When Not Seeing is Believing
23 October 2006 by Gil
Interesting article in the October 9 edition of Time Magazine on how ’spiritual doubt’ could be the key to defusing tensions between the rival fundamentalisms of East and West. Andrew Sullivan’s ‘When Not Seeing is Believing‘ is an argument for a greater humility in terms of what can be known about God and a reminder that there is a certain amount of doubt that is healthy and normal when it comes to finite people comprehending an infinite God.
“If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture, we have reason, we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something that we will never grasp, something we can never know - because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain… There will always be seomthing that eludes us. It there weren’t it would be not be God.”
I’m not sure Sullivan has uncovered the key to the diplomatic questions surrounding Iran and North Korea but he has given an interesting perspective on the nature of religious knowledge and the attitudes of those who claim it.
Tozer comments on the same type of thing. If man gets to a point where he can understand everything about God than it is no longer God that we are discussing but something that man has created. By the very nature of the relationship the created can not entirely understand/know the Creator.
doubt is created when one does not feel they have an adequate reason for holding a belief. i read some of the article and it sounds like sullivan wants mahmoud ahmadinejad to have a little doubt in his religion so he stops funding hezbollah and hamas. so he stops his nuke program. well sullivan made doubt sound like such a good thing that i have decided the only thing we can be certain about is that we should doubt everything. its the only way we can live in peace. we will all be humble and never expect others to hold the same morals we do. but then i suppose we will run into problems when killer is on the loose and no one is able to claim the moral authority to say that killing is wrong.
i am not sure that what is wrong with mahmoud is that he has moral and religious certainty so much that he has misplaced his certainty in ideas that are wrong. i think we must have an adequate response to why he is wrong. what do you think?
As I said at the end, I doubt that Sullivan is thinking that he has found the key to the problem of Ahmedinejad’s ambitions for Iran. He’s pointing to a basic problem within all fundamentalisms - an inability to see shades of grey and and built-in resistance to doubt.
I think you’re over-simplifying a bit when you see that the only solution is that we ‘doubt everything’. That’s not what Sullivan said. He was pointing toward a humbler faith but not one that had given up on the possibility of knowing anything.
Having said that I think your point about Ahmedinejad’s problem being certainty in wrong ideas rather than certainty itself is well taken. I would not want to lose the language of ‘moral authority’ because we simply need it to function.
So why is he wrong? That’s where it gets tricky? Where does moral authority come from in a world of competing truth claims? Do we say he’s wrong because he’s threatening innocent lives? Do we see he’s wrong because he has a misplaced nationalistic and religious agenda? Do we say he’s wrong because of our belief in human rights? Do we say he’s wrong because Jesus told us to love our enemies? Who comes up with the standard and where would we go for broad-based agreement? Those are questions that I have no idea how to answer.
I think this postmodernism is where the problem is… postmodernism has its pro: the fact that what I (or other people who are affirmed in their faith) believe in might be true.
But its con’s outweigh, just what ‘jc’ said. Without a large T[ruth] to guide our knowledge, everything else falls wayside. Our ability to judge what is right and wrong becomes so subjective, a savage de-evolution occurs.
I may be one of the few who believe that America in the world is a relatively remiscient parallel to the Rome in Europe of its hayday. Its power became so great, it outgrew itself. With the inherent knowledge being modified and formed to the self-serving progress of those who shaped it, the society fell. I believe hardcore liberalism and the sentiments of postmodernism are perfect correllations to this belief in the nation of today. America and its anti-patriotic rhetoric may very well bring down the country that allowed the rhetoric to occur.
There once existed a loyalty to this county, but after World War 2, I’m not entirely sure we will ever have another war where our country is in support.