Stranger than Fiction: Strange Faith for a Strange Reality

Black Hole Sun: Life is Weird Sometimes

10 weeks ago, I was flying back to the US for a mission conference. I was exhausted before I left, but found myself unable to sleep more than a few minutes at a time on the 14-hour flight, and tried to pass the time with in-flight movies. The plane was a 787 "Dreamliner," impressively new with a well-designed interior and auto-dimming windows. Those windows turned into a problem when they didn't dim quite enough, and the sun just happened to rise directly outside my window. I was at first confused at the alien, blue sun which rose, until I realized the windows had auto-dimmed and the manual controls were disabled. The best I could do to avoid this piercing cyan orb, dimmer than it would have been but still painful to tired eyes, was to shift in my seat and pull my hat down low. I had already watched a couple of movies and nothing looked interesting, but an old classic-era movie about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel caught my eye, partly because it starred both Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. (Title: The Agony and the Ecstasy)

I don't remember if I watched Total Recall before or after that one.
Either way, Ginger Ale is the best choice on flights, always.

Growing up on old movies, I knew both of these men tended to play strong-willed protagonists, and thought perhaps the two of them theatrically butting heads would be entertaining in a way that yet another trope-filled recent Hollywood production would not be. The movie itself was quite unique, beginning with a long introduction about Michelangelo and his art (which brought back memories of Francis Schaeffer's old but legit video series – with his impressively non-ironic goatee and knickerbockers), before moving into the story of how a warrior pope got a capricious sculptor to spend years painting a ceiling on his back, and how the perfectionist artist convinced the tight-fisted pope to keep extending the project until he was finished.

It occurred to me what a weird, existential sort of moment this was—flying in thousands of feet over Alaska, awash in the weird, blue glow of an auto-dimmed sun, watching an old technicolor period film about Michelangelo and Pope Julius II starring the Professor from My Fair Lady and also Moses/the NRA guy, while eating Japanese snack mix.

Life is full of these weird, surreal moments, and they strengthen my faith.

They strengthen it because recognizing those weird moments is a defense against a subtle but strong temptation to doubt, which is that believing the Bible explicitly and worshiping the God it describes in 2016 can sometimes feel a little weird, a little unreal.

The Strangeness of Faith (Mirrors the Strangeness of Life)

Maybe you have never felt this particular temptation, but I often have. "This is the era of instantaneous global communication, of metamaterials, of Facebook, of satire-as-news and social upheaval. Isn't bowing over your Chinese dumplings to thank a 1^st Century Jewish Savior-King a little... weird?"

Let's be honest with ourselves, from the world's perspective, it's quaint at best. It doesn't always feel weird to us, of course: belief in God can feel entirely natural while we can see answers to prayer, the testimony of changed lives, those times we especially feel God's presence, etc. Rationally the evidence for God is there as well, both historically and logically. So it's right and good that our faith should seem as real and instinctive to us as it often does.

It's obvious, however, that there is much about believing the contents of a canon of books closed almost 2000 years ago and making life decisions based on the will of God, the Creator of our universe that we cannot ever directly observe, that will necessarily seem weird in a culture that calls movies that came out 10 years ago "old," and which struggles to explain even the obvious existence of the human soul or mind. To our modern, cynical world, sincere faith is weird.

But—real life is weird. Even if you've chosen to stay inside a zone of life that has become comfortable and familiar, there are those really bizarre moments where you just have to shake your head. For those of us who have left what was comfortable and familiar, those moments occur much more frequently.

So when your faith seems weird, remember that reality is weird too. In some ways, in this modern era where we live immersed in fiction—TV shows, movies, books, etc.--we come to expect reality, contrasted to all that fiction, shouldn't have that weird feeling. But that's a little misguided, because fiction is usually strange in a way that makes sense to people, a consistent weird, if you will, because it's coming from the minds of people. Most fiction is either seeking a balance of fictional but plausible events, or occurs in an alternate world where nothing has to conform to our perception of what normal is.

But reality is both real and yet also stranger than human-devised fiction. Things happen in real life that no one would find plausible in a novel or movie. One of those things is that, once, among a people who for hundreds of years had expected a Messiah from God, a man declared he was that Messiah, and furthermore the Son of God, and that the proof of this was that He would be killed, and then be raised back to life again. He was in fact executed by the colonial government, yet on the third day the tomb was empty and he was seen alive by hundreds of people, and those who knew him and wrote about it suggested that if you didn't believe them, you could ask any of those people. A very falsifiable claim, then, yet instead of being proved false, its proponents willingly went to their deaths for the sake of it, and the faith spread across the entire world. Clearly something happened which cannot be accounted for by the banal theories of skeptics, and for those of us who have experienced God in our lives, there is no reason to doubt the Biblical account, as we have encountered the One of whom it speaks.

