Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 11

The next installment in the Campolo father/son book is Bart’s chapter called “Can’t, Not Won’t: Losing Faith is Not a Choice.” Bart begins by saying that he encourages the newly de-converted, when sharing their story with friends and family, to begin by listing all the cherished values they learned in church, all the teachings of Jesus they love most dearly, and all the commitments to social justice and community building they still share. Only then talk about why they can no longer believe.

Rhetorically this is perhaps most helpful, but I do find myself wondering about a potential equivocation. In Bart’s case, anyway, he has abandoned moral realism. He no longer thinks there’s adequate foundation for believing in objective moral truths. So it remains unclear what’s meant by his “cherished values” unless he’s just presupposing a deep fact/value divide, but in which case, how stable is his professed love for such “values”? It largely seems as if he’s admitting that his worldview lacks foundations for such values, but because he remains personally committed to them, he takes them seriously still.

However, he could have easily gone in another direction, it would seem, as some atheists do. I’m not suggesting that all or most atheists do so, but the question of ontological foundations for our cherished convictions seems eliminable only at great peril. Why remain committed to such values when, say, doing so becomes costly—if one genuinely thinks they are not objectively true, prescriptively binding, or anything of the kind? It makes one’s value commitments a purely subjective and personal preference that, in principle, could vary from one day to the next.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

Bart admits that early on, when he shared his de-conversion with others, he would get into the various reasons why he had grown skeptical of Christianity, which had the effect of putting believers on the defensive. He says he didn’t actually want to spoil anyone else’s faith, but it seemed that way when he took that approach. So eventually he says he learned to cut to the chase and claim something like this: “For reasons beyond my control, I simply stopped believing in God. The rest are just details.” In his case, “all that really matters is that over many years my ability to believe in any kind of supernatural reality gradually faded away, until I finally became convinced that the natural universe—matter, energy, and time—is all that exists.”

Bart claims he couldn’t retain his faith, and means to be taken seriously. “I didn’t choose not to believe in God; I just stopped believing.” He says it wasn’t willful. He had plenty of motivations to retain his faith. He says it didn’t happen on purpose; it happened to him, slowly but surely. God “disappeared before my eyes.”

The issue to which Bart is pointing here is quite an important one, pertaining to the matter of belief. It’s quite true that, for the most part, we don’t have direct volitional control over our beliefs. As I type this, my cat Mitty is lounging on my desk, partially behind the computer I’m writing on. Even if I were offered a hundred buck not to believe she’s there, I couldn’t do it. Beliefs don’t tend to work that way. We tend to be more doxastically passive than that; beliefs have a way of insisting on themselves, on the one hand, or exceeding our reach, on the other.

Then again, I resist Bart’s depiction of his de-conversion in wholly passive terms. I don’t think that’s true to life, either. Although we may not have direct volitional control over our beliefs, we surely, for at least a range of our beliefs, have indirect volitional control over them, it would seem. Pascal recognized this near the end of his Pensées, after offering several reasons to take faith seriously. Recognizing the challenge, he then pointed out that there are indirect ways of building faith. Our practices, our friends, our habits, our choices—all of these have an impact over time.

There are also indirect ways of undermining faith—bad theology, bad exegesis, bad hermeneutics, refraining from engaging in fellowship with fellow believers, living sinfully, etc. In a later essay Tony will suggest that Bart’s neglect of local Christian fellowship likely detracted from his faith.

But Bart seems to think that his volition and choices had little to nothing to do with his loss of faith. This seems monumentally unlikely. Having seen already some of the ways in which he processed the faith of his upbringing, for example, makes it, to my thinking, not unlikely that he would lose his faith. At least not a big surprise. Yet he persists in the claim: “For better or worse … none of us really chooses what we believe. No matter how motivated we might be, our sense of what is real is beyond our control.” Again, direct volitional control? Granted. Not even indirect volitional control? I doubt it.

