. . . because you believe what you believe.
Sounds as if I got my terms mixed up, doesn’t it? But I didn’t. I first heard this statement many, many years ago from the evangelist Bill Rice III, son of the founder of the Bill Rice Ranch in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. (The BRR is a Christian camp that began primarily as a ministry for deaf children, brought about because the Rices’ daughter Betty was deaf. As far as I can tell from the website, it’s still going strong today.) It wasn’t original with him at all, but it stuck with me from that sermon.
We think that we progress from knowledge to belief, but in reality we almost always go the other direction. We start out with a set of what are called ad hoc or a priori assumptions; that is, things we take for granted, that we believe. Then all of the things that we learn are fitted into those assumptions. So, for instance, a biologist who believes that all life originated by chance will see chance-produced organisms; a biologist who believes in God as Creator will see organisms that have been designed. Their observations are the same but their beliefs are different. So Richard Dawkins, one of the pre-eminent evolutionary biologists of the day, says, “Biology is the study of complex things that appear to have been designed for a purpose.” Well, if they appear to be designed, wouldn’t the simplest theory be to say that they were designed? No, not for Dawkins–because of his beliefs. His atheism precludes his saying any such thing.
Let us make no mistake, though: Christians also have a set of assumptions. Assumptions aren’t bad in and of themselves. We believe that God exists and that the Bible is true, and we do so by faith. At the moment of conversion we are given a new set of assumptions, as it were. Very few if any Christians have become so through logical argument; that is simply not the way that conversion occurs. If we have not had the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts then we can’t believe. And we can’t make others believe; all we can do is share the Gospel and pray. But we are commanded to do that.
An example of how assumptions control observation and not the other way around comes from the area of astronomy. We all know that for thousands of years mankind believed that the sun moved around the earth, the geocentric theory. Finally, in the 16th century, Copernicus came up with the idea that the earth rotated as it revolved around the sun (heliocentric), with his theory later bolstered by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. But here’s the thing: observations of how the sky looked did not change. Only the interpretation of those observations changed. The philosopher Wittgenstein (you’ve heard of him, right?) once asked a friend why people had believed the geocentric theory for so many millennia. His friend said: “Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going around the earth.” So the philosopher replied, “Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the earth were rotating?” And the answer is, of course, that it would have looked exactly the same.
If you find such questions as fascinating as I do, be sure to read A Shot of Faith to the Head by Mitch Stokes if you haven’t already done so. I have a post about that book over in the “Sporadic Book Club” blog.
Back to Bill Rice III: It’s surprising, actually, how many pithy sayings I remember from this preacher. He and his brother didn’t like wearing anything but jeans, but his mother wouldn’t let them wear jeans to church and made them wear dress pants. The boys called them “Mr. Goodman Pants.” More applicable to daily life, though, was his description of how he and his brother would play “hit last” in the back seat of the car. One would hit the other’s leg. Then that brother would hit back. And so on. Finally, their mother would turn around and tell them to knock it off, at which point the game would end. The brother who had gotten in the last lick had won, since he had “hit last.” Funny as that story was, Rice said, too many of us are engaged, in our daily lives, in an ongoing game of “hit last.”