Letters from a Skeptic
Oct 22nd, 2007 by Amanda
It’s funny. Yesterday morning I was sitting in church and the thought popped into my head, This whole Jesus thing and Christianity thing is really the most ridiculous thing in the world.
I never thought I’d admit to that on this blog.
But then… I started reading Letters from a Skeptic by Gregory Boyd (thanks Donny!), and I found the best reason for a belief in God I’ve ever heard.
…we human beings are personal beings. This means, I believe, that we are constituted by a mind which is self-aware and is rational, a heart which is free and can love and which is, therefore, morally responsible, and a soul (or call it what you will) which longs for meaning and significance. Consciousness, rationality, love, morality, and meaning: these, I maintain, constitute the essence of what it is to be a person in the full sense of the term.
Now the dilemma we face is this: either we exist in an environment (viz, the cosmos) which is compatible with these attributes, or we do not. Either our environment is congruous with these attributes–it renders them intelligible and answers them–or it does not. To illustrate, we hunger, and behold, there is food. We thirst, and behold, there is water. We have sex drives, and behold, there is sex. Our environment, then, is congruous with our natural hunger, thirst, and sex drive. And given the kind of world we live in, we can understand why we hunger, thirst, and have sex drives. Our cosmic environment “answers” our natural drives and thereby makes sense of them. Are you following me?
Well, the question is, does our cosmic environment answer to the basic features of our personhood outlined above? My contention is that unless our environment is ultimately itself personal, unless the ultimate context in which we live is self-aware, rational, loving, moral, and purposeful, then our cosmic environment does not at all answer to our personhood. In other words, unless there is a personal God who is the ultimate reality within which we exist, then we humans can only be viewed as absurd, tortured, freaks of nature; for everything that is essential to us is utterly out of place in this universe. This, on the one hand, renders human nature completely unexplainable. How could brute nature itself evolve something so out of sync with itself? And, on the other hand, it means that human existence, if we face up to our real situation, is extremely painful. We are the product of a cruel, sick, cosmic joke.
So, for example, we humans instinctively assume that reality should be rational, and that reasoning gets us closer to truth (and science seems to say that this assumption is valid), but in the end nature is irrational. There is no overarching mind to it.
We humans instinctively assume that love is a reality, that it is the only ideal worth living for and dying for. But nature seems to be an indifferent, loveless, brute process of colliding chemicals - and so our ideals are reduced to reacting hormones.
We humans instinctively assume that our moral convictions are true to reality, do we not? There are, of course, people who say that moral convictions are “just a matter of taste,” but cut them off at an intersection and their convictions change. You did a gross injustice!
And we humans instinctively hunger for meaning and purpose. You can see it all around in the way people behave. We strive to infuse our lives with some sort of significance, some sort of meaning. But if our cosmos is ultimately indifferent and purposeless, all we are, all we do, all we believe in, all we strive for is “dust in the wind.” After we exist, it matters not whether anyone has ever, or ever will again, exist. Everything is ultimately meaningless.
So, unless the ultimate source of all existence is as least as personal as we are, Dad, my contention is that who we are is both unexplainable and extremely hard to swallow.
I’m ready for the “poo” to fly at that argument, because I’m sure that several of you have something to say against it. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Because I read that, and it’s like…yeah, that’s it.
This book is a good one. It’s a collection of letters between Gregory Boyd and his agnostic father. They are dialoguing about Christianity and all of the elder Boyd’s objections to it. Gregory does a fantastic job answering his father, but then his father always brings up another valid point. I can’t wait to get to the end, because his father ended up coming to Christ after their 3 year correspondence. I’m curious as to what ended up bringing him to his son’s way of thinking about 70 years of being agnostic.
Yeah, you’re gonna get the poo for this. Apologies in advance…
some if it is right, but it doesnt lead to the rest of it. In fact, he has aprt of it completely backward. The right stuff for example:
We humans instinctively assume that love is a reality, that it is the only ideal worth living for and dying for. But nature seems to be an indifferent, loveless, brute process of colliding chemicals
And then the bizzarre conclsion
and so our ideals are reduced to reacting hormones.
The fact that life runs on a set of chemical reaction doesn’t mean we arent self aware, in fact he acknowledges our self awareness. Does that make our feelings of love and anger any less real? Why should it be less real because the capability of it is the result of trillions of reactions? The occurrence of it is still due to experience of events outside of our bodies.
The other part that is totally backwards
To illustrate, we hunger, and behold, there is food. We thirst, and behold, there is water. We have sex drives, and behold, there is sex
Thats 100% backwards. This presumption (and this is where I think this guy was never a skeptic) is that we came first and then the answer to our drives came along. That doesnt even make sense.
We don’t hunger and then there is food. The symbiosis of our species (or any species) with other living things on the planet is how we exist. Hunger is definitely a hormonal response, in fact we know the exact hormones that cause it.
Either our environment is congruous with these attributes–it renders them intelligible and answers them–or it does not.
This is another proposition with a predestined answer. of course our environment is congruous with our attributes! we have them because of our environment! THere are shirmp that live in the waters of the arctic north that die in labs if the water gets too warm. There are coral and anemonae at tremendous pressures in the marinara trench (near puerto rico) that fall apart when you bring them to the surface. All of these critters are successful in the environments because they are products of those environments.
I dont think this guy was ever skeptical of god. Just religion. This entire essay (perhaps I will read this book), is an argument from incredulity. He can’t believe that a sentient entity didnt make our needs met! We wouldn’t be here if that didn’t happen!
I can’t beleive that something that weighs close to a million pounds can fly through the air, and yet 747 hurl themselves high over my head every day.
There is so much more wrong with this… with its backwards reasoning….but alas, I must get back to work.
My biggest beef is that he seems to think that everything important to humans is somehow there for humans… rather than the reality that we are simply adapted to use what’s available. He’s one of those guys that suffers from puddle thinking: “Hey,” says the puddle. “Isn’t it cool that this hole is so perfectly suited to me?” The environment isn’t suited to us… we’re suited to it through adaptation.
Oh, and nature is a brute process of colliding physical properties. Big freakin’ deal.
Final note:
We have sex drives, and behold, there is sex.
Maybe for some lucky bastards. The rest of us have to work for it.
No Poo, just some thinkin… sounds like a good read.
But if the environment came first and then our desires, which were a response to our environment, doesn’t that imply that we have a desire for God because God existed in the first place?
BTW it is a big leap from saying ‘God Exists’ to saying ‘Jesus died for our sins and the only way to God is to be saved by his Grace and take him as your saviour’.
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