The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [16]
It’s a fair question, as was the one asked of him by a woman suffering from severe and untreatable angina: what did he believe about God? Collins’s skeptical convictions gave way to thoughtful sensitivity of the moment: “I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words ‘I’m not really sure.’ Her obvious surprise brought into sharp relief a predicament that I had been running away from for nearly all of my twenty-six years: I had never really seriously considered the evidence for and against belief.”
Collins’s family background, upbringing, and education led him to be a religious skeptic, a position reinforced through his scientific training and exposure to other skeptical scientists. Now an emotional trigger caused him to bolt upright and reexamine the evidence and arguments for religious belief from a different perspective. “Suddenly all my arguments seemed very thin, and I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking,” he recalled. “This realization was a thoroughly terrifying experience. After all, if I could no longer rely on the robustness of my atheistic position, would I have to take responsibility for actions that I would prefer to keep unscrutinized? Was I answerable to someone other than myself? The question was now too pressing to avoid.”
It was at this crucial moment—an intellectual tipping point that an emotional trigger can send cascading down a different path—that Collins turned to the influential writings of C. S. Lewis, who himself was once lost but then found. The belief door now ajar, Lewis resonated with Collins, leading him inexorably to an emotional readiness where a frozen waterfall would close the door of skepticism. “For a long time I stood trembling on the edge of this yawning gap. Finally, seeing no escape, I leapt.”
* * *
What was that leap like?
Obviously it was frightening, or I wouldn’t have taken so long to get there. But when I finally made the leap there was a sense of peace and relief. I had been living with the tension of having already arrived at a confidence in the plausibility of belief but realizing that that could not be a stable position for the rest of my life. I was either going to have to deny that or go forward. Going forward seemed frightening and going back seemed intellectually irresponsible. That uneasy middle ground clearly wasn’t going to be a place I could live for too long.
This does make me wonder that if you had been born at a different time or in a different place you might have had a different leap of faith with a different religion, and thus there is always going to be some cultural-historical component to belief.
There is, although I’m grateful that the journey that brought me to my faith didn’t rest upon a heavy dose of childhood exposure to a particular religion. That has eased some of my doubts about whether this was my own decision or something culturally imposed.
As a believer who was once a nonbeliever, why do you suppose that God makes his existence so uncertain? If he wants us to believe in him, why not just make it obvious?
Because it apparently suited God to give us free will and ask us to choose. If God made his existence completely clear to everyone, we’d all be robots practicing a single universal faith. What would be the point of that?
Why do you suppose that there are lots of thoughtful people who look at the same evidence as you and come to a different conclusion? Maybe they’re making emotional decisions the other way.
We all bring baggage to every decision we make, and there are aspects of what the evidence says and aspects of what we want the evidence to say. Certainly, there are lots of people who are unhappy with the idea of a God who has authority over them, or a God who expects something of them—that certainly rankled me when I was twenty-two, and I’m sure it rankles some people their whole lives. I had to become a believer to experience the freedom it brings.
You have debunked the intelligent design creationists for their “God of the Gaps” argument,