So committed is Bart to this narrative that he expresses confusion that old Christian friends call and express their concerns and “hold me responsible for my obviously sincere lack of faith. After all, if Christianity is true, and there really is a God in heaven, he’s the one to blame.” Here he cites Paul in Ephesians 2:8-9 for evidence: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Again, I find Bart’s appeal to a biblical teaching the way he does quite misleading. That Ephesians passage, rightly understood, does not suggest that we play no volitional role in the acceptance of faith. Faith indeed is a gift, but gifts can be accepted or rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, in big ways and an aggregate of small ways. But Bart reads it this way (without much of any recognition that he could be wrong): “That faith is the gift of God, plain and simple. Which means, of course, that if there’s anyone my dear Christian friends, those concerned folks who keep reaching out to me, and especially my still-believing parents ought to be imploring, it is God, not me.”

Although I believe we can and should pray for our unbelieving friends and family, my theology is simply not this sort of monergistic picture of God according to which Bart’s decisions played no role in where he’s currently at. I think such a picture is defensible on neither biblical nor philosophical grounds; and in fact, I think there are hermeneutical, exegetical, and rational reasons to resist such a depiction. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Bart played a far bigger role in his de-conversion than he thinks.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

Podcast: Mark Foreman on Faith, Reason, and Natural Law

On this week's podcast, we hear from Dr. Mark Foreman. Dr. Foreman is a professional philosopher who specializes in both Christian apologetics and bioethics. The main topic of this episode is theism as a natural law ethic. Dr. Foreman will explain what a natural law ethic is, why we should prefer it, how it can be applied in moral dilemmas, and  how to use it in apologetics. But before we get to that, we'll also get to hear some thoughts from Dr. Foreman on the relation of faith and reason.  

Sam Harris on Faith

I’m always interested to see, as I read a particular author, what he or she thinks about the nature of faith. Some think it’s a good thing, others think it’s bad, if not about the worst thing of all. Not to mention that people can have widely different views of what faith is. In the show “Once Upon a Time”—which I rather love, by the way—faith tends to be characterized as sheer belief. Belief, for example, that the good will win. I like that belief, although it’s not always clear what it entails. But my biggest problem with such belief in the show is that it seems largely unprincipled. More like faith in faith than anything—which, sadly, was also exhibited in Shepherd Book from Firefly—another show I loved. (I think I watch too much television.) I remember realizing this most clearly when, after Book made reference to the importance of faith, Mal said waiting for God is like waiting for a “train that don’t come,” or something like that; at that point Book asked why Mal thought a reference to faith required reference to God. The suggestion seemed to be that something like faith in faith was enough; that it didn’t matter what we have faith in, just as long as we have faith. I really liked the character of Shepherd Book, but that struck me as more than a little lame. But Joss Whedon can be forgiven; he rocks. And heck, he’s an atheist. And for an atheist says pretty cool things, like these words he gave to Captain America, after seeing Thor and Loki: “There’s just one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” So yes, Joss can be forgiven. ANYWAY, back to faith. I’ve suggested before that, largely owing to the influence of an Enlightenment-foisted definition, faith has often nowadays come to be understood along the lines of epistemic disadvantage. The idea is that faith makes up for lack of evidence. So much so, in fact, that—as I’ve heard more than one say—if we had evidence, we’d have no need for faith. This is, to my thinking, sheer faith as fideism. I have a dear friend who’s an atheist and a very smart guy who, though he’s not particularly open to faith, tells me the only faith he’d really consider is fideism. He’s drawn to the likes of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard quite a bit, and, especially in the latter, sees a picture of faith as essentially fideistic—a wild leap in the dark, something that goes contrary to the evidence, a counterintuitive staking of an ultimate claim on what may or may not be the right choice, something radical and outrageous and countercultural and even absurd. Yet somehow winsomely so. My atheist friend sometimes makes me laugh because, of all the variants of faith on offer, this is the one that he, a trained philosopher, might gravitate to.

