A Critique on Faith
The word faith can mean many things in the modern era. It can be a synonym for trust, it can also mean acting on a belief or used as a catch-all for the word religion. When I use the word faith here I mean specifically believing in a proposition while lacking empirical evidence to conclusively prove it. This is usually the first semantic hurdle that requires clarification whenever discussing faith.
I suspect some ardent believers may voice immediate objection and claim that their faith in God is in fact grounded on evidence, albeit evidence that requires some sort of emotional witness rooted in communication with God. Needless to say, this is not what I mean when I use the word evidence, nor is it what most people mean when they use the term. Religious or spiritual evidence tends to be highly anecdotal and subjective, differing from person to person too dramatically to be deemed reliable. Evidence, as I use the term here, is produced by a dispassionate analyses of facts that hold integrity across geographic, religious, and cultural lines. Though it shouldn’t, for some the issue may begin at this definition of evidence, but stay with me.
To be clear, I am not criticizing faith when understood to mean optimism, hope, or positivity. I heartedly embrace this definition of faith. This faith is vital to the well-being of our species, and can allow us to heal, to let go, and help us move on from difficult things that happen in our lives, such as breakups, illnesses, and deaths. It’s vital that we’re able to make the distinction between faith used to denote positivity, and faith used as a means of inquiry and rational-thought suspension if we’re to understand each other on this topic. This is usually the second semantic hurdle that requires explanation.
Here are some of my issues with faith and belief in a traditional God.
Most religions consider faith one of the supreme virtues a person can exercise. But how many of us question why faith is so vital to religion? The answer, to me, is simple: there isn’t reliable or consistent enough evidence to believe in the myriad claims all the different religions make without faith. We’re talking about metaphysical claims that supposedly reveal the way in which the universe works: heaven, hell, moral commandments, divine visitations, and revelations. For example, when a preacher yells from the pulpit: “you’ll forfeit heaven if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your savior,” or an imam proclaims that “it is God’s will that apostasy from Islam is met with death,” or a yogi says “you must believe in at least one of the 30+ million Hindu gods to obtain salvation,” we are being asked to suspend our disbelief and submit to these ideas, despite their incompatibility both with each other and a worldview committed to evidence-based beliefs.
The fact that the three aforementioned faith-based assertions are claims that can’t be simultaneously true leads us to an insurmountable dilemma, namely, only one set of claims, if any of them, could possibly be True (with a capital “T”) at any given time, unless of course you subscribe to a specific form of relativism, which I don’t.
When we use the tools of faith: desire, hope, and wishful thinking, and not the tools of reason: critical analyses, evidence, and skepticism, in our search for truths we open ourselves up to being led in any number of varied theological directions. We need only observe how many Christian churches exist within the United States today, each making claims about the nature of the universe and God, and each with a remarkable number of incompatible doctrines about the same divine being. The members of these congregations are clearly well-meaning, but it doesn’t take a PhD to realize that they can’t all be correct in their epistemologies. The sheer magnitude of incompatible conclusions people have come to about the nature of God, the purpose of the universe, and the right and wrong way to live, should say enough by itself to end the notion that faith works as a reliable mechanism that leads to Truth with a capital T.
Additionally, I have found that believing in God presents a number of paradoxical situations, all of which — if God exists — are being observed by a supposedly loving and benevolent deity. let’s consider just a few of these paradoxes:
— God exists, loves everyone, and answers prayers, but over 20,000 people die everyday from starvation and dehydration.
— God blesses some with good school grades in response to prayers (especially white, middle-to-upper-class westerners) but had a different plan in mind when millions of jews were praying for mercy in gas chambers and firing pits.
— God blesses some with the perfect spouse, but often turns a blind eye to those who have bombs dropped on their entire families while they sleep.
— God helps one faithful young woman find her car keys to get to church on time, but also allows children immigrants fleeing war with their families to drown and wash up on beaches.
— God helped you overcome your doubt in Him, but He didn’t help that child sold into sex slavery to escape before she was drugged, chained up, and raped by hundreds of men over the remaining course of her misserable life.
So a personal or interventionist God presents some major problems. The way I see it is a God who could intervene in profound human suffering but decides not to — I’m not talking about minor trials that can be character strengthening, but extreme, gratuitous suffering (as in children being sold into sex slavery) — doesn’t do much for his own credibility.
Christians are regularly taught to put these paradoxes under the rug or on the proverbial shelf, resorting to scriptures such as ‘God is mysterious’ or ‘God’s ways are higher than our ways’ to insulate against this mind-bending problem, but the logic of suffering in the world makes much more sense under the assumption that nothing reigns above that could intervene below. I cringe at the thought that God helps some people with menial tasks such as passing college exams, overcoming the flu, and finding lost property (things that could reasonably take care of themselves) but largely ignores those indiscriminately killed in tsunamis and war. Though I cringe just a little less when I view these sorts of events as random, uncontrollable accidents.
[Note: my tribe, the Mormons, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, would at this point be yelling “But God gives us agency!” (aka free will) meaning God isn’t ultimately responsible for what happens to people here on earth, that for better or for worse, mankind is. However, I’m no longer able to sustain the rather sickly notion that God is vindicated from all responsibility while watching countless innocent people get wiped out by unconscious natural forces dispossessed of any will, let alone free will.]
