thanks again for your reply.
I have Lewis's Mere Christianity, hes a good writer, but has a different approach apologetically from Francis Schaeffer.
I apologise for the length of this.
It may be just that I have read many conflicting views that
I am not sure who to listen to.
Maybe I am not even a christian yet, but the strange thing is I seem understand things as well as many christians.
Cool, I'm glad that you have
Mere Christianity. No need to apologize for length. There is much more information out there than we will ever have time to evaluate, so there is nothing wrong with having trouble discerning who to listen to.
Just to say a word about were I am coming from.
In the past I have been pretty far out in my thinking philosophically speaking. Then for a short while I tried to do Transcendental Meditation. That really was a bad move for me, because I had relied a lot on skepticism to keep myself from believing nonsense. I wasn't a total skeptic, as I didn't want to shut the door completely on the christian idea of God. But i noticed after trying to do TM that I had a much harder time rejecting as ridiculous, notions like the possibilty of levitation and what is called 'yogic flying' (something some TMers claim to be able to do). I also felt my whole idea of God had changed. I suppose my christian, or maybe modern western idea of myself was shrinking, and I felt then it had gone. Is there a way back from that?
I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of experience with TM, so I can't really comment.
A couple of things in your reply I would like to comment on. You speak of the need to know why one believes? I have seen books on this and yet there is something about the order here that bothers me. Surely one should know why one believes? Yet people often believe first then look for reasons. Perhaps they are told to believe the Bible. It is that way for people who have christian parents as with me (my dad passed away when I was still struggling somwhat with christian belief). We have been brought up hearing that the Bible is God's Word. So a minister often will say after reading from the Bible 'this is the Word of the Lord'. I am not disagreeing with them saying that.
So that is the basis for some people believing.
Technically, we all need a reason why to believe something before we form the belief, otherwise the belief would never be formed in the first place. However, while the reasons why we formed a belief appear good to us when we are forming the belief, they can often later appear to be not as good. For example, many people believe Christianity is true simply because that is what they were taught growing up and they trusted their parents, however when doubts later arise and they haven't been taught a firm foundation to fall back on, then it is easy for them to dismiss their belief. So we need to teach good reasons for why we believe that go deeper than because that is just what we were taught. For example, we need to teach how we can know that the Bible was accurately remembered until it was eventually, how we can know that what we have today matches what was originally written, how we can know that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, and how we can know that we can trust the authors. After looking into this sorts of issues, we can either reinforce our belief or discover that we can not be as confident in the belief as we once thought.
I have been wrong about many things in the past and I very likely will be wrong about many things in the future, so the chances are pretty good that there are currently things that I hold to be true that I am wrong about, I just don't know which things they are. The only way to find other which of my beliefs are false is continue to diligently investigate their veracity. So I see learning as the process of taking in new true and false information, reinforcing true beliefs, and dismissing beliefs that we wrongly thought to be true. Naturally the problem comes when we wrongly reinforce a false belief or wrongly dismiss a true belief.
But I am not quite sure that I understand what people mean when they something is 'God's Word'
Basically God's instructions.
It seems like for Francis Schaeffer one first has to accept there such things as absolutes.
There was a time when most people accepted this, whether christian or not, and people could discuss what was true and what was false.
According Schaeffer it was Hegel who changed all this, and introduced a different concept of truth, which relativised all positions.
Schaeffer writes: 'Truth in the sense of antithesis, is related to the idea of cause and effect. Cause and effect produces a chain reaction which goes straight on a horizontal line. With the coming of Hegel this changed.'
What Schaeffer means is that before Hegel when someone said 'This is true', people thought well if that is true then its opposite is false.
This isn't to say that everyone adopted Hegel's views.
But Hegel introduced the notion of synthesis. That is, one has a thesis and opposite it an antithesis, and rather than it being that if one is true then the other is false, Hegel said one resolves these in a synthesis,which then becomes amnew thesis and so the process repeats. I am not sure how he said one should go about that.
BTW if i am not explaining this right or if anyone who knows about this stuff thinks Schaeffer isn't quite correct, please feel free to chip in. I am kind of holding what Schaeffer says in abeyance (he may or may not be entirely correct) so to speak, as I am not well enough read to disagree
Ok then comes Kierkegard, and he says one cannot arrive at a synthesis by reason. Instead you acheive everything of importance by a leap of faith.
This Schaeffer says was not biblical faith, or that that it led to a concept of faith that was not Biblical, but modern.
It comes from Kierkegarrd's writing about Abraham and the 'sacrifice' of Issac, which God didn't allow to be consummated. Kierrgarrd says Abraham acted in faith without anything rational to base it on. And Schaeffer disagrees because he says "before Abraham was asked to do this he had much propositional revelation from God, he had seen God, God had fulfilled promises to him. In short, God's words at this time were in the context of Abraham's strong reasons for knowing that God both existed and was totally trustworthy."
Anyway it seems to me I just have conscious belief at times, but unconscious unbelief, and I don't know how to resolve that.
If you have read this far, thankyou, and if you have any thoughts on any of this please share.
In the Bible, "faith" is synonymous with "trust". I've read Edward Feser's book on
Aquinas, which I would recommend, but he has defined "faith" as "nothing less than the will to keep one's mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it". So you can use reason to discover that someone is trustworthy, but we can't see the future, so we can't know for sure whether someone will be trustworthy in the future. So having faith in someone is demonstrating that we trust them by putting ourselves at risk if they turn out to not be untrustworthy, keeping our mind focused on the good reasons that we had for thinking that they will be trustworthy, and continuing to act like what they promised is a done deal even when it is starting to look like it might not be. So it is a leap of faith in that we are committing to something that will put us at risk, but it is a reasoned leap rather than a blind leap. There are truths in the Bible that are revealed by God that we can't deduce through reason alone, but we can nevertheless discover good reasons to trust that what the Bible reveals is true. So when we have doubts about whether Christianity is true, we have a firm foundation and can go back and review the good reasons we had for believing and can continue to keep our mind focused on those reasons.
Abraham did not get the level of faith that he had over night, but rather it grew through a long relationship with God, so I am in agreement with Schaeffer on this issue. It is no different than the faith that we have in a friend. Through our experience with them we have placed our trust in them and have continued to find them to be trustworthy, so we can have a much higher level of trust with our friend than with a stranger.
