Faithful Unbelief

In Mark 9:24 a distraught father, at the end of his rope, cried out his final plea to a God who had failed him: “I believe, help me overcome my unbelief.”

That father was in the midst of a crisis of faith. He had tried everything he could think of to heal his son, but nothing worked. He’d even come to Jesus’ disciples who were supposed to be able to do things that no one else could do. When they failed too it seemed like the end for this ever hoping, yet hopeless father.

Then Jesus walked up. He started to dig into what was going on and learned of the disciples’ failure. He made it clear that anything is possible for one who believes.

That statement is life and death.

When faith is easy, it’s a joy to know that God is on your side. It adds to strength to consider that God makes anything possible. When the blessings are flowing, faith flows with them.

But when faith is hard, the idea that anything being possible for those who believe feels like another boot to the back keeping you down. It’s just another indication of how hopeless you really are. If you could simply have enough faith, God would provide. So the failure is yours, not God’s. It’s your lack of faith. Your disbelief. Your failure. Your death.

But that desperate father wouldn’t give up. Even though faith was hard for him and he was filled with unbelief, he didn’t see just two options.

We live in an either/or world that likes to divide things into neat piles. It is either this or that. It’s either here or there. It’s either conservative or liberal. It’s either science or faith. It’s either logical or emotional. It’s either faith or unbelief.

The father refused to be bounded by either/or. He claimed both faith and unbelief. He scattered the neat piles and destroyed the divisions. So Jesus smote him. Smote him good.

No, Jesus loved him.

It’s almost like a Kobayashi Maru, the fictional test for Starfleet officers in the Star Trek universe. It’s a no-win situation. No matter what option you choose in the test it turns out badly. It’s designed as a test of character to determine how potential officers react to real-life no-win situations.

Captain Kirk didn’t accept the rules. He denied that there could be a no-win situation so he found another way. He reprogrammed the test.

The desperate father didn’t accept that there could be an either/or situation. He wanted both/and. And Jesus gave it to him. Happily.

Jesus healed the boy. The father’s son was well. The faithful unbelief of the father was rewarded.

The idea of faithful unbelief isn’t often explored. We usually read the bible from an either/or perspective. Either people are faithful or they are unbelievers. We don’t usually have categories for the both/and, for the faithful unbelievers.

Yet that happens all the time. Faithful unbelief is something that everyone deals with, if they’re honest. Death, loss, divorce, sickness, bankruptcy, unemployment: doubt-causers. For the desperate father it was the incurable sickness of his son. For others it might be years of unemployment. Or mental illness that won’t flee from medicine and therapy. Or a relationship that is so broken mending it seems impossible. Or a death that comes suddenly and leaves broken hearts in its wake.

Doubt-causers will strike every life. Guaranteed.

So what do you do? How do you cope? How do you process through a doubt-causer in a faithful way?

What does Faithful Unbelief look like?

Join us for thirteen conversations exploring faith, doubt, questions, answers, and how to have faithful unbelief.

1. Being Uncertainly Certain
1. Why what we think we know isn’t always what we know.
2. Cognitive Dissonance
1. The power and danger of thinking two different things at the same time.
3. The Cycle of Learning
1. How our reason, experience and emotions combine to create knowledge
4. Asking Questions
1. Exploring the different motivations for asking questions.
5. Asking Logical Questions
1. A brief overview of logic, its questions and potential answers.
6. Asking Emotional Questions
1. How feelings spur questions that logic may not be able to answer and what to do about it.  
7. Searching for Answers
1. Ways to begin processing questions: study, conversation, experience, journaling, meditation, counseling, etc.
8. Searching for Meaning
1. Touching on the difference between answers and meaning and what each one can offer.
9. Discovering Truth
1. How will you know when you know what you know?
10. Big T Truth versus Little T Truth.
1. How finding your truth may or may not have anything to do with Truth.
11. Change
1. How to use both feelings and actions to create change, and why you should do it.
12. Cognitive Consonance
1. Re-aligning your brain to a new reality is painful and rewarding.
13. Re-Engage the Questions
1. The cycle of faithful unbelief continues. Learn how to keep the process going in a healthy way.

The Basis of Belief

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."

That quote has been variously attributed to Ralph Hodgson, Madeline L'Engle and Abraham Lincoln. Maybe they all said it, it's not that original. In fact, it's the basis of almost everything we do on a daily basis.

Going back to the conversation about Thomas and how the evidence helped him to believe, we have to assume that it was his belief that helped him to see the evidence. There were many other people who saw Jesus resurrected and decided that it wasn't him.

But let's come back to that.

In 1982 an Australian scientist named Barry Marshall developed the hypothesis that stomach ulcers were caused, not by stress and spicy food, but by a bacterium. The scientific community ignored him, ridiculed him, and flat-out wouldn't believe him. The conventional wisdom was that stomach acid was too harsh an environment for bacteria to live in. Marshall persisted, but no one would believe him until, at his wits' end, he drank down a petri dish of the suspect bacteria. Within a few days he developed the ulcer.

This was proof that his hypothesis was right. It was in 1985.

Yet for decades the public and the scientific community alike persisted in believing that stress and spicy food caused ulcers. Finally, in 2005, Marshall's work was recognized and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

It was only because he believed in his hypothesis that he saw a bacterium as the cause of ulcers instead of stress. Everyone else in the scientific community saw the same evidence yet believed something different. In the end, Marshall was shown to be right, but proof wasn't enough to convince the world. His unyielding belief was an indispensable part of the process.

Evidence can't exist without belief. Or rather, I should say that evidence isn't perceived as such without belief. It might be a bacterium, a sub-atomic particle, karma, or the resurrection of Jesus, whatever it is, unless you want to believe it, any evidence can be dismissed. And, if you're predisposed to believe it, anything can be construed as evidence.

That puts us in this dangerous middle-ground where we can't have any epistemic certainty. That is, we can't know for sure that we know anything. Since what we believe informs what we do with evidence and what we do with evidence informs what we believe, there's no beginning nor end to the cycle. Descartes' Archimedian point is quicksand. It's the chicken and the egg.

The basis of belief, then, is the certainty that we cannot have any certainty. Once we accept that everything we perceive is filtered through the lens of our belief, then we can start figuring out how good our beliefs are and how good our evidence is.

What have you seen because you believed in it?

The Science of Belief and Unbelief

Fotolia© Jeff Metzger

Over at Mother Jones, Chris Mooney writes The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science. What do you do when scientific evidence contradicts what you already believe?

Imagine walking into work with the crowning achievement of your career under your arm. You are nearly trembling with excitement to share what you've been working on all night. Then the moment arrives and you get to share what you've discovered. You tell your bosses that the world is, in fact, round.

You're met with blank stares and a barely audible grunt. One of them asks how you got to this preposterous notion and you begin to describe your reasoning. Before long you've been shouted down and called a heretic. Not quite the day you were imagining. Something similar to this happens all the time. Evidence is ignored, skewed and reinterpreted based on the emotional bias of the people who hear it.

In the article, Mooney says: "Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction."

If we're trying to lead people into a new way of thinking - a new way of believing. We can't start with contradicting what they've always thought. That's the road to increased resistance and intransigence. However, if we work to see the world from the perspective of the people we're trying to convince then we can present new information within the framework that they will expect. We are subversive. This is the way of Jesus with his parables. The way of the prophet Nathan before David. This is the way of powerful preachers.

How do you work to change minds?