When I was a child I had a very simple faith in the gospel. I simply believed what I had been taught, and I accepted it without question. As I became an adolescent and a young man, I became far more critical of my beliefs, requiring more concrete reasons to believe in them. I took apart each component of my theology and tried to understand its purpose and prove whether it was worthy of my devotion or not.
Fortunately, my critical examination proved to be extremely rewarding. I came to realize there were far richer reasons to believe in the gospel than “because my parents said so.” It turned out that the evidence for the gospel was deep and varied, and the curious, critical mind could plumb its depths forever, constantly finding greater meaning and greater justification in faith.
False Maturity)
Looking back, I see what my thought process was as an adolescent and young adult. My logic was that if I had once been a child, and had a simple mind, then anything that I believed in in that state was likely also childish and simplistic. Thus, my childhood faith became suspect merely by association.
And, to be sure, some overly-simplistic childhood notions were discovered, such as believing that society was comprised purely of “bad guys” that always did what was wrong and “good guys” that never did. But there was also much of my old belief system that turned out to be even truer than I had ever known.
Sadly, I know others who reached their adolescent, skeptical phase and never progressed any further. They let their skepticism call into question their faith, but they didn’t seek a meaningful answer. They didn’t conduct their own research or dive deeper to find out the truth of the matter. They found it easier to throw out baby Jesus with Santa Clause, discarding the pale imitations of faith without ever finding the genuine article. The skeptic who does not find the real truth hardens into a cynic, actively resisting any further opportunities for growth.
Such an individual has arrested their intended development. Normally it is a good thing to pass through the phase of skepticism, culling the mind of everything that is superstitious and unfounded while deepening one’s roots into the truer truth that remains. But like many blessings, skepticism is two-sided, becoming a curse to those that misuse it.
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This is Reason #1 for Disbelief: being stuck at an adolescent stage of skepticism, having pushed out all childhood beliefs and becoming hardened and cynical through the process.
There are other reasons for disbelief, and I will examine them over the next few days. I hope this series will be helpful to those who have temporarily lost their way, as well as those trying to rescue a loved one. All the world will be better when all of us can better believe.
I have already reviewed the account of the Lord’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in my standard scripture study, but the story has been on my mind lately and I wanted to address a few points about it in greater detail. All the verses I will be discussing can be found in Genesis 18-19.
God’s “Haggle”)
What first prompted my thoughts on this story was hearing a celebrity give it as evidence of God’s capriciousness, an example of Him being so petty and heartless that He would bargain and haggle over the lives of His children before destroying them. This is, of course, in reference to Abraham petitioning the Lord if He would spare the city for fifty souls, then forty-five, then forty, etc.
And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?
Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?
So, let me first point out that these accusations are obvious falsehoods, completely misrepresenting the story as it is written. God did not haggle or bargain over how many people it would take for Him to spare the city and He never changed His position on the matter. Abraham’s position changed, but not God’s.
The first thing to note is that God never brought numbers into the matter. He simply expressed His judgment, which was to destroy the city, no numbers attached whatsoever, and it was only Abraham who brought up the idea of sparing the city if a particular number of righteous people lived there.
Abraham wanted to know whether God would have spared the city for 50 righteous, and God assures that He would have… but there just aren’t 50. Abraham wanted to know if God would have spared the city for 45 righteous, and once again God indeed would have… but there just aren’t 45. And so on and so on, until Abraham reaches his own personal limit for mercy: 10 righteous souls to spare the city.
That Abraham presses the matter no further than 10 seems to suggest that he, himself, could not condone sparing the city for any less righteous than that. Even he felt it was justified to lose nine or eight righteous, if it meant that such a terrible evil could be blotted from the earth. And, once again, God shows that His mercy extends as far as Abraham could ever hope for. God, too, would have spared the city for 10 righteous…but there just aren’t 10.
When I read the account in Genesis 18, it is not about God and Abraham haggling, it is about Abraham not yet fully trusting God, and him exploring the limits of God’s mercy until he is convinced that God’s judgment is worthy of his trust. God had pronounced judgment, but Abraham wasn’t able to trust that judgment until he was convinced that God came to that determination by due prudence and fairness, and God indulged Abraham’s tests because He wanted to earn Abraham’s trust.
Thus, there is no haggling going on in this story and no changing of God’s mind. God was simply allowing Abraham to double-check His calculations so that Abraham could begin to learn to trust the Lord’s decisions.
God’s Mercy
And, as it turns out, not only was God as prudent and merciful towards Sodom and Gomorrah as Abraham, He was even more so. For after there were not even 10 righteous in the city Abraham would have surrendered any good souls to their destruction, but God would not. God shows us in this story that He cares for even the individual righteous soul, the 1 over the 99. Thus, while He was determined to destroy the city, first He sendt two angels to draw Lot and his family out of the midst of it.
