Faith or Reason?

I discovered this commentary this morning. I was debating a Church of Christ preacher (by e-mail) after he had responded to some questions I had written for him. This went on for about two months and we finally gave up on each other. He couldn't convince me to believe something I strongly disbelieved and I couldn't convince him to string out the logic of his belief in order to expose the absurdity of it.  

More than five years on since this was written, the only thing I would change is the reference to god giving us a large brain. Fossil evidence indicates we reached our present brain size some 200,000 years ago through the process of evolution.  History shows few of us have actually learned to use this remarkable organ.

                                                                   August 8, 2005

Dear Mr. Crozier

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions.  I always try to look for areas of agreement.  Certainly I can agree with you it would be a pointless  waste of time to bring up every contradiction.  I have a 165 page book, “The Bible Handbook” published in 1953 that contains countless examples of contradictions, absurdities, indecencies, unfulfilled prophecies, broken promises and obscenities all located somewhere in the Bible.  The subject is such a target rich environment (to put it in military terms) we can’t begin to scratch the surface with the exchange of a few letters or e-mails.  Scholars much more intelligent  than I  have been arguing and debating the subject for 2000 years.  If they haven’t sorted it out by now we probably won’t either.  I especially appreciate and acknowledge your comment about forcing believers to take a hard and honest look at the difficulties found in  the Bible.

Most of us were introduced to Bible stories as a child.  A child of 4 or 5 years will believe just about anything presented to him.  The story of Noah and the Flood is no more preposterous to a 5 yr old than is Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  But as we grow older and our minds mature, many of us cease to believe these stories.  I think the reason we continue to believe in equally impossible stories in the Old Testament is because we have filed them away in a corner of our mind as “religious”.  We have been led to believe, or come to believe on our own, that the authority.... indeed the very existence of God, is somehow entwined with these stories.  To question them is regarded as heresy, and blasphemy.  Therefore that little compartment of our mind labeled “religious” is sealed forever.  Other portions of our mind continue to expand so that we can learn to do heart transplants, launch spaceships, and other technological feats that literally boggle the mind, but many of us are never able to sever the umbilical cord that attaches us forever to those childhood beliefs which our brains have filed under “religion”.  Somewhere rooted deep in our psyche is a powerful emotional need.....so powerful that reason and logic just cannot overcome it. So while we continue to grow and learn in one part of the brain, the little compartment tucked away there under religion is not at all surprised to find that snakes talk, the sun stands still and a whole country is smitten with frogs.  (Imagine the surprise of those poor folks way out in the country who have no inkling of what is going on with this frog business and they wake up to find their tent is full of them.)  Does anyone have a stubborn rebellious son  that tends to eat too much and has taken to drinking?  No problem..  The answer is right there in Deut. 21  V.18-21.  Just tie him to the front gate and have the neighbors stone him to death.  I think we can agree there is no such thing as an illegitimate child, only illegitimate parents.  Yet Chapter 23, V.2 plainly says that a bastard shall not enter into the Congregation of the Lord, even unto the tenth generation.   This is moral nonsense, plain and simple.  But that little corner of our mind labeled religious allows us to skip over statements like that without the least concern.   We don’t bat an eye when we read in Deut. 23 V. 13 that God, who has an entire universe to look after, feels he has to  concern himself with instructions on how to dispose of our fecal matter.   It’s impossible to believe something that you disbelieve. You can test this for yourself.  Try believing for example that you are Napoleon.  I’ll give you a moment.

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You can’t do it can you?  (Unless you are insane).  The point is to profess a belief in something we disbelieve is the worst form of hypocrisy.  How many “Christians” have you known or heard about that profess one thing and do another? 

Reason and logic.

My personal belief is that reason and logic are a special gift from God.   If I am correct that God gave us a brain to think with and included in that package  the wonderful gift of reason and logic, what might be God’s reaction if I rejected that gift?  If I am asked to believe that a perfect God in a violent fit of rage, struck Uzza dead while performing an act committed out of admiral intentions, (Chronicles 1 Chap 13 V. 9-10)  while ignoring billions of seriously immoral acts, is to me an insult to God.  Try as I may, I just can’t believe it.  If God was so angry with Uzza over an instinctive act, how much angrier is he going to be with me for rejecting his wonderful gift of reason and logic. In my opinion, rejecting a gift from God is serious stuff.  So today when I read the story of Noah and the Ark my reason and logic (God’s gift) immediately clash with the story in the bible.   So let’s try to pry open the lid of that little box in our head labeled “religious stuff”and see what we find in there.  The contents of this box have not been exposed to the light of reason and logic for centuries so it can be a little scary.

