The Divine Encounter
The Ways We Find Faith: Intellect, Need & Interaction
by Diogenes Allen
In my seminary days it was an enormous relief to learn that the ancient Jewish belief in God did not arise from reflection on the natural world but rather because of Abraham’s encounter with Yahweh.
From my previous work in philosophy I had assumed that the ancient Jews believed in God because they wondered where the world came from and how it got its order. I was told that Hume’s and Kant’s refutation of the inference from nature’s order and existence to God were decisive refutations of any move from nature to God. So it had previously looked to me as if the Jews were guilty of bad logic.
I had also been taught in the philosophy of religion that as long as God is not absolutely required to explain nature, there is no proper reason to believe in God. I think the perception that if belief in God is to be rational, it must be based on the natural world, whether in the form of the traditional proofs of God’s existence or upon the natural world’s order, requiring God’s design for its explanation, is very widespread.
Such mistaken assumptions lead to a neglect of many of the actual reasons many people believe in God. In the New Testament Paul explicitly says that faith in the God of Israel comes from hearing. What Paul means when he says that faith arises from hearing is that faith arises from hearing about the way God has interacted with the people of ancient Israel and God’s initiative in sending his Son into the world. This is what people are to respond to with faith. However important the contemplation of nature is, it does not displace interaction with God as the primary reason for belief in God.
Three Types of Motives
I want to look at some of the many reasons people respond with faith. There are at least three main types of reasons that form around particular motives for belief.
First, some people respond with faith because of great or intense distress, such as alcoholics. In responding to a narrative about God’s power, love, and help with their addiction or other overwhelming difficulties, they find immense help and relief. They are able to give some order to their tangled and ensnared lives. Because of this help, their initial belief in what the preacher says attains firm conviction. Like the man cured of blindness in the Gospel story, who, under the pressure of questioning, replied, all I know is that once I was blind and now I see.
A second cluster of reasons group themselves around needs, which are like a deep, unsatisfied hunger. The needs are not so disruptive that a person loses control of his life. A major type of hunger is found in some people’s great aspirations. Many people are attracted by the nobility of a holy, godly life, marked by a sense of service and love. In time, they find that they are unable to live up to the ideal, and often very seriously fail to. This creates a sense of guilt and failure. The promise and experience of forgiveness, as well as the assurance of help in the future to move closer and closer to living up to the ideal, is a reason many people have faith.
The third reason many people are motivated to have faith is that it gives them an understanding of themselves, human nature, and our human condition that coheres with our understanding of the universe at large, whether drawn from the humanities, social sciences, or the natural sciences at any particular time.
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