God and the certainty of faith

It's almost Christmas and many people take this time of the year to reflect on the past year and look to the future.  For many people in the United States, this process also includes an appraisal of how their past actions reflect in the eyes of God and more specifically a Christian God.

Pew recently released a poll which showed that certainty of God is slipping.

In 2007, 71% of Americans were certain God existed but in 2014 that number dropped to 63%.  

The numbers by religious affiliation are summarized in the chart to the right.  Polls like this intrigue me because the word certain means that it is provable by direct evidence yet there is no direct evidence that God exists.  There is indirect evidence like the cosmic dance between the Sun, Moon, and Earth which gives human beings a great place to live but that is residual evidence.

Science would consider the idea of God a theory but you could never publish a peer reviewed paper of God as a fact due to the lack of direct evidence.  Yet a large majority of people are certain God exists.

Why is that?  None of us know with certainty how the universe originated.  Scientists understanding starts with the Big Bang but they can't explain what happened before that.  Some religious will claim that God initiated the Big Bang but even if that were true, that leads to the question of who created God.

The number of people certain that there is no God jumped from 5% to 9%.

This number intrigues me almost as much as those that are certain he exists.  No one is certain God exists.  No one is certain that God doesn't exist.  People have faith that God exists.  Doubters assume there must be another answer for the universe's existence but they don't know for sure.

Seeing this poll reminded me of something that happened to me when I was twelve.  At the time, my family lived in an apartment complex and door to door proselytizer from a megachurch convinced me and my brother and sister to attend their church.  Looking back it still feels a little surreal.  A couple of days later, a bus driven by someone none of us knew drove into our neighborhood and dozens of kids were carted off miles from their homes without a single adult they knew (only churches could ever do something like this).

When we arrived we were all in awe.  The church was an immense mix of glass and concrete paid by thousands of people that watched the television services held there each week.  My sense of awe turned to fear when I got split off from everyone else.  I was the oldest and was told I couldn't attend the children's service.  I had to attend the young adults session.  Having no choice, I went into the room with hundreds of other kids my age.  The first thing they did after we sat down was to ask us to bow our heads, close our eyes. then the leader called out,

"Raise your hands if Jesus Christ is your personal savior."

That was a tough question.  I'd gone to a Christian Church most of my young life, attended Sunday School and went to Bible camp.  Yet the question still bugged me.  Some things in the Bible didn't make sense to me and somehow I knew I couldn't raise my hand.  After all, the church had taught me my whole life that God would know if I was lying and I certainly didn't want to go to hell.

Less than a minute later an adult approached me and asked me to come with him.  Like the obedient kids I was, I followed a complete stranger into a back room (again ... only churches could get away with this).  I certainly noticed I was the only one in the room asked to do this and can still remember my growing embarrassment as a hundred pair of eyes watched me trek through the room to a little booth with a door.  I can still remember my hands starting to sweat as the man sat at the table across from me.  He said,

"I noticed you didn't raise your hand.  Why don't you feel Jesus your personal savior?"

I hemmed and hawed for a bit as I shrugged my shoulders but the man was insistent.  I wasn't sure what to say so I asked the first thing that came to mind.  I asked,

"Where did Cain and Able's wives come from?"

I'm sure the question took the man off guard.  Looking back I'm guessing he was just a volunteer of some sort and might not have even thought about that part of the Bible.  On the other hand I'd tried to read the Bible many times.  My love of reading was something of a family joke as I had a habit of reading encyclopedias when I didn't have something else.  Yet I struggled with the Bible.

Here was the word of God and little things like the above quote didn't make sense but it was more than that.  This man wanted me to say Jesus Christ was my personal savior when I never met him.  If he'd asked me to say my grandpa was my personal savior I would have agreed in a second.  How could I do this for a man I only knew from words in a book I barely understood?  Jesus wasn't any more real to me than George Washington, Thomas Edison, or General Patton.  I asked him how could I find a way past my issues.  After all, God would know if I had doubts.

The man read verse after verse to me about Jesus and how much he loved me but none of it answered my core question.  The only answer is faith but for some reason he answered every question with a Bible verse that made the matter worse.  I felt myself growing frustrating and angry that this adult was try to trick me somehow.  Why wasn't he answering my questions?  Near the end I remember asking the man something that had bugged me for a long time,

"What is the Holy Spirit?"

I understood God as he had worked with Moses.  Jesus did things like turn water into wine.  What was the Holy Ghost's role?  The man didn't even try to answer the question and instead read me a couple of quotes by Jesus then told me Jesus was my personal savior and that I would always remember the date of (I've long since forgotten) as the day I was saved.  I wanted to ask more questions but I could tell the man was annoyed and as we walked out I saw the young adult service was over.  The last thing the man told me was to raise my hand the next week when they asked if Jesus was my personal savior.  I never went back.

In hindsight I've always found this story funny.  I'm sure this guy was a volunteer for that church and when he saw me he thought it would take five minutes to read a quote and get me back into the lecture hall.  Instead he got an hour long grilling by a pint-sized skeptic.

At the core, my question to the man was the role of certainty when it comes to understanding God.

In time I came to understand that you can't be certain when it comes to matters of faith.  All you can do is follow your instincts.  There are no certainties because there is no proof other than a book passed down from our ancestors.  Everyone has doubts but that fact is hard to explain to a twelve year old.

Yet looking at the poll where 63% of American are sure that God exists tells me that other men were far more successful with the people they took into that cubicle.  A majority of American have been taught to force back any doubt and lie.

On the other hand, since the dawn of the internet the number of skeptics has continued to increase.  Frankly I really think it would serve the church much better to embrace doubt and help their members work through it.  If they don't I expect the drop in poll numbers to continue.

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