Reasons
"The heart has reasons that reason does not
have."
-Blaise Pascal
In general, we do not
jettison our faith because we’ve encountered incontrovertible evidence against
it. We set it aside for moral reasons.
I think of young friends
who have moved away from home to a less restrictive environment and have begun
to experience a new morality and consequent feelings of guilt. In time, they
encounter a friend, professor or fellow-student who imparts his or her unbelief
and gives them a rationale to quiet their conscience. Unbelief becomes an
attractive option because it releases the tension between what they know in
their hearts to be true and what they want to do. (We like to think of
ourselves as rational beings, but in truth we're largely driven by passion and
then must rationalize our actions.)
Listen to this admission
by Aldous Huxley, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed
it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for
this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not
concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned
to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants
to do... For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy
of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation
we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic
system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it
interfered with our sexual freedom."[1]
I’ve observed this
phenomenon for many years now and it’s been reinforced by countless conversations
with men and women who argue cogently and vigorously against the faith, or
certain aspects of the faith, and marshal their objections brilliantly. I
listen and try to respond with kindness and persuasion, but it always seems to
me that they protest too much and I actually feel like saying (though I have
rarely done so) “And who are you sleeping with these days?”
An oversimplification? I
don’t think so. Paul argues that unbelief is the final link in a chain that
begins when we harden our heart against the witness of our conscience
(Ephesians 4:17,18).[2]
C. S. Lewis put a fine
point on it: "What you see and what you hear depends a good deal on where
you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are." Put
another way, we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. It's the pure in heart that see
God.
DHR
[1]
Aldous
Huxley, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist," Report: Perspective on
the News, Vol. 3, June, 1966, p.19.
[2] Similarly, Israel’s poet insists
that unbelief is the product of moral declension and not rational argument: “The
fool has said in his heart there is no God” (Psalm 54:1). Here, the writer
selects a specialized word for “fool” that refers not to an ignoramus, but to
someone who has turned his face away from the moral law and who then becomes a
practical atheist, i.e., he behaves
as though God does not exist and his moral will has not been revealed.
