Belief ranks high among the mysteries of what it means to be human. This is such a murky topic that we have to start with a definition, and the one which I will use is “Confidence and reliance without evidence or proof; acceptance based on testimony or authority.”
An atheist friend of mine once told me, “I would believe in God if he appeared right now, in front of me.” He made this declaration as both a promise and a challenge to God. God did not see fit to comply, so his unbelief persists. I quietly laughed to myself. A visual appearance is no guarantee of anything, as some of the disciples discovered for themselves when Christ rose from the dead and appeared to them. Jesus accepted the difficulty of the matter, eating fish in their presence to show them he was not a ghost. Another persisted in his unbelief: “I don’t believe my eyes, so I won’t believe until I touch his wounds with my own hands.” Christ said, “come and touch them; don’t persist in your unbelief but believe.” He touched them and declared “my God!” Still others continued in their unbelief after all this. Even when they witnessed Christ ascend into heaven some of the disciples “still doubted.” Seeing, touching, hearing – a complete reliance upon the senses is certainly no guarantee of belief.
Of course we can disbelieve that any of those events even transpired at all. But even atheists are faced with the challenge of disbelief on a regular basis. Many atheists think of themselves as highly intelligent and enlightened, certainly much more enlightened than the silly fools who would accept the testimony of a group of folks from two thousand years ago. Yet there is something about being human which makes it difficult to cast off the need for myth, ritual and belief. Many atheists have their own religion – science, and the priests of their religion are scientists. And so the revelation of science becomes their dogma. Even so, I have encountered the mystery of unbelief here, too. I have presented the results of scientific studies to them which conflict with their own thoughts of things. “Well, I don’t believe that,” they have told me. “Believe what?” I ask, “the scientists who conducted the research? The data which they gathered?” What exactly are you not “believing” when you disbelieve what your priests and your religion are serving up for you? The result can only be a profoundly narcissistic retreat into the prison of one’s own mind, where one can only accept one’s own thoughts, which are generated not from external reality, or from the testimony and witness of others, but from a simple, fantastical wish of how one wants things to be.
If there were a God, you’d think he would be most interested in revealing himself to help save man from himself. For the believing Christian, two thousand years of a Judaic revelation history of covenants, prophets, judges and kings culminating in the fullness of time by the incarnation of God as a human person, followed by another two thousand years of salvation history expressed as testimony and authority, offer more than enough substance for an engaged, active belief. But it comes at the cost of a certain kind of violence against the lower nature of man which, for the astute, is itself a sign of authenticity.
“We are giving our testimony to what we have seen, heard and touched with our own hands – the Word of life, so that you may share our life.” (1 John 1.1-2)