In the records we have, Abraham never beseeched the Lord for the life of his nephew, Lot, even though he knew that Lot lived in the path of destruction. Abraham seems to have been ready to let his own kin die as a justified sacrifice for this destruction of evil. It was only because God was more good than Abraham that Lot and his family were spared.
A Lesson for Abraham)
Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice the righteous for the greater good returns again later in his story. When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, we do not see a moment of hesitation in Abraham’s response. He forthrightly makes preparation, goes to the place of sacrifice, binds his son, and raises the knife to take the lad’s life. Abraham knew that his son was good, but as with Sodom and Gomorrah, he was willing to sacrifice that good to fulfill the demands of the Lord. But then, as with Sodom and Gomorrah, God intervened to save the good and provide another way.
I wonder whether Abraham being commanded to sacrifice Isaac was, in part, a way for God to teach Abraham a lesson that He had tried to teach with Sodom and Gomorrah, but which hadn’t fully clicked yet. I wonder whether Abraham was too quick to believe in the God that would sacrifice good to destroy evil. I wonder if God temporarily assumed that role when He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, so that He could then dispel that illusion from Abraham once-and-for-all. I wonder if one of God’s lessons to Abraham in that moment was “Stop seeing me as the God of sacrifice, the God of taking, the God of destroying evil. See me as the God of saving, the God that brings back, the God of redemption!”
This is, of course, pure speculation. I don’t claim to know that this was the subtext to Abraham’s trial, or even if it’s likely. It is simply something that I wonder about. At the very least, it does stand out to me that we have no account of Abraham pleading for Lot’s life nor Isaac’s, and yet God saved them both. Whatever else those facts mean, surely they mean that these stories show God’s mercy, not wrath. They show His care, not indifference. They show His compassion, not brutishness. They show that God is a God who can be trusted when He declares His judgment because He has already analyzed the situation more than we ever could, and He cares for the innocent more than we ever would.
Being distracted from our loved ones for today means giving up the only “this day” with them that we have.
And even a single day lost is a terrible cost. We have 40,000 days or less for our entire life. 7,000 days for our child’s entire childhood. 365 days for our child being at each particular age. These moments are dear, and when they are gone they are gone forever. They must not be given away cheaply.
We’ve all heard the classic dilemma, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Most people merely see this as an amusing puzzle, and quickly discard it as having no suitable answer.
But really, it is a very serious question, one that was posed by Aristotle himself over 2,400 years ago! The fact that we are still talking about it to this day, and still shrug it off without any clear explanation is a very alarming fact!
Now, to the creationist, the question really isn’t that troubling. If God created the Earth, the atmosphere, the seasons, and the universe as we know it, is it really any stretch to say that He could have architected the egg-bearing chicken also? And whether He did that with an egg or a mature fowl doesn’t really matter, He could have begun with either without any paradox.
But the materialist throws out the idea of an omnipotent creator, and puts in His place the forces of undirected, spontaneous evolution. Darwinism states that neither the chicken nor the egg came first, but a single-celled organism which, through a lengthy process of mutation and natural selection, developed into the species that we now call the chicken.
And I might concede that this would be a possibility, if we could agree that the evolution would have to have been a tool purposefully directed by the hands of an intelligent creator. But if one insists that this evolution occurred totally at random, which is the position of modern science, well that’s just plain ridiculous.
The Requirements)
Again, the proposal is that the chicken would have had to originate as some sort of single-celled organism, one which reproduced by dividing itself in half, but eventually it evolved into a creature that reproduced itself via a fertilized egg. This would mean that at some point in between there would have been a creature that still reproduced asexually, but which was also gradually developing sexual organs. Organs that eventually were able to produce and lay an egg, but initially this egg would not yet have been functional.
This means that the pre-chicken was expending energy and effort, giving up nutrients of its own body, subjecting itself to a more vulnerable state, all to produce something that was—for the time being—useless. And again, this might be acceptable if some Higher Power was requiring the life form to undergo this process, but it according to the laws of natural selection, this would mean that the species had a detrimental mutation which would have led to its extinction, not to its flourishing. This unnecessarily-handicapped pre-chicken simply would have been overrun by all the other variants that weren’t wasting energy laying undeveloped eggs.