Messy Reality vs. Fragile Atheism

So then, for believers in God, a weird world makes sense.
There are rules by which things are supposed to work, to be sure: the laws of physics are the equations that describe God's order. He called it good, and He doesn't randomly violate them. There are commonsense laws about our world as well. (I love the poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" which cleverly illustrates how the basic principles of humanity, society, and life don't change, even when we manage to convince ourselves we've finally escaped them.)

But believers are free to acknowledge that, at times, weird things happen, which cannot be explained via the laws which explain how things operate by default, and we have an exception, what we call a supernatural event. If God is real, this makes perfect sense: that the One who set up the system and pronounced it good could still occasionally choose to make changes here or there as the situation requires, or in answer to the fervent requests of His people.

Materialists are forced to either explain away every single inexplicable event by natural means, or else shrug (Sometimes Christians forget.. under modernism you were forced to answer, but postmodernism lets you shrug. It's a nihilistic shrug, though). The only other way out is to deny the inexplicable thing happened at all, regardless of whatever evidence exists (as an atheist once said/unconciously admitted to me: Of course that couldn't be true. If it were, there would have to be a God) and at other times they simply come up with some other complicated explanation which they claim is much simpler or less crazy than "invoking a divine being" as the explanation (because they have already rejected that explanation for personal reasons) as if disbelief is the default normal (actually belief in God is by far the historical norm). It is as if color-blind people insisted color did not exist, and claimed any other explanation for people's claims of seeing color was preferable to the crazy, outmoded idea that things had a magical property they couldn't personally observe.

But preferring a very complicated explanation which does not involve God to one that does involve God is merely a sign that one has made up one's mind regardless of the evidence. If you don't want to believe in God, you'll find other explanations more appealing. If you already believe in God, whether weird things turn out to be less-common application of natural laws, or something more, it's equally reasonable in both cases.

In other words, Theists have much the less fragile position. Atheists tend to rebuff all challenges to their position with indignation and/or mockery, because without turning the burden of proof back on the other person, it becomes apparent just how narrow is the ledge to which they cling. (Polite atheists certainly do exist, but they typically will not debate the question either.)

Stranger than Fiction: The Implausibly Real God

In the end, a view of our world that excludes the strange and inexplicable is insufficiently broad to describe the real world. So when you are tempted to find the truths of scripture, the concept of God, or any aspects of our faith to be fundamentally strange (and if you haven't ever thought that, you might have a different problem...), don't feel bad about it, but recognize that it is because they are not plausible fiction, but part of messy reality. If the animals on an alphabet chart were hypothetical, I would consider U's unicorn to be quite plausible, but E's elephant to be a bizarre fantasy (Tusks coming out of its face on both sides of a skinny hose-like trunk and fan-like ears, all stuck on the front of a fat, bulky body? What was this artist smoking?). Yet the elephant is real and the unicorn is mythical. So there is no point in insisting that reality conform to what is theoretically plausible, in fact one of the marks of reality is that it never fits neatly into its own apparent cliches, and goes in directions we couldn't have expected if we were allowed to guess first.

We see this in our own walks of faith: Hypothetical faith is a nice pleasing continuity; real faith has odd corners and rough patches, even bits that seem missing. Fictional God is plausible: Allah—a simple, inexorable Unity, or the million specialized gods of Hinduism, one for everything. The Biblical God is not something we'd have ever imagined: One, but Triune; internally diverse in a way that defies human description, a Divine being who starts on the edge of what we can grasp conceptually and goes far past it. Prophets are more or less plausible—specially chosen people to communicate the ideas of Heaven to mortal men—but a suffering Messiah is so implausible that His own disciples didn't see Him happening under their own noses.

As C.S.Lewis has famously stated, a real God would be something we couldn't guess, versus something humans would come up with themselves. Reality is stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and that makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (because reality is what the mind of God has come up with, whereas fiction is what the minds of humans come up with), unlike overly simplistic materialist explanations. Christianity is the one faith that can accommodate rigorous logic and inexplicable miracles, that doesn't only make claims to mysterious and inaccessible truth, but actually introduces concepts of reality that you can grasp at but not succeed in comprehending, that are grounded in the concrete and not merely mystical hand-waving, yet range far into the mystical realm in that they exceed our ability to comprehend and have no perfect analogues in the material world.

