There is a well-known psychological reality called confirmation bias. It is basically the tendency to give more weight to data that supports your assumptions, than to data which challenges them.
In the humdrum of everyday life it is something to be aware of but its effects are limited.
Perhaps our political beliefs are less robust than we would like to imagine them, our prejudices less well-founded, our hopes built on a shakier foundation than we might assume.
But confirmation bias is only that – a slight bias in one direction – it does not make us incapable of formulating robust understandings of the world and of challenging these understandings as we try to improve them. If it did human beings would never have made any scientific progress. Ultimately the reality of confirmation bias just means we have to be humbler about what we think we know and the limits of that knowledge.
So, while confirmation bias is a reality in our every day life, we can live with it. However, when it comes to the realm of religious belief – where an accurate perception of truth can literally mean the difference between life and death, between salvation or perdition, between a life wholly fulfilled or wholly lost – the ability to perceive truth is a big deal.
The problem of confirmation bias is the area of religious belief is nicely summed up in the following quote;
Believers of any faith may see everyday occurrences as proof of their religious convictions. Positive events are seen as miracles, while tragedies are seen as “tests of faith.” Conversely, people who do not belong to any religion may see the same events as reinforcement of their lack of faith. No matter how random or innocuous the evidence is, people who have a confirmation bias can use it to validate what they believe.
from https://examples.yourdictionary.com/confirmation-bias-examples-in-real-life.html
So how can I as a follower of Jesus be sure that my faith is not just wishful thinking?
I think there are a few things that help us;
The Foundation of Faith –
The Christian faith is ultimately a response to a person – Jesus Christ – and we have quite a lot of data about his life, actions, and teaching. We have 4 eye-witness accounts of his life, all written within living memory and accepted as truthful and accurate accounts by the first communities of Christians.
We can read, study and compare those accounts and arrive at our own conclusion of who we think Jesus was.
Famously, the ardent atheist C.S. Lewis did this and came up with three possibilities for the identity of Jesus. That he was bad (a fake pretending to be something and someone he knew he wasn’t), mad (a mad trapped in a wild fantasy), or that he was God. Lewis could not identify any other option that was consistent with the data. Ultimately, he accepted Jesus as divine, abandoned his atheism and spent the rest of his life living out and sharing his faith in Christ.
The Pragmatic Reality –
The Christian faith has been in existence for 2,000 years, there is a lot of data out there for us to assess on whether embracing the faith whole-heartedly really makes a qualitative difference in a person’s life.
We have whole libraries of hagiography (the writings about the holy ones, the saints). These stories describe the lives and actions of those people who embraced the Christian faith to its fullest extent – obviously if we want to assess the impact of Christian faith it is amongst the most committed followers that we will see the best evidence.
As we examine their lives and teaching do we see evidence of truth and beauty that would give support to the belief that following Jesus makes a difference?
The Positive Place of Doubt –
Interestingly, the Christian faith itself holds that doubt is intrinsic to the experience of living with God. The Bible itself contains many stories of how difficult living with God is. The name of the people of God in the Old Testament was ‘Israel’ which literally means ‘struggles with God’.
The books of Job and Jonah are stories about the pain of living with a God whose actions you don’t understand and cannot make sense of.
The culmination of the Job story is when Job has a revelation of God in all his majesty. Job’s questions are not answered, God’s actions are not explained, there is no Poirot-esque resolution with all the loose ends tied up and explained. just an encounter with a God whose reality manifestly surpasses human comprehension.
Job’s response is to literally put his hand over his mouth, to physically stop himself from speaking any more (Job 40:4).
The Eastern branch of the Christian church developed a concept called apophatic theology (apo – to deny, phanai-to speak, so a meaning something like ‘what cannot be said’).
This concept holds that every way we might try to describe God is ultimately wrong. If we say ‘God is love’ that might be partially true, but our human concept of love is too weak and too limited to accurately encapsulate the reality of God. So, to stretch the concept to its limit it means that ultimately everything we say about God is wrong.
Does this matter? Well to a degree. If we use the analogy of electricity it can be helpful. As an trainee electronic engineer I learned certain formulas about the relationships within an electrical circuit and between power, current and voltage. These formulas meant I could safely work with electricity, predict its behaviour and harness its effectiveness.
If you has asked me to describe electricity at the sub-atomic level, I could not have done that – I’m not entirely sure anyone can completely.
But the level of accuracy we have in describing electricity is sufficient for everyday use.
As Christian do I claim to understand God fully – no – and I need to be humble about the provisional nature of my theology. But is my knowledge sufficient for me to live with God and follow him – yes – perhaps not without a level of discomfort and doubt, but it is possible.
Because of our limited ability to understand God doubt, and it’s corollary, faith are an essential component to living with God.
The book of psalms contains many songs that expressing the most crushing confusion and doubt about God – certainly to a degree that the stiff-upper-lipped English baulk at.
We have books such as Job and Jonah that have doubt as their central theme, we have many incidents in the Old and New Testaments about how hard it is to live with a God who doesn’t behave in a way you expect and which you cannot understand.
Someone has said that
‘doubts are like ants in the pants of faith, they keep it alive and moving’
and there is probably truth in that.
Faith is always a question as well as a conviction.
The Cross – Finally, and perhaps ultimately it is the cross that I think is the most helpful thing as we live with doubt. On the cross Jesus proved in the agony of his voluntary death the reality of God’s love for us and that act puts any and every doubt we might ever have into perspective.
We cannot not trust a God who has proven his love in such a way.
So we must learn to live with our doubts, to be humble about our theology, to see ourselves always seekers after truth, rather than custodians of it.
The life of faith is less like following a programmatic recipe for success, and more like an adventure into the unknown.
Buckle up and enjoy the ride!
FuelForPilgrims 