…from a letter to an agnostic friend
I’m heartened to hear you’re becoming a bit more interested in spiritual matters. I’ve always considered agnosticism to be a pretty honest position. I think the word loosely means “without knowledge.” One simply says, “I just don’t know.” You were interested in my journey, and it is interesting how it all came about. I think I discovered that it’s not only the mind that comes into play with regard to spiritual things, but also very much the heart.
The only way I can describe what happened to me is by comparing it to the gut feeling you might have regarding, say, someone beating a child. You know it’s wrong, just as you know goodness, compassion, and so on are right. I think, if it ever does come to you, it may well be that sort of knowledge, if that makes sense to you.
Certainly, I had the intellectual hurdles any thinking person would have, but in the final analysis, faith just came to be there, as though somehow planted in me. I had for a long time believed in a “Higher Power,” actually God, but Jesus was the sticking point. I prayed for years simply to find the truth of it.
A great Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, popped the intellectual bubble, and prayer seems to have done the rest, for I just woke up one morning believing! As for others, as far as logic is concerned, I can empathize with unbelievers, having been one for so many years. Those who look at Christianity, explore it, and deem it a load of drivel, I can understand. Those who don’t look and explore it? I think they are foolish.
If someone comes along and says, “You know, there just may be a whole marvelous eternity available, one of incomparable joy, unceasing, beyond any earthly imaginings,” why not check it out? So many folks say, in effect, “No, I’m not interested, at least not now—and maybe never.”
Let’s say one is strolling along one day and comes to a fork in the road. The path to the left sports a nice sign: Promise of eternal bliss. The path leading right has a sign as well. It simply says, Nothingness (at best)…
I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine any sane person not taking the path to the left, even if only to debunk what the sign implied, so he can go back and tell his friends what a load of hogwash he encountered and warn them not to fall for it.
I can’t imagine why, but so many sane persons go to the right. What is it about the human psyche that causes rational men and women to simply go tweedle-deeing along life’s road without any real concern regarding the most vital issues—their mortality and the potential hereafter?
So, if God exists and loves His creation, might He not look with more compassion upon one who actually explored, searched his or her heart and soul, and found Christianity or, for that matter, belief in God, Himself wanting, than on one who just dismissed it all out of hand? I guess that’s my real hope, that you’ll truly explore it.
Your books on comparative religions will likely treat all the prophets and founders of the various faiths fairly and equally, with many comparisons and similarities. The big difference they may ignore is that the centerpiece of only one of the major religions claimed to be the Son of God. That’s the touchstone, I guess you’d say, the very heart and guts of the Faith. Either He is or He isn’t. Nothing in-between. No “good man,” no “wise prophet,” none of that.
There’s something called Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal was a French Christian philosopher-apologist from some centuries back, who in his less-arcane moments seemed to reduce the whole thing to rather mundane, even coldly logical propositions, and so on. I can’t find his book right now so I’ll just put it the simplest terms I can.
First, we lay the groundwork for this “bet.”
The Christian believes in heaven and hell, whatever either might really be—as far from each other as the East from the West. The atheist believes in neither.
Death, nothingness, we will call “neutral.”
Each is wagering his or her eternity.
Capsulized: Neutral is the worst the Christian can expect and the most the atheist can hope for.
Christian correct? Bliss. Wrong? Neutral.
Atheist correct? Neutral. Wrong? Misery.
One has everything to gain and nothing to lose. The other? Everything to lose, nothing to gain.
I’d bet with the Christian.
The purpose is not to reduce faith to a bet, of course. I think Pascal’s Wager was simply an apologist’s attempt to encourage someone to do what he considered the obvious: explore the possibility that there’s something there. Eternity is far too important a consideration.
I can’t say what you’ll find in your searching. I only hope and pray that you will search. I personally believe that if someone truly seeks the answers, they will, in time, reveal themselves.
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