Matter of Faith and Evidence
1975 an Inspiration: All my life I have held to faith in God and Jesus Christ. When I left the Catholic Church in the late 1960s it was somewhat painful, but my new found religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to be the "right thing at the right time" given the social and family unrest at the time. There were also the civil right movements, hippie movement, women’s rights movement, questioning authority, college riots, anti-Viet Nam protests, treating the US military with disdain, emerging drug culture, and the irrelevance of Catholicism and religion in general. Added to this were the political upheavals, fear of nuclear war with the communists, once friendly nations saying to the USA, ‘Yankee Go Home!’, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. My best friend moving away, my mother’s death, my brother and sister getting married and moving away, and my Dad abandoning me did not help.
All this was soon followed by a ‘get-back-to-nature’ culture where our food was in serious question, our technology was deemed unsafe and in need of 'rolling back' to simpler times, and medical practices being viewed as unnatural and largely unsafe. At the same time the culture was breaking out of long held institutions with marriages and families being broken, free sex without marriage was becoming the norm, and the emergence of the homosexual movement seemed to be a serious challenge. There were also eastern philosophies being introduced, the oil embargo, and hyper-inflation when the Dollar was removed from gold backing, and finally then President Nixon resignation fiasco. 1975 looked like a sure bet, and the Watch Tower Society pushed this and milked it for all it was worth.
The 21st Century: Now here I sit 26 years after 1975, typing to you on a PC, an ex-JW, 50 years old, my children grown, and most of the issues and conditions present in the late 1960s up to 1975 are resolved or faded away. New issues have emerged, but many are positive. The downfall of the Soviet Union, the exodus of many nations from under communism, and a long economic boom from the mid-1980s to the present, social acceptance of many issues such as being Gay, calming of the civil rights movement, more advanced technology such as the advent of the PC and Internet, and the fear of a nuclear war has been greatly reduced. While the Watch Tower has been exposed as a fraud, as have many other religions, the emergence of greater questioning of God, religion and the Bible have come back into vogue while at the same time a revival in nominal Christianity is taking place. What can we make of all this?
A long Hard Look at History: The recorded history of the human race is filled with extreme trouble. Wars alone are not just a matter of victory over an opposing force, but involve cruel and painful death and injury, harm to civilians, and total destruction. Ignorance and superstition due to religion has kept many people in darkness and ill treatment. And then so much war and wrongs have happened because of religion and religious hatred. A simple look at the Crusades or the rise of Nazism and Communism are in part a fallout of what has been wrong with religion.
Even today, many religious movements, including many large factions of Islam are still living over 2,000 years ago and fighting their ancestor’s wars. Today, while at the brink of our greatest technological achievements, we are also capable of totally destroying all life on earth. The key is in our hands, or the hands of those we permit or elect to lead us.
Then science has established another important milestone in providing solid evidence that humans evolved as well as other species. Combined with this our knowledge of human history reveals that our species and close ancestors have been around much longer than shown through Bible chronology. Combined with this are the serious challenges to the Bible, breaking down long held beliefs that its statements of origins, history, events like the Flood, and being a book inspired of God are seriously lacking support in many respects. The Bible is not dead yet, but needs to be read and understood in a different way than we have done through history.
Where are we really at and where are we going?: I no longer have the sure-fire confidence I once held. We certainly are not where I once thought we would be – in the New System helping to build a Paradise Earth or in my case, ruling in heaven with Jesus Christ telling you guys what to do. Nor am I sure that is what we should ever really need or want, though the prospect has some appealing aspects.
I don’t know the future. And after my JW experience, I am not sure that it is wise to even dare make a guess. But, I have this sense about me that the human race will survive for a long time to come. Perhaps in the near future, say 30 years when I reach 80, likely many of today’s issues will be resolved or faded away and new challenging issues will emerge. Whatever popular means of communication that exists, people like us will still be debating, prognosticating, and pontificating issues of religion, science, government, business and social trends.
Then, what of the great “Gulf” between humans and animals? Up until recently, I held to this as at least some level of evidence that the human race is special, likely an amalgamation between flesh and spirit, between the physical and the invisible world. I reasoned that surely this "vast difference" between the animal kingdom and us means something?
