Why Believe?
John 17:1-3, Romans 1:16-17
In I Believe Because, Batsell Barrett Baxter tells a story of two young boys who decided to see who could chase the most rats out from under a barn. One boy had a long pole with which to poke under the barn to drive the rats out, while the other stood on the opposite side to count the number of rats that escaped. The first boy used the pole, & rats went everywhere. He yelled to his friend, "How many rats did you see?" The reply: "Not a single one." When the first boy went around the barn, he found his buddy standing there with his eyes tightly shut! He hadn't seen a thing. The lesson: Evidence is important, but we have to have our eyes open in order to be moved by it.
We Christians believe in a God who created us & loves & us sent His Son to die for our sins, & to whom we will give account for how we choose to live in this life.
But, we live in a world of unbelief, even antagonism, toward our faith. Many think that believers are either unintelligent or lacking in integrity, or both. The best-sellers of our day have titles such as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The God Delusion, & "The End of Faith. This makes it all the more imperative that we know what we believe & why. We need to be firmly convinced in our own minds, & we need to be able to explain to others why we believe, as well as what (1 Peter 3:15).
So before we begin discussing What we believe, we need to think about Why we believe. Why is faith better than unbelief? Why should we believe, when most don't? What is at stake when people choose not to believe?
I'd like to suggest four reasons why we need to believe:
1. To live in hope & to avoid despair. In the same book mentioned above, B. B. Baxter tells about a meeting he had with a former student, a brilliant young man who was almost finished with his graduate degree, yet was in utter despair about his life. He had given up on faith & had no idea what he wanted to do, & didn't really care about doing anything. When Dr. Baxter asked him about his future, he said that he just didn't see anything worth living for. When asked why he didn't just end it all, he replied, "I've thought about it often."
That young man was struggling with what we call "the human predicament." William Lane Craig describes our predicament this way:
As man looks around him, all he sees is darkness & obscurity. Moreover, insofar as his scientific knowledge is correct, man learns that he is an infinitesimal speck lost in the immensity of time & space. His brief life is bounded on either side by eternity, his place in the universe is lost in the immeasurable infinity of space, & he finds himself suspended, as it were, between the infinite microcosm within & the infinite macrocosm without. Uncertain & untethered, man founders in his efforts to lead a meaningful & happy life. His condition is characterized by inconstancy, boredom, & anxiety. His relations with his fellow men are warped by self-love; society is founded on mutual deceit. Man's justice is fickle & relative, & no fixed standard of value may be found. Despite their predicament, however, most people, incredibly, refuse to seek an answer or even to think about their dilemma. Instead, they lose themselves in escape. (Reasonable Faith, p. 52)
This predicament stems from the denial of absolute truth – including the denial of God. Samuel Beckett accurately portrayed this futility of existence in the absence of absolutes in his play, "Waiting for Godot." Throughout the play, two men engage in trivial & meaningless conversation while waiting for a third man, who never arrives. When humans attempt to live without God, life has no meaning & is utterly hopeless. We are merely waiting for a "Godot" who never comes.
Faith, on the other hand, gives us a hope to live by, that there is meaning in life, a reason for living, & something beyond our temporal lives here. For example, the pivotal moment in the book of Job comes in 19:20-29. It is at this point that Job, battered by his friends' lack of understanding & their constant allegations of his wrongs which he hasn't committed, facing utter despair b/c of his pitiable condition, finally cries out, "I know that my Redeemer (Vindicator!) lives," & declares that somehow he will see Him face to face. He is driven to this conclusion by his despair, but also b/c he knows intuitively & because he believes in God, that this cannot be all that there is to his life. In our darkest hour, faith gives us hope.
Unbelievers will shout that the existence of God is a mere myth, evolved over time to give us comfort, but lacking in all reality. Actually, the reverse is true: non-believers invent myths to live by so that they can avoid utter despair. One of these is, "Somehow everything will be all right." Another is, "In the end we are all annihilated, & all suffering ends," not realizing that such a belief means the end of all happiness & goodness, too. We must believe, or despair becomes our only reality.
