believe in God being involved in their daily lives. Yet, whenever the leaders gave room for testimonies about how God has answered prayers, I felt that I’d like to hide behind my chair because I was so embarrassed about the testimonies.

The reason? Well, the testimonies usually went like this:

Person No. 1:
“Last week, God really convinced me of His involvement in my daily life. He truly cares for every little thing. You see, I thought I’d lost my wallet in my car, but search as I might, the wallet wasn’t to be found. And then I paused a moment and prayed, ‘Lord, You know where my wallet is. I trust You.’ And can you believe it? As I stepped out of the car, I saw my wallet lying on its roof! I must have absent-mindedly put it there before I stepped in the car! Now isn’t God good? He cares for every detail in our lives. Nothing is too mundane for Him. Hallelujah!”

(Loud cheers and clapping.)

Person No. 2:
“I just want to thank God for having given me a job. I had been out of a job for more than a year, and I tried dozens of places to get a job, all for nothing. But God really encouraged me not to give up, and last week He was so good as to give me a job again. It’s not necessarily the job I’d dreamed about, but I’m still so grateful. God is good. He is our Provider.”

(Exclamations of “Hallelujah” and “Amen.”)

Person No. 3:
“I stand here today only because of God’s amazing protection. Last month, I had a car accident, but the Lord must have sent His angels to hover over me, because I got away with a few injuries. And now I’m almost completely restored. And my insurance covered everything too. Praise the Lord!”

(Repetitions of “Praise the Lord” from the congregation.)

Person No. 4:
“Brothers and sisters, I’m a living testimony that God still heals today. For several weeks, I had a bad backache. But then, a week ago, Pastor Gerald prayed with me, and the next day the backache was much better. It’s still not all the way gone, but I’m not going to listen to the devil’s lies that I’m not healed! By His stripes I am healed, in Jesus’ name! I trust Him that my backache will gradually become better until the healing is complete.”

(Once again loud clapping, although she never returns to report on her complete healing.)

I could go on like this, but I think you get the point.

Person No. 1 would have found his wallet on the car’s roof even if he hadn’t prayed. In fact, such misplacements and sudden findings happen to people all the time, irrespective of their religion.

Person No. 2 did get a job, but what about all the people in the congregation who still didn’t have a job? Why did God answer his prayer and not those of all the others who were looking for work? The fact is that the unemployment rate in my church was identical with that in our region in general. For every person who got a job there were probably two who lost theirs. They just didn’t give their testimonies. Once again: I see no difference between the unbeliever and the believer. Prayer seems superfluous.

No. 3 is no different. She got away with a few injuries, but what about the young engaged man in our church who was smashed to pieces in a car accident a few years before—together with his mother? What does his former fiancé say about No. 3’s testimony, or his never-to-be father-in-law and now widower? Where were God’s angels then? Maybe it had nothing to do with God’s angels, but only with chance. Or the long-awaited son that a couple in our church had gotten after many prayers and prophecies, only to be fatally run over by a car while still a toddler. What about all the grand prophecies regarding that child now?

And No. 4 is hardly any more convincing. The prayer might have helped her psyche and made her backache momentarily better, but by her own admission it wasn’t really healed yet.

Speaking of healing, the stories I have accumulated over the past ten years have led me to a dismal conclusion: Prayer makes no difference beyond that of a psychological—and through it, sometimes physical—impact.

I’m not saying that people don’t experience healings. But whatever their cause, it seems that prayer makes little difference. Some people report remarkable healings who didn’t even believe in God, while others have all the top healing evangelists in the world pray for them and organize international prayer chains, only to die of their fatal diseases.

I, myself, have been a part of such a prayer chain. A well-known church sent out a prayer request for one of their more prominent sick members. Besides many leaders in the healing ministry, thousands of Christians around the world prayed for that person. People even sent her e-mails and cards with encouraging “words from God,” including myself. I felt God leading me to a passage in Psalms about someone being close to the gates of Hades but experiencing restoration.

In spite of all the fervent prayer and the messages from “God,” she died after a few weeks of struggle.

And this story is by no means unique. The prayers of thousands often receive no answer, and answers sometimes come even though nobody asked for them. One is temped to turn Christ’s words around: “Seek and you shall not find; do not seek and you will find.” This is of course not always true, but it is the picture I have formed over the years.

 

I Spent this Week with Four Wise Old Men

It’s true. Granted, three of them were completely fictitious, and all four of them gave me company merely through the pages of books, but it was still four remarkable older men whose words I was privileged to read this week.

I am talking about the Greek philosopher Aristotle from the fourth century BCE, an old Jewish merchant in Jerusalem as pictured by Lessing in 1779, a prophet called Almustafa whose poetic words first came to us in 1923, and a Cuban fisherman from around 1950.

I had not planned to spend the week with these four old wise men, but it so happened that my reading consisted of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet (a re-reading), and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

All four of them show (or at least attempt to show) the wise perspective of someone who has been on this earth for a while.

In the Ethics, it’s Aristotle himself who teaches us that the middle path between the extremes is usually the right one.

In Lessing’s play, it’s the Jew Nathan who advises on what to do about the conflict between the three great monotheistic religions.

In Gibran, the prophet is asked about various aspects of life before boarding a ship and heading home.

And in Hemingway, the old fisherman muses about the issue of Man against nature and Man being nature while on the sea for the biggest catch (and loss) of his life.

What struck me most when I compared them is that all they saw life in a differentiated manner. Theirs was not a world of black and white, but one which had acquired many shades of gray throughout the years.

Of gray. But also of color.

The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

Today, I got an e-mail about my Amazon book review of “How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture” by Francis Schaeffer:

hey saw your review of how should we then live. liked the chapter by chapter breakd own but i couldnt really get a god feel for the ideas and views of the book just wanted to know if you have any more in depth reviews on the book i am a pentecostal christian and never really have time to read books but am interested in you review please email me back with the review and or information

Luckily for him, in 2003 I actually did write a more detailed report on the book, even illustrated with relevant pictures. I dug it up from some CD-ROM in a big CD pile, and since I went to all that trouble, I thought I might just as well post it here.