Then along came the Chimpanzee! Darn! I have studied what has been going on with that species. It seems that when any species is struggling for food, shelter, and survival, it will resort to base instincts, including humans. When our basic needs are met, we tend to start doing other things, among which are to develop our social structure and abilities to advance our comforts and improve our ability to maintain our basic needs.
Chimps have been observed in nature, without human intervention, to not only use tools but even "make" tools. They are quite advanced for an animal species. With help from humans, where their basic needs are met, such as food and shelter, Chimps not only learn human words, but also are able to use them in simple sentences in the right syntax, and about a topic at hand! Are Chimps sentient, self-aware beings? Who can say, unless we could get into a Chimp’s mind? And if they are, then what implications does this have for the religious and spiritual aspects of what humans have believed and accepted up to now? Are humans the exclusive development of flesh and spirit?
What of my Faith?: I cannot prove God’s existence. I can test, measure, observe, and reproduce by experiment much in the way of science, but I cannot say for sure that God is the source of what I may discover. I can attribute godly characteristics to my observations and studies, but I cannot escape the obvious that this is only conjecture on my part. I can accept evolution and still have faith in God, because I can say that God initiated the process and then used the results at some point to bring about the human race and deal with us. But, I cannot prove that hypothesis no matter how many plausible and seemingly good arguments I may make.
What keeps me from abandoning my faith in God is the strong sense that we are a special species, given our sentient, self-awareness and our yearning for knowledge and reaching for God, for something better than ourselves. While evolution is well established, the symbiosis and complexity and simplicity of all nature seems to defy, in my opinion, the notion that this All came about by mere chance development. An intelligence, a purpose, and design appear very resident in what we observe, even though we cannot prove or even establish that a super-being called God is behind it all.
What inspires me so far are not any religious movements, doctrines, rituals, beliefs, or philosophical arguments. Rather, the life and spirit of Jesus Christ is my only anchor remaining holding me back from from the great chasm of total uncertainty and agnosticism. The flame, the fire, the spirit of Christ has held me for 50 years, and has yet to die out. But, all the religious appurtenances, ancillary beliefs, and associated dogma have been forever burned away like removing the chaff from the wheat.
I cannot ever again be certain of a Trinity or non-Trinity, or whether I might be annihilated or burned in hell for some ‘sin’ or whether I should go to Mass on Sunday, Sabbath meeting on Saturday, or Thursday Bible Study. I can’t again be yoked back into worrying about birthdays, voting, not eating meat on Friday, confessing to a Priest or Elder my transgressions, and ... most of all, other than pointing to Christ as my own hope, source of truth, and life, I can never again knock on the door of my fellow man to tell him that his way is wrong and my way is right.
What I believe that religious people, or at least Christians, need to do at this point in time: Religious people need to answer the above issues and questions with more than well contrived plausibility. Religious people need to provide some solid basis for faith. Faith is fine in and of itself, but must be anchored in something solid. As the Apostle Paul put it, faith is the “evident demonstration” of realities though not beheld.
As a person of science, I have never seen electricity, but as an electrical engineer and researcher, I have observed the “evident demonstration” of its reality, the law combined with the theory, such that I have full faith in the existence of electricity, and can demonstrate it to others. This is an example of what atheists and Agnostics need, especially those of the scientific variety, in order to develop an honest and truthful response to the possibility of God's existence.
We as Christians have got to completely and honestly, with total open-mindedness revisit our entire basis for belief in, faith in, and all claims about God, and see what it is that we can truthfully demonstrate with evidence, even if certain realities cannot be beheld ... much like demonstrating the existence and function of electricity while people still cannot see electricity.
We need to do this, not with plausible comparative illustrations, but with rock solid and concrete evidentiary demonstration that proves that God's existence is more than human fantasy and wishful thinking.
We need to do this, not only for non-believers, but more so for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. We need this so that we can be confident that we are not spending a life in the squirrel cage of endless religious service, a life that may prove to be for nothing but a waste of time and energy. Our lives in eternity and the 'hear and now today' are seriously affected, and the lives of those we touch with our hearts and minds. - Amazing