Not that Easy

A 26 year old graduate student wrote to one of those advice columnist and asked for some reason to believe. He asked for some reason for hope. He said his studies in History and Economic gave him nothing but despair. He said there is overpopulation, environmental destruction, increasing violence in religious wars, the gap between rich and poor is ever growing, unemployment, horrible tribal warfare, and pending natural disasters. What is there that offers any reason to be hopeful?

That article in the newspaper was just a public display of what I got in a personal response to an email I sent out to friends at Easter. I said something about the fact that I hoped the annual repetition of the Easter greeting, He is Risen" has not robbed it of the audacity and incredible claim that it makes and that this Easter would find them with a surprise of joy that would help them to hold on to it. One of my older friends, one whom I have admired and respected for a great number of years, wrote back and said that because of some very severe and painful deaths of a few friends, because of his own unstoppable prostate cancer, and other things, he no longer believe in a beneficent God. After a life time of preaching and bearing witness to faith, he has now found he can no longer claim it.

When it comes right down to it, and one wants to take it seriously, this business of faith in the reality of another power, the existence of another reality that impacts and shapes and is involved with this reality is not an easy decision. Evil is a problem for a good God, but goodness is a problem for agnostics. Ethical behavior for human beings is a problem for all of us. Why does the good matter? Someone once said that the amazing coincidences of the creation of the universe by chance is about the same as the publication of the encyclopedia by an explosion in a printing shop. So there is the problem of explain the amazing creation without a supreme being who has intelligence and purpose. But the argument is not absolute.

This business of faith in a good God is not as simply or as easy as some many practitioners of religious groups seems to want to believe. One theologian once suggested that religious groups get young people to commit at age 12 or so because they can get them to make promises at that age that they do not fully understand and then when the young person does start to question, the religious group can apply pressure by saying "But you swore that you did..." The evidence and the rational arguments for or against faith are pretty equal. The evidence is inconclusive from the logical point of view. The decision in either direction is a leap of faith. It is a leap of faith to believe in a good God. It is an equal leap of faith to believe that there is no God. The decision to not believe in a supreme being also is a decision to put something else in that place. Who has ultimate authority? The State? My race? My own mind? But we ought to never suggest to any one that those leaps are easy to make. It is a gamble we have to make with life. We are all lottery players in this game.