And that’s just the matter of the chicken and the egg. But by itself, a female chicken still cannot produce a fertilized egg. Just as the species would have had to evolve from a replicating cell into a chicken that had embryonic and adult stages, it also would have had to evolve itself into male and female forms also. Thus it had go from being sexless to having sexed versions, but at least for a time those two halves would still have been reproducing asexually until they evolved into full sexual maturity. That means that there would now be two separate strands of random mutation, each evolving separately from one another, but somehow also in perfect tandem, developing in complementary ways, remaining compatible with one another once they both reached full sexual capability.
A Valid Question)
So as it turns out, the childhood question of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is actually a very weighty matter. It has all manner of scientific and metaphysical implications. 2,400 years later it still pokes holes in the most airtight theories of man and leaves us either with a stronger belief in our divine creator, or else a greater confusion of this inscrutable world.
In the middle of his mortal ministry Jesus Christ gave the following instruction:
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
-Matthew 7:13-14
The last time I read this passage I was caught by this particular sequence of words: “few there be.”
“Few” would suggest less than half, probably significantly less than half, in any case a clear minority. And if a minority of people are finding the pathway to heaven then, by definition, the average goodness of man would be insufficient.
This makes me wonder…am I only of average goodness in my everyday dealings? Am I only of average zeal in my seeking and proclaiming of the truth? Or is my discipleship the sort of which one would say “few there be?”
Above Average)
I am also reminded of another declaration from Christ:
For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.
And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same.
And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.
-Luke 6:32-34
I believe that these verses describe the efforts that most people make to live good and wholesome lives. And while it certainly is not bad to love, do good, and lend to those that we are close to…once again, the default goodness is clearly not enough.
If “few there be” that find the path to eternal life, and most people are trying to be basically good, then we must aspire to be more than basically good. We must be extraordinarily good, uniquely valiant, and exceptionally virtuous. Christ says that we can find the strait and narrow way, but not by doing the status quo.
Perhaps this isn’t the comfiest of teachings, but at least Christ was good enough to forewarn us, to give us a chance to check ourselves and change our path. Pay close attention to how these words stir your heart, and give those feelings the heed and serious consideration that they are due. Don’t be going so fast that you can’t make the turn-off that takes you from where you are headed to where you need to be going. It’s a pretty narrow road, after all, and few there be that find it!
There are many instincts that we people have ingrained in us, even without being taught them. We tend to fear heights, have a revulsion to spoiled meat, and pull our hand back when it is burned. These reactions are all invented from within us, though, they do not immediately correspond to some physical, universal reality. The universe is not afraid of heights, the universe is not repulsed by spoiled meat, and the universe does not pull back when it is burned. Fear and revulsion and recoil are not calculable by any sort of physical equation, they are only psychological illusions.
One might also make the case that it is the same with our morality. There is no observable universal reality that hates slavery and abuse. There is no observable universal objectivity to loving kindness and bravery. Could it be that these are also delusions of the mind? That they are simply extreme emotional hallucinations, totally detached from reality, just like being afraid of heights?
It’s an interesting argument but I do not find it convincing. In fact, it undoes itself.
Abstractions of Reality)
Let us consider the first half: the notion that the universe itself is not afraid of heights, and so our fear of it is merely a psychological illusion. It is true that the greater cosmos does not shrink back at the edge of a cliff. All of the elements and minerals and flakes of dust that have no mind attached to them happily roll off the edge of the cliff without a care in the world. But that doesn’t mean that our fear of the cliff is random or detached from reality.
The fact is, we fear the edge of the cliff for a reason, and that reason is based on three universal truths. The first is that objects which become untethered at a high height will be accelerated downward by gravity. The second is that an object which has been accelerated into another object will experience an opposite and equal reaction, a force that presses against it. The third is that a force will continue through a body, dispersing its energy in fractures and breaks, until that other body has cancelled out that force.
These are all objective realities that apply to every physical object in the universe. The combined effect of them is, of course, that an object that is suddenly released at a great height will fall, and hit the ground with great force, and be broken into pieces. Our seemingly subjective fear is actually an abstraction of multiple objective truths that can combine to destroy us. It is well worth appreciating how our minds are able to take all these separate physical phenomena, and encapsulate them with a single, visceral emotion.
So yes, there is no universal fear of heights, but that fear is an abstraction of physical laws. So our fear does actually have an objective basis and justification, and no one is deluded for listening to it. The same goes, of course, for our revulsion of spoiled meat and our recoiling of our hand when burned. These impulsive, instinctive reactions are simply abstractions of objective truths in chemistry and thermodynamics.
The Moral Reality)
Having recognized these objective roots to our other instincts, it seems most logical to assume that it is the same for our sense of morality. To suggest otherwise, one would have to make a compelling case as to why one set of instinctive, emotional reactions is grounded in reality, while another is purely relative, and I struggle to think of what such an argument would be.
