Faith, Certainty and Idolatry (part 1)

A few weeks ago, my wife was talking with a cute, adorable and precocious seven year old girl. The topic? How can I know for sure that God exists? This was not mere intellectual curiosity; she was being pulled in two opposite directions. Her dad and step-mother are devout believers. Her mom and her step-father are non-believers. She is loved by both her parents but the lack of unity on this most basic issue was disturbing her greatly.

Her dilemma is not new or unusual, except that one so young is not usually confronted by this issue so blatantly.

“How can I know?” is simply a personal plea for the basis of certainty of the things we know. Throughout most of the history of Western civilization certainty was based on authority, ultimately that authority was derived from God, the Bible, and/or the church. (In reality, it is nearly impossible to disentangle these three.)

At the beginning of the Enlightenment, the French mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal, wrote, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” He recognized that the deepest issues of life do not arise from the mind/reason, but from the heart.

Pascal also formulated what has become known as Pascal’s wager. Pascal himself was a devout Catholic faced with the growing radical skepticism of the burgeoning Enlightenment philosophy. Even in these early stages of the Enlightenment most sneered at the rational proofs for the existence of God. In an attempt to do an end run around the rejection of the proofs of God’s existence, Pascal lowered the bar from proof that God exists to probability that he might exist.¹

As valiant as Pascal’s wager was, it did not win the day. The Enlightenment grew more and more rationalistic and set the bar of knowledge at the level of certainty. From a philosophical perspective all true knowledge had to be based on rational certainty. There could be no contingency, or doubt. Any assertion that did not meet the bar of certainty had to be rejected. More than this, truth had to be the same for all people at all times and in all places. From this perspective, historical knowledge could not be true. Lessing’s observation about history and the truth found therein has become legendary:

Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason . . . That then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make a leap.²

The Enlightenment insistence on certainty as a basis of knowledge has permeated the western worldview for nearly the past four centuries. Philosophers call the Enlightenment definition of certain knowledge “the view from nowhere.”³

Christianity, which understands that faith is our ultimate assurance, has not fared well in this environment which has demanded rational proof prior to belief.⁴ It was in this environment of skepticism that modern biblical criticism arose, challenging the centuries old understanding that the Bible was simply a divine book with little to no human input. In this environment even those who sought to defend historic orthodoxy were sucked into the vortex of the necessity of certainty. The situation in the late 19th century was described thus: “Man, as an intelli­gent being . . . cannot be satisfied with uncertainty. He must have the truth and be assured of it. In the last analysis, truth in religion rests on authority and certainty upon infallibility.”⁵

In American Christianity this mentality took the form of Christian rationalism built upon the foundation of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. The theologian was to consider himself a scientist who assumed the trustworthiness of his senses to ascertain facts. He also assumed the trustworthiness of his mental faculties. The theologian like the scientist had to “take for granted that he can perceive, compare, combine, remember, and infer; and that he can safely rely on these mental faculties in their legitimate exercise.”⁶ When it came to the study of God, a rigorous inductivism implied the same subject-object distinction in the study of theology as in any other scientific discipline. “Knowledge,” Charles Hodge contended, “is the persuasion of what is truth, on adequate evidence.”⁷ When applied to the knowledge of God, this implied that “natural knowledge of God and spiritual knowledge of God, differ only in degree, not in kind.”⁸ God was to be known through external objective revelation i.e. the Bible, rather than through an “inner” experience which was in contrast to all other experiences which were “outer.”⁹ I see this as one of the greatest weaknesses of the Princetonian tradition. For all intents and purposes the Princtonians at this point followed Thomas Aquinas in denying that the intellect/mind was fallen. This commitment to the full adequacy of the mind has led continental Reformed theologians to accuse the Princetonians of Arminianism at this point!

B.B. Warfield marks the high point of evangelical rationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He viewed the task of apologetics not as “. . . the defense, not even the vindication, but the establishment . . . of that knowl­edge of God which Christianity professes to embody and seeks to make efficient in the world . . .”¹⁰   In relating reason and faith he insisted:

Though faith is the gift of God, it does not in the least follow that the faith which God gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without cogni­zable ground in right reason. . . . The action of the Holy Spirit in giving faith is not apart from evidence, but along with evidence . . .¹¹

Warfield’s great opponent in the late nineteenth century was Charles A. Briggs of Union Seminary New York. In contrast to Warfield, Briggs was an American Old Testament scholar and theologian who was on the cutting edge of critical Old Testament scholarship. Although he rejected the theological method of the Princetonians,   he too was deeply involved in the quest for certainty:

The earnest spirit presses back of all . . . human authorities in quest of an infallible guide and of an eternal and immutable certainty. Probabil­ity might be the guide of life in the superficial eighteenth century. . . . But the men of the present times are in quest of certainty. Divine authority is the only authority to which man can yield implicit obedi­ence, on which he can rest in loving certainty . . .¹²

This quest for certainty has characterized American Evangelicalism to this day as can be seen in the utterly rationalistic nature of evangelical apologetics. In fact, in an exchange with Thomas Torrance, Carl F. H. Henry explicitly denied that the good we do is fallen and in need of redemption (this includes the “truth” of our theological understanding).¹³ Likewise the use of the doctrine of inerrancy has functioned as a means to provide a bastion of rational certainty among both Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. It has had the effect of locking the Holy Spirit within the leather-bound covers of our Bibles and explicitly denying that God can communicate by any other means than the propositions found in Scripture.¹⁴

The quest for certainty in the rational sense has been a crucial piece of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Newtonian worldview. This quest has however come crashing down in the twentieth century as a result of the work of Einstein’s relativity theory and the opening up of the world of Quantum Physics, which inspired Werner Heisenberg to state his Uncertainty Principle. Einstein himself asserted that within the created order, mathematical certainty is not possible, “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”¹⁵ But what has been known in the hard sciences for nearly a century has still not made its way into the biological and the soft sciences as well as in the popular mindset. These are in many ways still stuck in Newtonian thinking.

It is my contention that the quest for certainty has among many conservative Christians become an intellectual idol which is to be served at all costs. The unstated contention is that to deny rational certainty is to deny truth itself.

I have recently reread Leslie Newbigen’s Proper Confidence : Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. As an Anglican missionary bishop to India for over fifty years he watched the shifting intellectual climate beginning with Enlightenment rationalism and shifting toward pluralism and post-modernism. In this book he addresses the issues of doubt and certainty. Addressing the polarized theological landscape he observed: “From the point of view of the fundamentalist, doubt is sin; from the point of view of the liberal, the capacity for doubt is a measure of intellectual integrity and honesty.”¹⁶

Just last night I was engaged in conversation with one of my students on Guam, a tribesman from one of the remote islands of Indonesia who complained that the missionaries in his area insisted that it was sin to ask questions. Their mantra was, “Don’t ask questions! Just believe!”

This tactic is based their worldview, a worldview that gives certainty and thus intellectual and emotional security. Daniel Taylor observes “We fend off competing world views because by threatening our present understanding of reality they threaten our essential security.” ((Daniel Taylor, The Myth of Certainty (Waco: Word, 1986), 25.)) This mindset tries to achieve certainty by denial, a denial that is based in fear “When people defend their worldview, they are not defending reason, or God, or an abstract system; they are defending their own fragile sense of security and self-respect. It is as instinctive as defending one’s body from attack.”¹⁷

Well known among philosophers and historians of thought is the fact the rationalism of Christianity (and Islam) is directly derived from Aristotle, and that Aristotelianism drove a wedge between faith and reason, beginning in the 12^th century with Thomas Aquinas. From this point forward certainty became “a matter of knowledge, not of faith. Faith is what we have to fall back on when certain knowledge is not to be had.”¹⁸ Intellectual theological security was henceforth grounded in the logical theological systems hewn from the bedrock of the scriptures by theologians employing scholastic theological methodology. Often the scholastic mind exchanged Augustine’s dictum “I believe in order that I may understand,” to “I understand in order that I may believe.”

Beginning with Rene Descartes and the Enlightenment, Augustine’s dictum to “believe so that you may understand” was turned on its head. Doubt became the route to certainty. Descartes sought to provide a structure to indubitable knowledge via programmatic doubt—he would doubt everything until he found something that could not be doubted. He found his answer in the fact that he could not doubt that he was doubting, His ah-ha moment led him to utter his justly famous cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” From this foundation within himself he reasoned his way to God and the rest of reality.

While Descartes’ dogmatism of doubt has been held up as the ideal for over three centuries, it has in the past generation been demonstrated to be logically fallacious. Specifically, it has been shown that logically one cannot doubt something without at the same time believing something else, which is itself unexamined. As I have written elsewhere:

This whole program is logically fallacious, for as scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi has shown, doubt and faith, contradiction and affirmation, manifest a logical equivalence. To doubt one thing is at the same time to believe something else.

The skeptical statement “I doubt P” can be restated in a positive form: either “I believe not P” or “I believe P is not proven.” But these state­ments provoke the question, “On what basis do you believe this?”