All this is exactly as it should be, and clashes with our expectations yet "rings true" with reality in exactly the way that real things do. So, rather than retreating to fictional conceptions that are less mentally tiring, that seem to make more sense precisely because they were conceived by humans for human consumption, let's continue to forge ahead into the weirdness of reality, and of our faith, and be comforted that the mutual correspondence between the two is simply more evidence that our faith is indeed real.

When Doubts Attack: Attack Back

                 Or, the Irrationality of Doubt when God's Presence is with Us.

As I continue on in my walk with God and journey of faith through this life, I find that I often have questions. I don't mean questions about the basic tenets and principles of the faith, although I do have those kinds of questions from time to time, usually in a curious way. I am relentlessly curious, so I will investigate nearly anything from different perspectives to see what it looks like.

But with regard to those more basic questions, over and over again I've tested the core tenets of Christianity, based on my ongoing experiences and taking into account criticisms both new and old that I've encountered, and found that they hold together without budging. Given the existence of a Creator God, the faith set forth in Scripture follows, and no other religion or holy writings could stand up to the rigorous assaults withstood by the Church for centuries now.

As Christians we can be reluctant to talk about doubt, since to acknowledge that sometimes we consider the truth of what we believe as something that could potentially be untrue sounds like we're denying our faith.
But doubt is not the same as denial, doubt is a testing of our faith, and such tests are necessary to strengthen it. The question is whether we will pass the test with stronger faith, or become doubters, our faith weak, remaining mired in uncertainty. James had strong words for people who chose the second option...

The questioning and uncertain thought or feeling that pops into your mind is not yet sin; what you do with it might be sin, or might instead be a glorious victory. If we need more faith, God is willing to provide it, but the biblical conception of faith is an active reaching out to God, not a passive hunger strike. Sometimes we must find ourselves crying out to God along with the man in Mark 9: "Lord I believe, help my unbelief!"

The Irrationality of Doubt

When I do get those doubting sorts of moments, lately they are of that vaguely anxious "but what if 'all this' isn't true?" variety. Interestingly, that sort of doubt is the least able to stand up to logical inquiry. Nonbelievers (in the world of Western thought) would have you believe that Christianity is not rational or logical, and, recently and irrelevantly, that is has been made unnecessary by "Science," as if the laws of physics would be a challenge to or replacement for the One who set them up and provided the energy to have any matter to begin with.  ("Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools...")

It's the opposite, actually: given the presuppositions from which Christianity begins, everything proceeds in quite a logical and orderly fashion. So for these vaguely anxious sorts of doubts, simply asking "Can you be more specific? Which part isn't true exactly? What alternative truth claim is being suggested here?" often dispels it outright without it even bothering to explain itself. Very, very few doubts stand up to any vigourous inquiries about a) content, and b) motive.

So for me at this point, I can say that doubt is inherently irrational. I know the depth and truth of scripture more than I did earlier in my life, and have a more clear understanding of how Christianity all holds together, and perceive that the reality of the world as understood through Scripture is indeed the inevitable conclusion to which an honest and informed look at reality would drive one (what Paul is talking about in Romans 1). Yes, the more I've learned about Scripture and the history of doctrine and our faith the more questions I have had, but my curiosity has been joyously satisfied by the truth of God's word and the miracle of His church and His presence.

Also, my faith has been extended over any question marks that remain for me (and there always are, for now we see in a mirror dimly), not primarily due to answered questions, but because I have experienced over and over again God's gracious intervention in my life. Lack of total knowledge about the story can't make me doubt the author when I've met Him, and He is not passive. I have some pretty cool stories... crazy things have happened exactly when they need to happen.

And that is where a believer and a non-believer go in totally opposite directions: when some crazy, unlikely thing that seems like supernatural intervention occurs, the believer states that given God, the simplest explanation is that He did this, since this sort of thing doesn't happen by accident. The non-believer states that given no God, the only possible explanation is that sometimes crazy coincidences happen by accident, or maybe that there's no such thing as 'accident' or 'miracle,' everything just happens, and it's your own confirmation bias making you think it's for your own benefit or some other purpose.

But they're the ones that are trapped. While we can look a crazy, wonderful miracle in the face and say "This cannot happen naturally, God did this," they must always either deny that it occurred, concoct an explanation so unlikely that the only excuse for it is "well it happened, and there's no God, so this must be how it happened," or pull out the tiresome confirmation bias hammer, for which to those who wield it everything seems to look like a nail.

