Critical of Faith By Cathi-Lyn Dyck Read more at Cathi's Blog! Click Here
"People with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what world view is true." -Dr. Francis Schaeffer I was taught to think critically about the world by my parents. The only rule was: Question Everything. I remember my mother often asking me questions that forced me to evaluate not just words, but what people really meant and what their motives were. Rather than be controlled by someone else's religious ideas, my parents directed me to explore and discover my own beliefs. However, that method was not without its pitfalls. The problem with applying critical thinking to the spiritual realm is that you can't see it. You can't evaluate it using your five senses in a lab experiment. There are huge limitations to the amount and type of data that can be collected. People recognize the benefits of holding some sort of higher belief. But belief in what? Does it matter? Random Searches For Meaning I began by listening as a child to my grandmother's accounts of how she and Granddad explored the world of mediums and psychics. Grandma chose specific parameters for what she would consider evidence: Spontaneous revelation of personal details no one else could know. She and Granddad made a point of not reacting to the psychic's probing or comments so as not to give anything away. Their conclusion was that the whole thing was a hoax. As a teenager, I experimented in paganism and occultism. I also tried reading the Bible, but it didn't make much sense to me. From the Gideons' list of "Christian Virtues" in the front, all I got out of it was a whole lot of behavioural rules. I'd had no success keeping the ones my parents established for me, let alone adding to the list. In the local United Church, I heard about how sinful we are, but there was no solution offered for the alleged guilt. The Christian God didn't seem overly real. I concluded my mother must be right about the guilt-trips-earn-money thing. At the age of thirteen, I entered public school. In search of acceptance, I became involved with a local teen who was into Satanism. The results were psychologically devastating. In that time, I experienced huge conflict about how love is defined. I had my parents' definition on the one hand, but the definition for male-female relationships seemed to involve a lot of smiling coercion and emotional pressure tactics. All my values were shaken loose during that time period. I read Shirley MacLaine. I picked up on her idea that everything around us is an illusion that we're simply supposed to learn from. Here's how I evaluated that theory: If everything is an illusion, then that means the people I love most are also an illusion. It means that in reality, I am completely, totally and irrevocably alone, and there is nothing and no greater purpose. I couldn't handle the pointlessness of those thoughts. Why think at all? So Shirley MacLaine's New Age went the way of the Bible. After some study of martial arts, I became interested in Eastern philosophies. I did some reading on Buddhism and loved exploring Japanese culture. ...Till Real Life Intrudes At 16, I became involved with a 20-year-old. It ended in a pregnancy and an abortion. I was shaken to find myself with maternal instincts that outweighed my personal beliefs about the situation. The loss and grief overwhelmed me. This was a bit of evidence that didn't fit into my framework of understanding. Two years later, I started dating a "religious" guy. Early in the relationship, I told him about the abortion. I pretty much knew he'd lose all interest once he found out I wasn't up to his religious standards. Better get it over with sooner than later. Dave's response was to put his arms around me and cry with me. "I believe your baby's in heaven," he said. I was stunned. But I couldn't just let myself believe it because it sounded soothing. That would be mindless, indeed. We broke up over his refusal to leave behind the intellectual prison of religion. But we ended up back together, and then engaged. Then, in my first year of university, I read Carl Sagan's "Cosmos." He talked about the Anthropic Principle, a beautiful example of circular reasoning that looks like this: The universe is perfectly suited to human habitation. Therefore, humans inhabit it. The only way humans could inhabit it is if the universe were ideal for human habitation. Therefore, the universe is perfectly suited to human habitation. That was Sagan's best and brightest answer for life the "why" of the universe's origins and its superficial appearance of "design." It didn't even touch on my hidden pain. In the meantime, I was pregnant again. This forced yet another evaluation of my basis for values: How could I, at the same stage of pregnancy, treat one fetus as something to be discarded and the other as a baby I already wanted to talk to and nurture? When does a baby become a person, exactly? I realized my reasoning had been arbitrary. It got to the point where I was so starved for answers and relief that I considered going to a Catholic church for confession. Yet somehow, I knew that talking to one more person wasn't going to lift the weight off my heart. A priest is only a person too. I was well inoculated against the hocus-pocus of special water and special rituals. I'd been doing pagan rituals all through my teen years in search of lasting inner peace, and I had learned well that simply believing deeply in something doesn't guarantee it's for real. I had become a true cynic, completely critical of all faith. But the abortion was too horrible to repeat, and I knew I wasn't capable of raising a child on my own. That December, Dave and I went to his sister's pastor to ask to be married. The pastor asked if we were both Christians. Dave said yes. I said a resounding no. The pastor said, "I know you don't agree, but this is far more important than getting married." He told me that Christ died for my sins words that burned like salt in the wounds of my guilt that He rose again to give me new life, and that I needed to trust God's way. But Isn't That the $64,000 Question... To this day, Dave still recalls the smoke boiling out my ears. The pastor's wife intervened then, asking, "Do you like poetry?" "Yes," I said, not sure why she cared. She took out her Bible and read to me from Job chapter 38 about all the wonders of nature. I had grown up in the country, and loved it fiercely. For no reason I could explain, I began to cry. The anger was gone, and all that was left were tears. It didn't make sense. We went back the next night, where she had me read several verses. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.... The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord... But God shows His love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.... If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved. With each sentence, she asked me what my understanding of those words were, and she asked me to evaluate them. That was language I could understand. Now I'm asking you the same thing. How do you understand these old, old words? On what basis? How do you know? Do you have explanations that account for the observable facts in the world about wrongdoing, death, justice and love? How do you know your definitions of those concept - right and wrong, justice, love - are accurate? Can you defend your basis with more than just personal preference? Do you have a rational explanation for your internal attitude towards these topics? Can you solidly reason out your emotions? I found out that night that belief is something more than intellectual understanding. It's also more than an emotional commitment to a way of life. It's something that's useless without a correct accounting for all the facts, because it uses them for a springboard to something non-measurable: Trust. The Framework Has to Fit Those verses explained to me things for which I had no explanation. I had to consider changing my parameters of acceptable evidence. I had to question whether the Bible could be what it claimed God's book, with humans as simple transcribers. At eighteen, my life was pretty much over. It was totally pointless and I was ready to finish it. So I chose to trust a little bit. Nothing else offered even a shadow of a genuine answer. I went on to do my best to deconstruct the Bible, from origins to future things. It has stood up to every examination. I've been evaluating both the Bible and other world religions continually ever since. That's what my parents taught me to do. Thanks, Mom and Dad. I hope you'll join me on this journey someday. "But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good." (The Apostle Paul of Tarsus, 1 Thess. 5:21) | Articles may be republished freely. However we ask that you include the following and a link to our site with the article.
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Cathi-Lyn Dyck is a former unschooled
student, visual artist, musician
and writer. She
will author a chapter on Critical Thinking. She lives
in Manitoba, Canada with
her husband and four children. The Dycks have a 25-acre spread
where they produce vegetables, natural honey, wild (but not uncultivated)
children, original artwork and music and random helpful writings.You
can visit their farm at