Why Do We Believe?

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence; and keep your conscience clear…"

-- 1 Peter 3:15-16

In the midst of a series of ethical exhortations concerning just about everything, from women’s dress and makeup, to marriage, unity, humility, gossip and a tender heart, Peter tells us always to be ready and willing to explain to outsiders what and why we believe the Gospel. He calls it, ‘making a defense to anyone who calls us to give an account of the hope that is in us.’ Peter considers such defense a normal part of Christian life, something for all of us, and not only a peculiar taste for argumentative personalities, and so I thought we might take up his challenge briefly and ask ourselves what we might say to someone who asks us to explain why we believe.

It is timely for me because I am preparing a paper to be read at a conference at Stanford in two weeks on the interface between science and religion, specifically biological science, which, of course, means the theory of evolution. A certain kind of Christian faith is battling against the theory in the name of the biblical account of creation in six days, and we all have heard of school boards that are politicized and polarized around the issue. Every now and then the creationists win a majority and are able to force teachers to teach politically correct views rather than their conscience, but the victories are short-lived and the theory eventually prevails. I don’t think we should focus our reflections on the creationist debate because it is too politicized and too narrow. Creation vs. Evolution is only one instance of the larger question of how we can believe in the God of the Bible after three hundred years of Western science and technology that in many ways have cast doubt on the possibility of such belief.

Peter tells us to give our account, “with gentleness and reverence” and I take that to mean that we should not build ourselves up by running the other side down. Religious people easily fall into a type of argument that points out the desperation of our current culture and assumes that that is because most of us  have no faith in God. Since faith is a missing ingredient it must be the one thing needed to change culture from negative to positive, and so if only the unbelievers would join us everything would come right. There are many things wrong with this assumption, not least of which is the clear evidence that faith in God or the gods is very often a corrupting and violent force in culture. I need not point out the extreme damage being done at present by pathological religion. So we must not fall into the trap of assuming that faith will solve everything. By the same token the other side cannot argue that religion is the cause of every bad thing.  

Having laid a basis in mutual respect what might a believer and an unbeliever say to each other?  The most important thing to be clear about is this: the difference between the believer and the unbeliever is a difference of interpretation of the world and this difference begins with a decision and a choice. Let me give you an example. Currently I am reading a philosophical biography of the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ( Rudinger Safranski, Nietzsche, a Philosophical Biography [New York: W.W. Norton, 2002]).  Nietzsche, whose dates are 1844-1900, was the son of a Lutheran pastor who became one of the most influential atheistic philosophers in Western culture. He was an autobiographical thinker and his writings are really an account of his personal journey from faith to unbelief. When he could no longer believe in the biblical God he turned to art, especially music, to provide the same feeling of depth and significance for human experience that his childhood belief in God had given. Before him, in the 18th century, another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had made a similar move, substituting moral awareness, the moral imperative within, for the biblical belief in God. While Kant rested his case here Nietzsche only paused briefly before he went on to a position that he called “icy.” He based it on the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus for whom all things were illusion excepting atoms falling in a void.  Not love, not thought, not beauty, not language, not art, not music is real, only ice-cold atoms eternally falling in an empty space. This is the truth, Nietzsche decided.

He made a decision to interpret the world in this way. Not everyone made the same decision in the light of the same facts, but it must be said that many, many did make similar choices, and today our culture is on the whole more Nietzschean than Christian. More lead lives of silent desperation than lives of hope, and so it would be a healing if people could reconnect with the hope that is the Gospel.

When Nietzsche made this decision he knew that he would have to work hard to decontaminate himself of the habits of love and compassion, logic and communication, ego and other, to crush hope and break free from the erroneous impression that there really is a world of connections with other people and with animals and things.  He called the task, “a personal detoxification” and worked especially hard to expel his own sensitivity and compassion, but in that he failed. In 1889 at the age of 46 he suffered a mental collapse and lived the last ten years of his life insane. The final episode of his collapse occurred on a street in Turin, Italy, when he threw his arms around the neck of a horse that was being beaten by it owner, taking on his own back the blows intended for the horse.  In that moment he refuted his own philosophy and showed that his decision to choose ice-cold nothingness was the wrong decision. Compassion is not a secondary human phenomenon that can be expelled like a toxin; it is part of the truth of who we are.

If our truth is the ice cold void our lives have no meaning, in the sense of moving towards a worthwhile goal in the light of which it matters how we live. On this view history is just one thing after another, without beginning and without end, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” to quote Macbeth summing up his dreadful life, and the moral ruin of it surely determines the bleakness of its summary.  But most human beings live in a history that has meaning, even if for the time being we have to invent its meaning. We live from one rite of passage to another, “When I am married, then…” When my children are born…” When my children graduate…” “When my children marry …” etc. these are the milestones that give meaning to life, and we have to work hard to “detoxify“ ourselves of the sense of hope in our history. Even as we invent meaning we know that we do so because we cannot live without it, and that knowledge attests the existence of true meaning, somewhere, somehow. Since we cannot live without it we must assume that hope is there, because we do not accept that the truth is ice-cold nothingness and cannot see why we should  work hard to persuade ourselves that it is.

A theory that holds that history is without meaning is known as “nihilism,” and a theory that holds that history is moving significantly through important moments of my life towards a fulfillment, is called hope. So as we exercise the fundamental choice we made long ago, to regard life as warm and compassion as real, we are giving an account  “… of the hope that is in us.” Not nihilism but hope is our truth.

Only experience can warrant one or another of those choices, and as I continually say, that warranting is the work of a lifetime. Much depends on the point of view we take. So far in this sermon we have taken the point of view of an outsider, a non-believer, in order to fulfill Peter’s injunction to give an account of the hope that is in us to those who do not share it.  Things look different on the inside, do they not? As we pray together, worship in song and symbol, we experience the spiritual power of the living God and our lives are filled with hope. As Job said at the end of his ordeal, when had he heard of God only from a distance everything seemed problematic, but when he experienced God close-up, he realized that what he thought he knew before was incomplete and inaccurate  (Job 42:5-6). Perhaps the last word to the questioner must be, “Taste and see, the Lord is good! (Psalm 34:8). ” And if that is a word to outsiders, how much more must it be a word to us insiders. Let us take the symbols of Christ’s body and blood, and truly with our souls taste and see how good he is!