First half of an essay I’m writing:
Evangelical Christians often make the mistake of framing their “salvation” as a “leap of faith” which is just a vague way of saying “a leap beyond reason”. This gets criticized by most “scientific” thinkers as being an appeal to authority, a fallacious argument by itself. And it’s true, most evangelical Christians mean exactly that: do what I say because God told me to tell you, not because it makes any sense, but because God is omnipotent, and how could you possibly disagree with an omnipotent being? However, me being me, I’d like to think these clashing world views (that, by the way, everyone seems to take too seriously) can be reconciled, and that there is a lot to be gained by reconciling them. For one thing, truly understanding this argument will put us outside the argument. We will have no need to be emotionally invested in this petty argument any longer. So use this like an “exit”, so to speak, a theme that has come up a lot recently in my studies.
First of all, let’s pick at this division from the position of the “scientific” thinker, the self-appointed “reasonable” one. This position is less steeped than the Christian’s, but it’s got it’s own assumptions, like that “reason” is the best and/or only way to figure out the world, which is where most people get stuck. The thinker thinks to himself “The evangelical christian does not use reason, so how am I ever to understand their arguments?” Unfortunately, many thinkers then offer their own appeal to authority, of which we just spoke: “Reason is the only way to understand the world”, they might say, “so don’t ask me to put it away just because you tell me to.” I have all the respect in the world for the sentiment in the second half of the sentence, but all they needed to say in the first half was “Reason is how I understand the world, and you misunderstand reason”.
This situation illuminates perfectly the cages that many atheists lock themselves in. The first cage is the cage of reason: the belief that reason is the only (or correct) way to understand the world. The problem with this, of course, is that reason is simply not the only way to understand the world. How did our “prehistoric” ancestors understand the world? How about animals? Plants? Bacteria? “Dead” matter? Perhaps the Christian’s missteps in life aren’t due to a vague “lack of reason” but due to the cages he has locked himself in? Could the worldview he lets dominate his day to day activity (the cages I speak of) have anything to do with his problems? Could an atheist have a similar problem? Those who lock themselves in the first cage often lock themselves in a second, the cage of puritanism: the belief that reason is an ideal to be held above all else, an ethic that turns “being completely rational” into some kind of perfection to be achieved (Ayn Rand anyone?). I shouldn’t even need to go into detail here, the problems of puritanism have been written about and explored in a million ways already. The basic argument against puritanism is that reality is complex, and the ideals that puritanists cling to are simplistic (rational vs. irrational, black vs. white, sustainable vs. unsustainable, man vs. nature, true vs. false, etc. etc.) and do not do a very good job on their own of describing— that is, helping us understand—reality. There are probably further cages from that point, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been through a lot of them. At times, I even like to go visit the inmates.
The Christian offers an escape from these cages (and other ones too), but it’s an escape that leads straight into more (probably worse) cages, which I’ll describe in detail later on. So here’s what I think atheists need to hear: I DON’T want atheists to sit on their asses and argue about what’s most reasonable, that’s sure to be a fruitless endeavour, boring at best and a distraction at worst. I want them to show Christians, especially evangelicals, what a leap of faith looks like. Because sometimes, a leap of faith really IS what’s needed. Too often does “rational” mean doing what everyone else does, or the safest option, or even doing nothing at all. When rationality becomes a cop-out for not living your dreams, for not living the best way possible, then it has become a cage. I think that the Christians (or atheists views of Christians) have scared most atheists into mediocrity. They’re afraid of taking a leap of faith (even when one needs to be taken) because they’re afraid of being labelled “irrational”. It’s the scarlet letter of the atheists, and until an atheist gets over the lovey-dovey feeling of belonging to a group, that feeling will keep them from challenging the notion of super-rational puritanism.
Now we come to the evangelical Christian in our little set up, the self-appointed “faithful” one…
