Assume as possible . . .

Assumptions are necessary because everything is not known. It just bugs me when people who claim to be intelligent will not be honest about assumptions.

I have always been hard on we Christians for not admitting that our faith includes some assumptions. That may sound heretical, but I think it is really a fairly common method of discovery that is different from the scientific method. For instance, I believe in God as revealed to me through Jesus and the Spirit. My faith did not begin as a result of seeing, hearing or feeling God. It started with an assumption that God is real. After I allowed myself to be open to that assumption, then God became more and more obvious to me in my life and in the world around me. I have still not seen, heard or touched God, but I have sensed His presence and seen the results of His power. Because my assumptions about God may not have been entirely correct, my knowledge of God is a continuing process of learning and unlearning. But my faith necessarily began with some assumptions on my part.


I think it is harmful to discuss our belief without admitting that we are operating on faith, not fact, and our faith may be said to have begun with our acceptance of certain assumptions. If a Christian is not strong enough to admit this, if his or her language is of the "The Bible says it and that settles it" school of thought, then most thinking people will reject him or her as dishonest, and may reject the God we so much want to represent. We must acknowledge that we act out of faith, not fact.

Christians receive this criticism often. But we are not alone. Aetheists assume that there is no creator. But some aetheists cannot admit that their view is based on an assumption. Nothing in creation or science supports any certainty about what, if anythng, created all this. It is difficult, maybe impossible, for us in our finite understanding, to understand the beginning. If I am wrong about that, let me know.

I often listen to Interfaith Voices, an NPR program that explores a broad spectrum of religious issues. Today's program featured a discussion between Christopher Hitchens, an atheist that wrote a book and is on all the talk shows, and a secular humanist, Edd Doerr.
The debate raised a lot of good blog fodder (I guess that could be called 'blodder', you saw it hear first). But the substance of the debate is not what I want to talk about.

Hitchens uses evolution theory as a case study. He says that the large number of religious people, Christians and others, who insist that God created the earth a few thousand years ago in seven days, have closed their minds to obvious scientific evidence to the contrary. I agree with him on that.


And Hitchens makes a logical argument when he says that if the literal seven day creation story is made a necessary tenet of a religion, then the overwhelming evidence that it did not happen exactly that way affects the credibility of the whole of the religion's beliefs.

We Christians are guilty of doing God a great disservice when we give the world the idea that we have God all figured out, that we know all there is to know about God. On many days my favorite Bible verse comes not from Jesus, but from a poor blind beggar who had been healed by Jesus and was being grilled by the local authorities about who Jesus was and what He did to him. The formerly blind man became exasperated, and in a retort to authorities that was almost as miraculous as his healing, the beggar tells the Pharisees, "look, I don't know much of anything about the man. What I do know is that a little while ago I was blind, but now I can see."

The Pharisees could not argue with the blind man. He assumed that whatever Jesus did, whoever Jesus was, He cured his blindness. Nothing more.

We cannot prove the existence of God. God never meant for us to do so. Jesus gave us some helpful instruction though.

"This is how they will know that you are my disciples . . .that you love one another."

It can't be that simple, can it?