"I think Tomáš Halík has produced one of the best and most beautiful responses to the new atheism, in his recent book Patience with God (Doubleday 2009). His argument is that the real difference between faith and atheism is patience. Atheists are not wrong, only impatient. They want to resolve doubt instead of enduring it. Their insistence that the natural world doesn't point to God (or to any necessary meaning) is correct. Their experience of God's absence is a truthful experience, shared also by believers. Faith is not a denial of all this: it is a patient endurance of the ambiguity of the world and the experience of God's absence. Faith is patience with God. Or as Adel Bestavros puts it (in the book's epigraph): patience with others is love, patience with self is hope, patience with God is faith."
From Benjamin Myers' excellent blog, Faith and Theology
There aren't atheists on one side and people of faith on the other. There are at least three groups: people who have faith God exists, people who have faith God does not exist, and people who doubt God exists. It's only that last group, agnostics, who embrace doubt.
ReplyDeleteIf you have any doubt God does or does not exist, then you aren't a Christian or an Atheist, and if you're associating with those groups you should understand you don't really belong. But life is complicated, just like matters of religion, so such things happen all the time.
Hi Jason - thanks for stopping by. I agree that it's not just atheist vs believers - there's a good deal of doubt in both camps.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't agree that if you have any doubt at all you "don't really belong" in either camp. Doubters have always been a big part of the church; they make it much more interesting. Christians who do not experience significant doubt are probably not experiencing much of life, or at least refusing to think about what they do experience. (I might say the same for dogmatic atheists.)
Actually, it seems to me we pretty much agree on this, except that my definition of a Christian or an atheist as someone who can have doubts is a little more flexible. You might call that flexibility wishy-washiness, though. I can see that.