We have to ask ourselves that most stubborn of all questions. Why would a God who supposedly intervenes in human affairs heal certain diseases but never amputees? If God only ever heals what nature could repair itself, then it was probably never God and always natural biological processes responsible for so called miracle healings in the first place. If so, it makes complete sense that limbs never return to people who have lost them, because if nature can’t fix it, then neither can God.
It’s worth noting that neurologically there’s no difference between a belief in Ganesh, the Hindu Elephant Lord, and belief in Yahweh, the vengeful Lord of the Jewish Bible. Here we have two distinctly unique gods orbited by mutually irreconcilable theology, yet with one thing in common: the certainty with which people believe in them. The brain state that secures someone’s certainty in Ganesh is undoubtedly the functionary equivalent to the brain state that provides certainty about the existence of Yahweh, or any other god for that matter. Certainty about God, therefore, has little to do with being right and more to do with theological and cultural conditioning and our brain’s susceptibility to believing incorrect ideas.
Likewise, it seems suspicious to me that God seems to have little insight into important contemporary issues such as homosexuality, gender-identity, abortion, climate change, colonization, militarism, nuclear proliferation and racism (to name a few). From what we can read in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, and other religious texts, it’s as if these issues — ones with incredible moral importance for so many — have never crossed God’s mind. According to scripture, god seems far more interested in ancient, local territorial disputes rather than large-scale, planet-ending problems facing our world.
Claiming that God engineered both homosexuality and gender-identity issues as a test of faith seems like an extreme and unfortunate misunderstanding for the diversity and complexity of human sexuality. To inform a gay person that their romantic love for someone of the same sex is unwanted, unholy, or disgusting when acted out, is simply not in harmony with the biological fact that homosexuality is ubiquitous throughout a multitude of species. Contempt for homosexuality is also one of the most obvious signs that God — as we know him — is a product of archaic theology, developed during a time when mankind was so ignorant of science and biology that they thought witches existed, that earthquakes and storms were punishment for sin, and stoning unbelievers was a good idea.
Are we honestly expected to believe that the ancient desert tribes of the Middle East who were responsible for producing the Old Testament were wrong about the existence of witches, the morality of slavery, and the science of cause and effect, but were perfectly calibrated in their understanding of human sexuality? I think Reza Aslan said it best:”God doesn’t hate gay people, YOU hate gay people; God doesn’t love America, YOU love America.” God is the ultimate reflection and projection of our fears and desires, we are not an expression of his.
Popular disdain for homosexuality is more likely to have roots in an ancient kind of quasi-morality which I’ve heard termed as the ‘Yuck Factor.’ Because homosexuality constitutes a minority of sexual expression, it was probably considered deviant by the majority of heterosexuals who then wrote their hetero-normative sensibilities into their theological scribblings. What was disgusting to them became disgusting to their God.
In regard to God being a product of time and culture, Richard Dawkins offered quite a convincing argument;
“You know what it’s like not to believe in a particular Faith because you’re not a Muslim, you’re not a Hindu. Why aren’t you a Hindu? Because you happened to have been brought up in America, not in India. If you’d been brought up in India, you’d be a Hindu. If you were brought up in Denmark in the time of the Vikings, you’d be believing in Wotan and Thor. If you were brought up in Classical Greece, you’d be believing in Zeus. If you were brought up in Central Africa, you’d be believing in the Great JuJu up the Mountain. There’s no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian God, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up.”
Sociologists almost unanimously agree that place of birth is the best indicator in predicting what an individual is likely to believe about religion, which inevitably leads us into the question of bias and whether we believe the things we do about God because they were the most convenient ideas available to our developing minds.
Can it be reliably argued that religion, theology, or faith has ever revealed something that science has later found to be true? For the better part of the twentieth century science was preoccupied with undoing most of the claims religion had made about the age of the Earth, the biological origins of mankind, and our place in the universe. Additionally, if all religion on the planet was to suddenly disappear along with our memory of them, it would be reasonably safe to say that religious structures going forward would reflect contemporary, not ancient, moral standards and science. It seems to me that “revelation” is a human affair that responds to the moral, social, and political zeitgeist of the day, not a divine manifestation revealing eternal moral standards. They are merely standards we enjoy calling eternal.
Religion certainly offers profound psychological benefits to people who sincerely believe. As I wrote in another post: Why Mormonism is Half True, religions can function as a housing for universal moral principles that benefit society. In fact, in that post I largely focus on the benefits of religion. But faith, while a powerful influence for optimism and hope in life, is likewise an inadequate tool in our journey to discover the facts about the way our universe works. Unfortunately, most people are too entrenched in their religious tradition, too certain, too persuaded by a constant head-first dive into their familiar religious forms, refusing to criticize their own superstitions the way they criticize others’. Too often these same people revert to cliches and platitudes they’ve been taught to cite when faced with criticism. To many, doubt is only permissible in relation to beliefs they don’t already hold.
I think we need only open our eyes to the fragmented state of religion in the world, and the multitude of incompatible theological directions faith thrusts people to realize that faith leads us not to God, but to wherever old men with imaginary authority in suits and fancy gowns direct us. I certainly don’t think any of these considerations do anything to disprove the existence of a supreme intelligence or multi-dimensional power, but they do represent some troubling hurdles for me in accepting the existence of a personal, interventionist God as would be described and prescribed by any religious tradition in the twenty-first century.
In the end we must ask: is there anything we couldn’t believe if only we had enough faith? This may be the simplest rebuttal to faith any of us need.
“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” — Mark Twain