The Absurd Reasons of the Heart

The question "Does God exist?" is quite different from the question "What reasons do I have to believe in God?" The theologians and apologist of Christianity have often failed at being doctors of the soul. The unbeliever does not find the idea of God significant in their lives, so the doctors of faith try to calm their doubters by doing that silly business of proving God's existence, a practice that I find utterly useless and contrary to the workings of faith. Some of their arguments imply that if something, anything, created you and the universe, you must worship that Thing.

We have, for instance, the cosmological argument, as made clear by St. Thomas Aquinas, which claims that every entity that exists in the universe must be caused by something. Now if we rewind and go back from effect to cause, to effect to cause all the way to the first cause of the entire universe, there we will find God, who is the First Cause. Well, All hail the First Cause!...No, I didin't think anyone would be that passionate about worshipping that abstract, personality-less First Cause. And what if the universe was infinite? Did the universe ever start to begin with?

And we have the ontological argument, which never made sense to me. By the time I get to understanding it, I'm mentally standing on one foot, doing a one-legged hokey pokey. It does some fancy foot work in asserting that "if we can concieve of an all perfect being like God, he must exist." The only way this argument will work is in confusing atheists into belief.

But no matter if this God is the First Cause or that all pefect being of the ontological argument, we still are given no idea of the responsibilities needed in serving God, the world or our neighbors. It is ludicrous if one thinks that we can recieve a moral vision just through the basic fact of God's existence. In fact, is God's existence in this case at all significant to our existence? And even if we elegantly find the key, and the mystery of God's existence is solved absolutely, that leaves a whole menu of choices of which God(s) and which relgion to choose from. Or we can even get creative and invent our own Gods, like the well-known parody of the Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe with one of his noodles, or even the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

(Respectively, an image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Invisible Pink Unicorn)

No, simply a belief in the existence of a God will not do. When I make the choice to believe wholeheartedly in a faith, I can't passionately follow the God of the philosophers and the theologians, that God of philosophy classrooms, written down as some four premise syllogism on a piece of notebook paper. No, I will believe in Jesus Christ, the only son of God, who rose from the dead for the forgivness of our sins and for the gift of everlasting life (and if your Bhuddist, Hindu or Jewish you may fill out your faith yourself). Assure yourselves in knowing that all the powers of rationality and all the mental muscle a human can muster will never prove one's faith. In brief, faith transcends reason. We know belief in the immortality of the soul is irrational, but some believe. And I won't be ashamed of believing this--proof kills faith, and faith is passionate belief.

Tertullian, one the early Christian apologist, made this quite clear. But later theologians had to legitimize their faith, making it respectable in the grand philosophical tradition of Aristotle and the Greeks. But in the fifth chapter of his Prescriptions of Heresy Tertullian gives us the most appropriate reason to believe and the most elegant proof of Jesus' death and resurrection:

"The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. And He was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible."

Ultimately, your faith in God lies somewhere beyond reason, just as your love for someone in your own life is based more in the immediate experience of that person, than in your reasons for loving that person. If an atheist says he found no reason to believe, and by reason he means that he found no rational reason to believe, then it's not likely this person will ever love, let alone believe in, God. I wonder how many men out there forumulate rational reasons why they love their wives or girlfriends. Now imagine someone whose absence defines the relationship.

But the part of us that reasons is only a small part of us. Remember, these experiments in faith are about the complete man of flesh and bone--the man that feels, desires, thinks and loves. When one says that he or she needs a reason to believe, they ususally do not mean a rational reason, they mean an existential reason, one that speaks to how they experience the everyday stream of moments and the those extraordinary isolated moments. So in defining for ourselves why we should believe in God, it is necessary to look at our sense of life, a life that is charged with meaning. Perhaps your reasons will be absurd for those who look from the outside, but with this faith, which for the most part is your own secret, you will work a magical transformation of the world.