The answer to this question reveals a framework of belief that cannot be doubted while at the same time doubting P. This framework provides the conditions of doubt, but the framework itself is not doubted. If it were doubted, the ground for doubting P would be removed.

Thus every doubt has a fiduciary structure and is rooted in a set of faith commitments which for so long as they support the doubt, can­not themselves be doubted. The branch upon which every doubt sits is a belief. To insist on chopping this branch off in the misguided attempt to assume a wholly uncommitted position can only result in self-refer­ential destruction, as the initial doubt itself falls to the floor.

Shifting the focus of our doubt means shifting the focus of our faith commitments. The whole enterprise of doubt rests on an uncritical acceptance of and reliance on a whole framework of meaning. Thus doubt is not an objec­tive process. Rather, it is highly subjective and rooted in all sorts of commit­ments beyond the awareness of the doubter. The act of doubting, then, is not avoidance of unproven beliefs. The doubt itself rests on unproven belief. If we commit ourselves to the principle of doubt, we must ultimately either be reduced to silence, since nothing at all can be proved, or be willing to move from one belief structure to another so that we may avoid permanently asso­ciating ourselves with any other unproven beliefs. “Philosophic doubt is thus kept on the leash and prevented from calling in question anything that the skeptic believes in, or from approving of any doubt that he does not share.” The skeptic in effect says that his own chosen beliefs are neutral and objective and that we should accept the way he sees things if only we would accept rational beliefs like his own. As Polanyi has observed, “a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive.”¹⁹

The with the expansion of the world through exploration, conquest and missionary activity in far flung regions in the 19^th century, the Enlightenment found that there was not just one culture and rationality (i.e. Europe and the Americas) there were many different cultures and many different frameworks of belief i.e. worldviews (although they did not use that term). This plurality of cultures became the undoing of the Enlightenment elevation of doubt as the path to certainty. Instead it became a one way road to nihilism. This cultural plurality was ultimately a key piece that led to the undoing of the Enlightenment’s “view from nowhere,” the idea of truth and with it meaning itself.

By and large American Evangelicalism and has dug its heels in and tried to fight back, using rationalistic apologetics as its chief weapon in much the same way as did the old theologians of Princeton more than a century ago. I am convinced that apologetics is at best marginally effective as an evangelistic tool. (I am not here denying that apologetics has a place. I believe it does. It can help strengthen the faith of believers.) But our tradition is so wedded to propositions that we scarcely have any concept of evangelism and spreading the faith apart from first establishing the truth of theology. In this we have everything backward. Jesus did not say, “By this shall all men know you are my disciples, that you can defend the truth and rationality of your theology.” NO! He said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples: that you love one another.” Is it too much to say that the failure to do this belies our claim to be Christian? (But I digress.)

Part 2 of this article to follow next week.

1. For an explanation of Pascal’s wager see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager [↩]
2. G. E. Lessing, Lessing’s Theological Writings, ed. Henry Chadwick, (A & C Black, 1956), 56. [↩]
3. Trevor Hart devotes an entire chapter of his book Fatih Thinking critiquing this concept—the book it is well worth the time and money for this chapter alone. [↩]
4. Augustine in the fifth century exhorted his readers to “believe so that you may understand.” [↩]
5. Charles A. Briggs, Church Unity (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), p. 223. [↩]
6. C. Hodge, Systematic Theology 1: 9. [↩]
7. Ibid., 1. [↩]
8. Steven Douglas Bennett, Thomas Reid, p. 69. [↩]
9. C. W. Hodge argued that all experience was “inner,” contending that the distinc­tion between “inner” and “outer” related only to the object of knowledge, not to the way in which it was known. “Christian Experience and Dogmatic Theology,” The Princeton Review 8 (1910):8-9. [↩]
10. B. B. Warfield, “Apologetics,” Studies In Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker re­print, 1981), p. 3. (Italics added.) [↩]
11. Ibid., p. 15. [↩]
12. Charles A. Briggs, Authority of Holy Scripture (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), p. 24. (Italics added.) [↩]
13. T. F. Torrance, lectures on The Ground and Grammar of Theology, given at Fuller Seminary, 1991. [↩]
14. See my essay “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Scriptures” for a more detailed study of Evangelical rationalism. https://bible.org/seriespage/father-son-and-holy-scriptures [↩]
15. Albert Einstein, “Geometry and Experience” delivered January 27, 1921 at the Prussian Academy in Berlin, (English Translation: London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, in 1922). [↩]
16. Lesslie Newbign Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 1. [↩]
17. Ibid. [↩]
18. Newbigin, 18. [↩]
19. M. James Sawyer, The Survivor’s Guide to Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 89-90. [↩]