This I Believe

The mind is such a curious thing. It can believe something so tenaciously and with such conviction that it can convince itself and the body in which it resides to suffer or die for that belief. And yet, it is so fickle that it may believe today the exact opposite of what it was willing to suffer for yesterday.

On a much less intense level, I was once convinced that a girl in my class had stolen a particular item off of my desk. It seems every class has its thief, so it’s not terribly shocking (although no less upsetting) to me when one is uncovered. Besides, this girl had already been caught once in such an act and had offered only excuses as compensation. Not only that, but one of her previous teachers had whispered a warning to me about her “sticky fingers”. When I realized the item was missing, it occurred to me that she had been playing with it the day before. Prior to finding the item on a bookshelf, I questioned her in general terms, searched her backpack and desk, questioned her in more specific terms, and began to cement this idea that she was an unremorseful thief. Not only did she show no compunction, I perceived her to be wholly indifferent, callous, and even smug. To my mind, such an attitude confirmed her guilt and sealed it.

Finding the item on the bookshelf made my world spin. I had been certain that I had been in command of the truth, when really I had been held sway by some erroneous notion.

I once heard a young lady respond to the question of absolute truth like this: “I carry my truths around with me. Sometimes my truths come in contact with other truths that are more true than my truths, so I trade my truths for those truths.”

It occurs to me that she is confusing truth with belief. If she were to replace the words “truths” and “true” with “beliefs” and “believable”, then she would have a denotatively accurate sentence. Belief can feel true, but it has the luxury of working independently from reality. Truth does not have that liberty.

I realize this is one side of an already overwrought conversation. The other side—if it were here right now—would say something like, “Well, it’s only true if you believe it”—as stated in a song I heard this week. But statements like that are so arrogantly wrong that they make me blink in bewilderment. We humans seem to think that we can take words and bend them into any shape and situation and purpose we desire by first stripping them of their meaning and definition and then by persistently using them incorrectly. Just because I came to believe that a particular little girl stole an item from my desk had no bearing on the truth of the matter. She did not steal it. All of the evidence I had compiled—her history, her attitude, her actions with the item the day before—did not make my belief more true; they simply made my belief more believable.

It’s like we approach truth as if it were a salad bar. We walk up to the salad bar of truth and take what we like. Then we sit down with our friends at the table and one says, “Why don’t you have any croutons?” And we say, “Croutons don’t exist.” And the friend says, “Well, sure they do. I have some right here; I got them from the salad bar.” And we look at the croutons and say, “Well, that may be true for you, but I don’t believe in croutons.” Sometimes our impatient friends try to shove croutons down our throats simply so we will acknowledge that we can design beliefs but not truth. Truth simply is.

Can we take this approach with God? God claims many things about Himself and His creation. Can we pull at the strings that disgust us and unravel only what we don’t like? It’s like saying “I don’t believe trees grow acorns because it is a pain to rake them up.” If I don’t like it, then it must not be true. The other side—if it were here—would say, “That’s not fair; you are over-simplifying it.” Is it possible to believe in God and dismiss the unfriendly parts? If we do, that causes bigger problems. If we say we will believe God concerning this and this but not that or that, then that means God was not always truthful. In fact, that would mean He was quite deceptive, which would mean that Jesus was really just a raving lunatic and Christians are the biggest fools in the world. The way I see it, we either must accept the whole package, or throw the whole package out the cosmic window.

Suspend beliefs and disbeliefs with me for just a moment. Suppose—pretend—God created the world and everything in it. Suppose He created people for the purpose of having a relationship and that the whole purpose of people is to glorify God. Suppose, as a creator, He determined a basic set of rules for people to live by. Would it be fair for Him to do so? Suppose God decided not to force people to obey Him, but to allow people to either choose or reject Him. What if He gave that choice to His angels, also? Suppose one-third of the angels rejected God and are doing their level best to persuade people to do the same? If I pick and choose what to believe, how does my belief (or lack of it) affect reality?

I would be remiss to say that believing in God is easy. I can handle the virgin birth, talking donkeys, and raising the dead to life. Miracles I can understand. However, there are some things about God that I find very distasteful and hard to understand. I’ll admit that Hell is one of them. I think, “Why doesn’t God just take everybody to Heaven regardless of belief? Isn’t He big enough to deal with that? Or—barring that—why doesn’t He let nonbelievers slip into oblivion at the end of life instead of an eternity of torture?” Can I dismiss this if I simply don’t like it, or do I have to take the whole package?

These things I have wrestled with for more than half my life. I have seriously considered full disbelief, but I cannot find the atheistic approach plausible. Even Michael Behe—a scientist who does not believe in God—dissected an eyeball and said that the eyeball alone is so complex that it seems to point towards a designer. Nature will not let me renounce God. The transcendental worldviews are too inconsistent and do not make sense to me. I find it hard to believe in God, but I find it harder not to.

There is truth and there is belief, and they are not always consistent. Once the truth is learned, belief can waver. There can be doubt. Doubt and belief do not change truth. Truth is.

I believe the truth is knowable. Throughout the Bible, God commands people to seek truth and claims to be truth. And though I struggle with it, I believe Jesus was the Son of God. And since I believe that, I have no choice but to believe He was speaking the truth when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me.” I have some comfort from other things Jesus said, namely, “Whosoever believes will not perish, but have everlasting life” and also Peter’s comment that God is patient, “not wanting anyone to perish”.
This I believe owing to constant seeking, and I have no choice but live according to it.