To me, it is far simpler to assume that our disdain for slavery and stealing is a subjective abstraction around an objective reality. Not a physical reality, but a spiritual reality, and the disdain is not a protection of our physical form, but of our spiritual form. We are afraid of unkindness because it is a reflection of unseen universal, moral truths that will damage our spirits just as surely as falling off a cliff will damage our bodies. So even if our sense of justice and compassion and virtue are subjective illusions, they are still illusions that signify an underlying truth.
Many of my generation and culture have expressed that we were raised with strict—and sometimes severe—consequences for any time that we slipped from the moral standards we were expected to live by. Quite a few of us developed a strong sense of perfectionism as a result, inflicting upon ourselves an impossible standard that has tied more than a few of us into painful knots. Too many of us have had constant feelings of being guilty and unworthy. Suffice it to say that there were some flaws in the way we were given our belief systems.
But on the other hand, I have also seen several of my same generation that were raised under an anything-goes sort of mentality. Moral misdeeds were only winked at, and consequences obscured, resulting in some incredibly reckless, selfish, and narcissistic tendencies. Either morality was relative, or it didn’t even exist, and many avoidable wounds were suffered by that denial of objective truth. From my observation, this philosophy wasn’t really any better than the extreme legalism.
The Inevitable Extreme)
Either way, one can easily come to feel that they were dealt the harder hand. I have seen many of my peers throw the baby out with the bath water, renouncing all moral law because they were hurt under an inappropriate application of it. They lack the nuance to see that there was good in the theory, if not the execution.
And, frankly, these flaws and nuances are inevitable. Whatever principles people choose to live and raise their society by, there will always be those that take the principles to an inappropriate extreme. If you decide to instill a strong sense of moral obedience, sooner or later you will have individuals that enact cruel punishments for any perceived deviance. If you decide to instill a carefree, life-loving mantra, sooner or later you will have individuals that pursue carnal indulgence without any regard for the people harmed along the way. Humanity is made up of all sorts. It has the best of people within it, but also the worst, and it is the worst who will always find a way to pervert the well-meaning conventional wisdom.
Lessons Learned)
Having explained this, let me point out two essential takeaways related to the matter:
In any philosophy that you choose to live by, it is worth considering what potential evil might sprout from it down the line. Life philosophies are not so much a destination as a direction, and it is important for us to follow the logical conclusion of that direction to its furthest extremes. In the wrong minds, what are the worst interpretations that others might take from your teachings? If you identify what those perverse extremes are, then you can call them out ahead of time, setting in place the bounds that will let you and others know when things have been taken too far.
Any principle, even one that is true and good, becomes corrupt when pursued at the expense of all other true principles. Going back to the idea of life philosophy as a direction, we might also consider it as a vector: a line stretching across a graph. It may run from one inappropriate extreme to another, but in between it might run through some very worthy territory as well. Additional principles can be thought of as more vectors, other lines that stretch across the graph, and at certain points intersect with our first. Those intersection points help us greatly in that they represent the natural bounds that each principle sets upon the other. For example, if we are mature enough to hold both the principle of moral obedience and grace for sin at the same time, then each will keep us from running too far with the other. Together they plot for us when to forgive and when to call for repentance. They will even show us how to do both at the same time!
I’ve been part of an addiction recovery group for a while, and I’ve noticed something that can trip up addicts in our sobriety. I think it is a trap that applies universally as well.
I have witnessed and experienced how an addict will sometimes re-examine his definition of sobriety, playing with the fringes of exactly what behavior he will consider a relapse and what behavior he will not. Sometimes he will find a behavior that really doesn’t contradict his conscience or give him any guilt. So he relaxes the rules and guidelines in that one area, but not long after he finds himself pushing the envelope further and further, and ultimately relapsing multiple times in a row.
So was he wrong in his appraisal and just trying to justify doing things that he should have felt guilty about all along? Not necessarily.
As a general rule, good begets good and evil begets evil, but there are times where an action that is neutral, or even good, should be treated as evil, not for its own sake, but because of the evil places it tends to lead to. The addict has to acknowledge what actions follow his choices down the line. Lending a sympathetic ear to a friend might seem like a good thing to do, and in-and-of-itself it might be, but if spending time with that particular friend often leads to you eventually losing your sobriety, then maintaining that relationship is actually a bad thing to do.
The addict—and everyone else as well—is playing a game of chess against his own nature, and to not get caught in a trap he has to know how to play six moves ahead. He must reject what is clearly wrong, but also reject whatever leads to it. He must place a prudent and deliberate buffer around evil. He must come to know himself very, very well.
Spiritual Wanderings 