And often they misunderstand us. When met with something they do not understand, people may simply say "God did it." Then along come scientists and say "Ah, not so: this is caused by energy transferred in X way by Y methods. See, your so-called god is vanishing one explanation at a time." (Then we ask them where energy came from originally, and they vow to have the answer to that too, someday. There are theories. Just have faith.) This is the 'god of the gaps' idea, that "God" is merely the answer to things for which science has not yet provided a purely natural explanation. Some Christians do use this argument, and I think they should stop. We don't believe God hides in the inexplicable; we believe He created the explicable. As Paul reminds us, God's invisible attributes can be observed clearly from the things that are made. His existence need not be only inferred from the things that are mysterious. That would be weak faith indeed.

In the end, however, it's not even a necessary conflict. One can say that lightning is a transfer of energy and one can say that lightning shows the power of God, and those two statements are in no way contradictory. If God created this universe, then "God did it," applies to everything that follows, it doesn't matter by what means He was pleased to arrange things to occur. "Friction kept your tires on the road" is not a rebuttal to the claim that you drove to work this morning, it's one piece of evidence that your claim is a rational one.

The Experience of Doubt

I certainly do experience feelings of doubt from time to time. It's a strong temptation on the missions field in general, and for me in this place specifically where people hear of Jesus and say neither "Lord" nor "silly myth" but "Wonderful, you've got your god, we've got ours.. lots of them actually."

But I had strong feelings of pain when I stubbed my toe the other day too, and I did not throw out my preexisting conception of the universe based on those feelings. ("I've been wrong all this time.. all is pain! There is nothing in life but all-consuming pain and that blasted metaphorical chair leg, whatever it represents!") The example is obviously absurd, but in more serious situations that's more or less what occurs. Some pain does not pass so quickly, and its intensity can weaken our convictions and make us question our assumptions, even when it shouldn't.

I often have the weird situation here on the mission field where I get 'attacks' of very strong feelings to doubt, as I mentioned earlier, without even much content to speak of, only force. It's much like someone sitting beside you screaming at you "doubt! doubt! doubt!" without ever saying what it is you should doubt.

Now here's the fun part: The fact that you already know what it is you're 'supposed' to be doubting, and the force with which this demand to doubt comes into your mind, all plays into exactly how the Bible describes the world. I'm being tempted to doubt by whom? The existence of a tempter is a pretty good confirmation of scripture, no? And you want me to doubt who? Precisely the God of Scripture, as it turns out? So it turns out that by turning the tables on a doubt, and making it answer the questions, typically you destroy it. (Caution: Don't be prideful about that, that's just trading one sin for an equally dangerous one. Doubts often fade away after a little while, pride typically does not.)

After that realization, doubt began to no longer feel like potential ulcer wanting to crop up inside me, but more like a wind trying to buffet me from the outside. Sometimes buttoning up my jacket is sufficient; sometimes I call to the One who calmed the winds with a word.

In both cases, I am able to bring to mind numerous moments in my life where I intentionally set up a remembrance stone in my memory, to say "here is where God did something amazing." I've experienced so many of those moments; of students coming to Christ and my seeing the immediate, inexplicable change in them, of situations that seemed impossible right up until we prayed, of the joy and peace and love I feel in His very real presence. The evidence of God, once seen in faith, is unending and wonderful.
But one doesn't get to see it much inside one's comfort zone, I should add.

Conclusion

Doubts may attack sometimes, but my faith is never in doubt. Even when assailed by a gale of doubt and feeling neither faithful nor logical, I have my remembrance stones, and the wind can't push those around. And it obeys the voice of the One who died for me, who offered Thomas the proof he asked for, yet blessed us who believe without yet having seen it. But we will see it. Let us continue in faith.

God cannot be 'proved' in the way people demand proof, but by faith He can certainly be experienced, proof enough to the we who experience Him, and faith in His existence and presence explains everything else in a perfectly sensible way. As C.S.Lewis famously said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

In the end, so many times it turns out like this:
Scripture says there is an invisible ladder in this spot, so in faith I begin to climb here, and after considerable effort I find that miraculously I am fifty feet up in the air, just as Scripture said. The scoffer's mocking reaction that I am merely imagining myself to be fifty feet off the ground would carry more weight if he wasn't shouting into the sky to let me hear him.

            I hope reading this strengthens your faith as well.