In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last crusade, one of the most compelling scenes is when Indy is rushing to retrieve the Holy Grail in order to save his dying father. But to reach it, he has to faces a series of challenges, the final of which requires him to cross a chasm which is too wide to swing or jump. The only advice he gets from his father’s grail diary is that he has to take a leap of Faith. With time running out and his father’s life on the line, he has no choice but to try. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, steps over the edge of the cliff, and finds that there was a bridge disguised to look like the rocks, which allows him to cross the abyss and arrive at the Grail.
There is an argument being used by those who are critical of Christianity that has been growing in popularity over the past few years, and for the life of me, I can’t see why people still find it compelling. The argument challenges the idea of Faith itself, which is defined in the book of Hebrews as “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The argument states that people should only rely on things which they have 100% proven, and because they don’t have 100% proof of God’s existence, they deny that He is real. They claim that the idea of trusting things that are unseen is nonsense, dismissing Christians as gullible sheep who must be crazy to believe in something that is not guaranteed. They would never base their life around something they can’t fully prove and understand. When you discuss these ideas with people you will inevitably discover a belief that they hold that contradicts this explanation. But moreover, the claim is simply not true. Whether they realize it or not, they are living by faith.
For instance, driving a car is a lot more dangerous than most people realize. The National Safety Council reports that in 2022 over 46,000 people died as a result of motor vehicle accidents. They also reported preliminary data that states in 2022 motor vehicle crashes were the third leading cause of death by unintentional injury. Last year Agero put out an article that claimed driving is more dangerous than ever. They reported that an increase in the use of larger vehicles, an increase in speeding, and a rise of drivers that are either distracted or driving under the influence has made the roads a pretty dangerous place to be. But despite these reports, we drive to work every day with the assumption that everything will probably be fine. We put our trust in the system that says we will be safe if we follow the rules, but that is a promise they can back up. This is a far cry from being able to guarantee that we will arrive safely, but we do it anyway. There is no way we can truly know what will happen, but we find the balance between what we fear might occur and what we hope is the likelihood of that fear coming to pass.
Another way to look at it is through the lens of trust. Late last year, the New York Times reported that when taken orally, a large swath of the over-the-counter medicines that were supposed to help with nasal congestion don’t work at all. A panel on the F.D.A. voted that “a common decongestant ingredient used in many over-the-counter cold medicines is ineffective.” That means when added together, there were 250 medicines worth $1.8 billion, that did absolutely nothing. And I’m willing to bet that at least some of the people who bought these products say that they can’t live a life of Faith because God hasn’t been proven, all the while they are taking pills that promise a false reality.
The people who claim they are only rely on things because they have 100% proof either haven’t thought it through enough or they’re lying. We all place our trust and confidence in things that we have no control over. And yet, many people can’t seem to connect the dots between the massive amounts of faith they put into extremely fallible human beings and the possibility of putting their Faith in an unseen God. We continually dream about the future items we wish to own or the jobs we hope to have, all with the subconscious pretext that there will in fact be a day in which those hopes will come to fruition. James 4:14 puts it “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” By this logic people should be highly skeptical of every area in life, but for some reason the only category people apply this amount of scrutiny to is the existence of God.
From here, some people will pivot and say that these examples don’t address the question of existence since they have observed examples of these events occurring. Even if they can’t prove that every medicine will work the way that it claims to every time, they have at least seen medicines that work before, so it is not unreasonable to assume that other medicines exist as well. But since they have never seen the existence of God proven they say there is no reason to assume that He is real. Therefore, they say, they can still claim that they only believe in things that they know have been proven to be real.
But that’s also not true. Many of the people who make this claim also believe in the Big Bang Theory, which, simply put, states that the universe was created by particles that collided, reactions happened, and from that at least the basic components of what we see today were created. But this process has never been replicated. No scientist has ever been able to demonstrate this theory, and thus it has not stood up to our standards of proof. Scientists will claim that there is compelling evidence for it, but even if you believe them, that isn’t proof, it’s conjecture. Even if every scientist in the world agreed that is how it happened (which not everyone does), that doesn’t make it true. You just have to take their word for it, which mean you are putting your Faith in people who have no proof to back up their claims.
And yet, when Christians bring forward examples of people who claim to be eyewitnesses of resurrected Christ and died horrible deaths for that belief, we are told that their word doesn’t count.
And if you inquire further, it gets even worse. If you ask questions like “where did the particles come from if you cannot get something from nothing?” and “how did living matter arise out of non-living matter?” All they can do is appeal to ignorance and say that there must be some exception to the rules that they haven’t discovered yet that will backup and validate all their claims. But no, clearly, it’s the Christians who are the unreasonable ones.
To believe in the Big Bang and things like it, is to believe in something you cannot see and has not been proven. But those who whole heartedly agree with this theory will reject the existence of God using the very same logic. You can’t have it both ways. Either you don’t accept even a whiff of something that hasn’t been proven, or you have to agree you believe in things for which you don’t have proof.
Obviously, this does not end the conversation around Faith and the existence of God. But in those conversations, don’t allow people who criticize the idea of Faith to pretend they are not taking leaps of Faith themselves. If having 100% proof is where you want to hang your hat you will never find a home. I understand that having Faith isn’t easy, but having it is not a question of if, it’s what. What do you choose to put your Faith in? If you spend your life seeking the truth and you’ve come to your beliefs because of arguments and evidence you’ve found convincing, so be it. But so do we. And if you are that willing to put your faith in earthly things, then why not also have Faith in God? Or as Pascal puts it, “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."
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