The Need for Certainty
# Reference
- Source: William O’Malley, Atlas/Maps/DLQ 10 MOC
- Keywords: Cards/permanent notes
- #religion #spirituality
- Relevant Notes:
# Notes
In this reading taken from Help My Unbelief, O’Malley challenges our human impulse towards certainty and shows how faith can flourish precisely without claiming that one has absolute certitude.
# Reflection Questions
- Why did O’Malley call faith a “calculated risk”?
- Rethinking Certitudes
- “Unexpected challenges built right into our lives are evidence God doesn’t want us to settle too long with insights even into our own souls.”
- Why is it hard to believe?
- The distillation of all that is Christian is all based on the existence of Jesus…
- Two truths: (1) Jesus died so that he could rise; (2) 1 Cor 15:17 states: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile”
- Christianity depends on those two truths…they make Christians continue to imitate Jesus (a.k.a. give love even when they get nothing out of it)
- It’s also difficult to accept the Catholic Church because of the church itself
- Finally…how can a good God exist if he allows evil to happen?
- The distillation of all that is Christian is all based on the existence of Jesus…
- The Need for Certainty
- Richard Dawkins: “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence…Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of every religion.”
- Asking for absolute certitiude is blasemphous, because only God is capable of such.
- “Theology is what we know about the God questions; belief is what we accept as true of what we know; religion is what we do about what we claim to believe.”
- Faith, as belief, is a calculated risk because there is always the possibility of being wrong, given our limited human capacity…but we still believe anyways
- “And what we do is a more authentic indicator of what we really believe then what we claim.”
- “An act of faith is an opinion. Seeing is not believing, it’s knowing. Belief is accepting something as true without overwhelming certitude — an opinion based on objective evidence…and honest reasoning…but with no pretensions to absolute closure.”
- Faith is calculated risk because we accept God as the truth despite lacking absolute certitude about him
- Steps to forming a reliable opinion:
- (1) to perceive what’s actually out there, to gather the evidence
- (2) to evaluate and categorize what you’ve encountered, to “warehouse” it correctly
- (3) to put all the best of the carefully analyzed evidence into a logical sequence (outline), sifting out the core issues into a hierarchy of importance and substantiating each with evidence.
- “If you don’t know how to outline, you don’t know how to think.” Cards/Outlining is thinking
- (4) to formulate a temporarily satisfactory conclusion — one’s own personally validated opinion, which remains open to revision
- (5) offer it to someone whose mind you respect for critique
- ^ this process shows the calculation required for faith
- An inescapable truth: Cards/We operate our everyday lives on unfounded certitudes
- Faith, as a calculated risk, is both a submission to evidence that compels and a blind leap in the dark.
- Rethinking Certitudes
- Why did O’Malley talk about paradoxes?
- “The point of the principle of complementarity…is that if you hold both seemingly incomparable qualities…to be true, you come to a much less simplistic and more adequate view of the situation.” This is what is also known as a paradox.
- Embodiment of the polarity of opposites: Yin and Yang
- “Complementarity is an organic, holistic attempt to harmonize contary realities, both of which we know are somehow ’there’.”
- Faith requires paradoxical actions…accepting truth but alson belieivng blind
- Why is the relevance of O’Malley’s discussion about left-brain and right-brain thinking?
- Assumption: logic is locked the left brain, while creativity lives in the right
- Thinking purely rationally (with only your left-brain) is a kind of absolute certainty
- Our right brain asks unsettling yet real questions
- We need to listen to both sides
- Discoveries begin in the right brain; these are then analyzed and tested in the left brain.
- This is exactly what theologians have said is their function: faith seeking understanding. “I believe; help my unbelief!”
# Other Highlights
The two fundamental questions each of us faces are (1) Who am I? and (2) Where do I fit into all of this? Who is this person “I” — stripped of all the influences I didn’t choose myself? And what is my value and mission at the center of the web of relationships that eddies out from myself into my family, my neighbors, my work, the nation, the whole human family, the mystifying universe, and beyond (I trust) into the life of the Trinity?
- Related to Henri Nouwen’s Sources/Being the Beloved and the concept of Cards/Tangibles
The second question — where do I fit into all of this — is really the search for a myth, a sense of established, coherent background against which to find meaning amid all those unexpected intrusions. We need a sense that our lives have a storyline, rather than random bits…
^1edbe4
- This explains why it’s easier for us to deal with problems than mysteries (See Cards/Problem versus Mystery)
- We resort to reductionist thinking because we try to explain the complexity of the world (See Cards/Absolute Certainty versus Wonder)
- Searching for a myth = seeking order in the midst of the chaos that is life Cards/Order and Chaos
(Paraphrased) The overwhelming majority of our beliefs do not come from rigorous self-examination…what we call our opinions actually come secondhand from parents, pals, brokers, and teachers.
The whole purpose of basic education — as opposed to mere schooling at one end and true learning at the other — is training minds to come to trustworthy decisions, to form valid opinions.
- #education #learning
- Cards/Critical pedagogy
- Cards/Critical thinking and skill development are not mutually exclusive
At the heart of every inquiry worth pursuit is mystery.