For the record, I do think there’s something radical and countercultural about biblical faith rightly understood, but I don’t think this translates into fideism. God may challenge our assumptions and cultural convictions about what’s right and wrong, but ultimately, the only way we can love God with all of our minds is if God makes sense. It might take some work and hard thinking, and of course God ever in certain respects remains beyond our ken, but it’s either possible for us to reconcile God with our clearest apprehensions of the dictates of logic and morality or, if it’s not, God makes little to no sense and faith is thus irrational. When Donald Miller says, in Blue Like Jazz, that he wants a God who doesn’t make sense, I get a tad nervous. If he means God might challenge our convictions and help us realize that what we thought had been true in fact is false, that’s fine; surely we should retain a correctable and teachable worldview and theology; but the phrase “doesn’t make sense” could mean a whole lot more, none of which is the slightest bit appealing to me and all of which smacks of anti-intellectualism. I think biblical faith is clearly not fideistic. It’s rooted in evidence. The “not seeing” part of faith usually has more to do with our inability to see how God’s going to work things out than having no evidence to believe trust in God’s faithfulness is warranted. The more evidence we have, in fact, the stronger our faith can and should be, in my estimation, contrary to the fideistic perspective.

Recently I read the atheist Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape, and his view of faith—and of religious people generally—is a delight to read. His fiery rhetoric veritably drips with animus—so much so, I have to confess, it makes for incredibly fun reading. The dude is passionate. I don’t mean to mock his convictions; I really don’t. I found myself liking him more and more as I read his book, however much I disagreed with parts of it. And it seems to me, anyway, that he sincerely cares about people and would like to see the world become a better place. He’s understandably grieved at how some folks, in the name of their religion and faith, do hideous things, and though I think he’s radically mistaken thinking of all religious conviction as of a piece and equally dangerous and deleterious, the fact that he thinks religion is so big a detriment to human well-being renders it eminently understandable he argues so vociferously against it, particularly its harshest manifestations.

For now I’d like to point out his depiction of the nature of faith, as I think it’s informative, and it adds something to the discussion: The condition of faith itself, he writes, is “conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc." So here Harris identifies what he considers to be five salient features of faith:

1. Convictions without sufficient reason;

2. Hope mistaken for knowledge;

3. Bad ideas protected from good ones;

4, Good ideas obscured by bad ones; and

5. Wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation.

I think there’s little doubt as to why, if that’s his view of faith, he rejects it. I’d reject it, too!

But again, I don’t see biblical faith, rightly understood, as anything like this. Biblical faith is trust in the faithfulness of God to do what he’s promised to do. And such trust is predicated on, in my estimation, excellent reasons to think God is trustworthy—a long, established track record of showing himself to be faithful. Not in the sense of giving us everything we want, but in showing his love, fulfilling his promises, and offering his salvation. Whether biblical faith is lacking in evidence is a matter for dialogue and discussion, not dogmatism. It seems to me, in my own study of these questions, philosophical arguments for God’s existence and historical arguments for the truth of Christianity are strong—even if the evidence is not such as to compel the assent of every rational person. There’s both light and darkness, as folks like Paul Moser, C. Stephen Evans, and Pascal before them, have argued is likely to be the case if God wants to do more than enlighten the mind, like woo the heart. The bald assertion that biblical faith lacks evidence grows tiresome. I suggest that atheists find someone who can debate William Lane Craig without getting their clock cleaned before repeating that vacuous mantra ad nauseum. And whether biblical faith involves empty hope, bad ideas, or wishful thinking entirely depends on whether the claims on which such faith is based are true or not. Again, merely repeating such charges as if doing so accomplishes anything is a paradigmatic instance of question-begging assertion without argument. So, once more, this sort of uncharitable and knee-jerk characterization of the nature of faith, however fun it is to read, leaves me unimpressed, and does little to advance substantive discussion.