2. To be whole as human beings. In one of Plutarch's stories, two men learn that a friend of theirs has died, so they go at once to his home to see if there is anything they can do. They find his lifeless body lying on his bed, but attempt to rouse him anyway. They pick him up & hold him upright between them, but when they let go, he falls to the ground. Finally, after numerous attempts, one of them says, "There must be something missing inside." Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 declares that we were created with a spiritual dimension, which unbelief denies. When that happens, "something is missing inside." An acquaintance of mine who calls himself a "non-theist," points to his church background as "a central part of who I am." Yet, he does not see that by turning his back on his faith, he is denying a part of who he really is. This probably explains why even non-believers generally seek some form of "spirituality." It is commonplace to hear people self-identify as "spiritual, but not religious." In place of a personal God, they exalt the environment or nature or technology. Why? Because they cannot feel complete without trusting in something outside of themselves. The sad part is, most people turn away from the One who knows them best & who loves them most.
The Christian faith acknowledges that we are spiritual as well as physical beings, & provides us with the wholeness we long for, b/c it promises us redemption of both flesh & spirit, and we need that.
3. To have a basis for ethics & morality. Those who deny God have to face this fact: without Him, there is no firm reason to live well rather than living horribly. As Craig points out, one can live as either a Stalin or a saint, since the denial of any absolutes means there is no basis for saying that one is better than the other.
There are & have been numerous attempts to get around this. In the 1960s, "situation ethics" attempted to say that any choice is okay as long as it is loving. But who is to say that "love" is the standard? And by what criteria does anyone decide what "loving" behavior is? Currently, post-modernism says that everything is right as long as it's right for you, that there is no absolute morality b/c there is no absolute view of God, if any at all. A few years ago I spoke on a forum on same-sex marriage & homosexual behavior at Virginia Commonwealth University. My task was to present what the Bible says about homoerotic behavior. During the question-&-answer session, one man politely asked why there was a need for a common morality, why we can't just each have our own standards, without declaring the behavior of others to be "wrong." I responded by asking him if he therefore was willing to say that the Holocaust was in some sense "right," b/c it "worked" for some people, & by his definition of "right," there was no way to say that such atrocities are wrong. He sat down without saying a word. The truth is, even non-believers cannot live consistently within their own world-view. Not many will say that child abuse is right, & will certainly cry "foul" if someone mistreats them. By rejecting belief in God, they find themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma of their own making.
Besides, if there is no God, & therefore no right or wrong, then there is/should be no punishment for evil or reward for good, nor is there any motivation to do one rather than the other. Again, hopelessness!
Only faith in a God who determines right & wrong makes any sense. Otherwise, how do we account for any good in the world?
I will never forget January 13, 1982, a miserably cold winter day here in Richmond, with deep snow & lots of ice. Schools were closed, & I had not gone in to the office that day due to the weather. We were watching the evening news on TV when the story broke that an airliner had hit the 14th Street Bridge in Washington, D.C. Air Florida flight 90 hit several cars on the bridge before plunging into the icy waters just as it was growing dark on that winter evening. Several on the bridge were killed, as were almost all of the crew & passengers on board the plane. But some survived, largely due to the heroic efforts of Arland D. Williams, Jr., who became known as "the man in the water." As rescuers threw ropes to those struggling to stay afloat in the icy darkness, Arland Williams kept grabbing the rope & passing it on to other passengers, several of whom were pulled to safety. When all survivors had been rescued, the rope was thrown once again, but by this time Arland Williams had succumbed to the numbing cold & slipped under the water and drowned.
I submit to you that if the non-believers are right, & there is no such thing as right or wrong, & no action is inherently better than any other, then Arland Williams, Jr. was not a hero. He was a fool. He should have taken the rope himself, even if he had to push others aside, & made sure of his own rescue, even if it meant that others had to die. But who is willing to say it? There are very few unbelievers who are foolish (or warped) enough to be consistent with their own world-view in this regard.
4. To keep from losing what matters most in life. What matters most is what matters for eternity, not just for time. It is our relationship with the God who made us, a relationship that He longs to have continue for eternity. It was the French philosopher & skeptic Blaise Pascal who first pointed out that unbelievers are wagering that there is no God, betting eternity on their unbelief. From this he reasoned that, all evidence between God's existence & non-existence being equal, it makes more sense to believe than not to believe. Even if there is no God, nothing is lost. If there is, everything is lost.
I'm not suggesting that Pascal's "wager argument" is an adequate reason to believe, or that all of the evidence is equal. But he was right about one thing: Unbelievers are betting their souls that their point of view is correct. And for what? A belief system (because, in spite of their protests, it IS a "belief system") that leads only to despair, denies their full humanity, & provides them with no basis for a good life. And what if they're wrong?
Christianity recognizes & provides the two necessary conditions for a meaningful, valuable, purposeful, & happy life: (1) God, & (2) life after death. And for this reason, "We Believe"!
--Tommy South