As you know, a cubit  measures  a man’s arm between the elbow and the tip of his middle finger.  Mine happens to be 18 inches.  Noah’s was probably smaller.  Goliath’s was probably 40 inches.  Who knows?  Just to make the math easy, let’s assume Noah’s was 20 inches and he used his own arm to conform to God’s instruction.   So that leaves us with a boat 500 feet long, 83 feet wide and 50 feet high.  By comparison, the Queen Mary 2 is 1132 feet long, 147 feet wide and 230 feet tall from the bottom to the top of her stacks.   In this story we are actually asked to believe that a handful of human beings could have rounded up seven clean beasts of every kind and two unclean beasts of every kind.  There is no way a human being, even the  fastest, strongest  human being could catch a big part of them anyhow.  They would have simply flown away or ran away.  And many of them would have caught Noah and made an appetizer of him and had the rest of his family for lunch. (Polar bears living north of the arctic circle come to mind.)  And remember Noah would not have sailed those thousands of miles required to catch 2 (or seven) polar bears because in those times everyone thought the earth was flat.  He would have known if he ventured too far he would have sailed right off the edge of the earth.  But all that aside, we now know there were and still are hundreds of thousands of species of animals and millions of insects.  A whole fleet of Queen Mary’s would not be sufficient.  Much less a little wooden boat.  Just as you could not make yourself believe you were Napoleon, I cannot make myself believe Verse 19  chapter 6 of Gen.  If I professed to believe it I would be a hypocrite.

Galileo, (1564-1642) building on lessons learned from Copernicus, discovered the earth went round and round the sun.  He was branded a heretic by the Pope who made him recant his findings under threat of death by torture.  The Bible clearly suggests  the sun goes round and round the earth. So that little corner of the Pope’s mind was closed. Galileo was spared being burned at the stake when he recanted his findings but even then, he was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life.  Nearly 400 years later (1982) the catholic church                                                                                             3

finally got around to apologizing for that.  As late as the latter half of the 19^th century, protestant churches here in the U.S. were teaching that to help blacks was a sin.  Anyone caught helping a runaway slave could go to hell for it.  Mark Twain in his classic story “Huckleberry Finn” addresses that problem through the character of Huckleberry.  Huck has just about talked himself into turning “Nigger Jim” in because “Christians” have taught him it’s a grave sin to help a slave run away. He realizes he can go to Hell for harboring a slave.  He wrestles with the problem in his mind for a long time and  finally comes down on the side of Jim.  He decided if helping good ol’ Jim would cause him to go to hell....(as his church taught) then he would just go to hell.  Maybe the protestant churches won’t wait 400 years to apologize for their error.  It matters not to me one way or the other.  The thing is  I’m about where Huck was concerning this reason and logic thing.  If I am wrong and God planted reason and logic in my brain as some kind of perverted joke, and  my punishment for using his gift is banishment to hell for eternity, then, like Huck, I will just go to hell.

Most Christians I talk to believe that God is omniscient (all knowing) At this writing I have  friends and relatives with serious medical problems in which the outcome is uncertain.  But to God the outcome is certain.  He already knows who will survive and who will die.  I cannot bring myself to pray for them because that sort of prayer is just an attempt to get God to change his mind. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) takes on the subject of prayer in his excellent book, “The Age of Reason”.  He says, “Man takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the Universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine he prays for rain, and when it is rain he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change His mind and act otherwise than He does?  It is as if man were to say, “Thou knowest not so well as I.”

The opposite of ignorance is knowledge.  I find it interesting when Christians  talk about the “mystery” of the bible.  I find fish mysterious.  I confess to be ignorant about fish. I know they can breathe underwater but just how they do that is a mystery to me.  But just because it’s a mystery doesn’t mean there is no answer.  It simply means I haven’t studied the problem enough.   Mysteries always contain answers.  If we are truly interested in answers  then we need to direct more attention to it.  Eventually we may find the answer or sometimes we won’t and just give up in defeat.  But just because there are mysteries, we have no right to believe anything we want.  Reading the same thing over and over in the Bible and pretending we have discovered some new answer is a precarious construct.  If we were to discover (and come to agreement on) some new truth in the Bible, that means all those who came before us had it wrong.  So what’s to become of them? 

I want to close by thanking you again for addressing the Bible contradictions.  But truthfully sir, I couldn’t help but smile at one of your arguments.  You said “God miraculously inspired the scriptures.  However he has not miraculously preserved them.”  Why would God go to the trouble of inspiring them and then not preserving them?