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THE LACK OF FAITH OF THE AVERAGE CHRISTIAN

10/16/2018

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Roger Olson, one of the theologians Lee Strobel interviewed in The Case for Miracles, laments the lack of faith he finds among the majority of his fellow believers. He correctly observes that in their everyday lives, they for the most part live as if God isn’t really there. Only when faced with something like a terminal illness do they turn to God. Even churches function much as secular institutions do: “Years ago, I noticed that churches were tending not to think biblically or theologically about the way they ran their operations…They’d ask, ‘Will this fit into our budget?’ regardless of any faith that more funding could come in.”

That average Christians don’t usually expect miracles, and that churches run their business based on realistic expectations rather than counting on supernatural intervention, is disturbing to Dr. Olson. Nevertheless, he believes he knows the reason why: “You see, there’s a certain unpredictability with the Holy Spirit, and we mainstream evangelicals have come to love predictability. We don’t want big surprises. We don’t want to open the door to something that will really shock us, because we can’t control it.” In other words, according to Olson, people behave as if God isn’t there because they don’t like the idea of something that is out of their control.

This explanation fits in with the general Christian message about humility. Olson points out that he can guess fairly well what a particular congregation believes by the kind of cars he sees in the church’s parking lot. “The more prosperous and educated we are, the more likely we are to substitute our own cleverness and accomplishments for the power of prayer.”

Olson has correctly noticed many of the behaviors of his fellow believers. His analysis of the reasons for that behavior, however, is almost completely wrong. The real reason has nothing to do with being afraid of the unpredictability of God.

Human beings are practical by nature, which means we are basically rational with respect to our everyday needs. After all, an individual who, rather than actively searching for food, waited for manna to fall from heaven, wouldn’t last very long. This explains why, when it comes to practical matters, most of us behave pretty much realistically. Usually, it is only with respect to things that are out of our control that some of us turn to imaginary beings for help. People don’t pray for food to appear on their plate: they use their naturally-evolved abilities to find it. A terminal illness, on the other hand, is something that we can do nothing about – and so the only thing left (other than acceptance of the facts) is to hope for a miracle. And of course in the middle of a famine, many will pray for food. Many also turn to magical thinking when it comes to less drastic things – such as finding love – provided, once again, that these things are to a great extent out of their control.

So it’s not that we “don’t want big surprises,” nor that we are prideful in our “cleverness and accomplishments.” It’s that we naturally do whatever we need to survive and flourish, and only turn to magical help when our abilities fail us. This explains why the more prosperous we are, the less reliant we are on God.

I once used the example of a car breaking down to make this same point. No one prays to God when their car doesn’t work: they go to an auto mechanic. Though he doesn’t realize it, Olson is like everyone else in this respect. One of the examples of a miracle he gave Strobel was of how one time, when his car broke down and he didn’t have the money for the repairs, someone “miraculously” gave him the money. “It was what I needed,” he says. But why didn’t he expect God to skip the need for the auto repair shop, and just fix the car directly?

 
[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]


 
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THE LATEST FROM RAY COMFORT

10/3/2018

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In a recent YouTube interview, evangelist Ray Comfort somewhat surprisingly admitted that certain things in the Bible – things like the talking snake and Jonah and the whale – are “crazy,” and even “intellectually offensive.” This doesn’t mean he’s becoming more enlightened: Comfort fully believes that the stories involved are veridical. However, he has an explanation for why these things happened.

According to Comfort, God “chose foolish things to confound the wise.” Those who have too much intellectual pride to accept such nonsensical-sounding stories will reject them. But those who are sufficiently humble will believe them in spite of their better judgement – and that’s what God wants. As Jesus said, you must become like little children to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

Thus, instead of concluding that the crazy stories must be false, Comfort thinks we should suppose that we are being intentionally misled by God, as a test of our humility. This makes Comfort’s deity a bit like Descartes' evil demon. It is also reminiscent of Philip Henry Gosse’s view that God created the world a few thousand years ago with “pretend” fossils already in the ground.

I guess as far as Comfort is concerned, being humble means having the will to doubt even our strongest convictions. A man living for three days inside a whale seems crazy, but if we don’t have any pride in our reasoning abilities, accepting such nonsense is easy! But now, if we are to be this skeptical about what we can be sure of, shouldn’t Comfort be skeptical of his “knowledge” that the Bible is God’s word? Or that any of it is true?

Link to Comfort's interview on YouTube

[Originally published at Debunking Christianity]

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