How you can reasonably believe that the sky is green (and why Christianity is reasonable)
Posted by Mathew | July 4, 2009 | 3 Comments
The objections to belief in God in general, and to Christianity and its God in particular, are many and varied. It’s important to note, however, that the quantity and variety of objections have no bearing on the truth claims that Christianity makes – you really only need one solid objection that can withstand scrutiny and refutation to pull Christianity down. So quality, not quantity is what is required here.
Recently I found a forum thread* that was seeking responses from non-Christians about the “dealbreakers” that prevent them from believing in/exploring Christianity. That is, what are the lynch-pin reasons that prevent them from taking Christianity seriously. This query, put forward on an otherwise very liberally-minded, left-leaning technology site, has flung up some tired-old objections that seasoned Christians would undoubtedly have encountered and discounted, but it has also turned up some objections that have been re-hashed in interesting ways.
One poster’s “dealbreaker” was that he sees organised religion as having all the answers and that difficult questions are put into the “God works in mysterious ways” basket. In other words, the objection is that believers are required to have faith – blind faith – and that such faith has no reasonable basis. By way of analogy, he offered the following illustration:
It’s like me telling you that the sky is green but telling you not to bother looking up for yourself to check. Do you only trust what you are told?
What if I told you that my mother told me the sky was green, so I believe the sky must be green, even though I’ve been locked in a cellar my whole life and haven’t been able to check for myself, but even so you should believe it too?
What if my mother had been locked in the same cellar her entire life, as had her mother, and her mother before her, for generations, and the fact of a green sky had been passed down by each generation, even though nobody had ever seen the sky, they don’t even know if the sky really exists, but they have a crayon drawing, that’s based on another drawing, that’s based on somebody’s description that says the sky is green — should I believe it? (Emphasis mine.)
I want to focus on the bolded text: should I believe it? To which my answer to this question is: Yes. You should believe that the sky is green as this is the most reasonable conclusion permissible by the available evidence. This is what we call reasonable faith. But let me elaborate on the illustration he provided as it seems to me as though certain assumptions were made – I now offer what I believe are relevant and realistic details to his analogy. I need to do this in order to demonstrate my affirmative answer to his question, “Should I believe it?”, and I am perfectly within my right to do so as I do not seek to prove that the sky is indeed green (we know that it is not), but rather that there would be some scenarios in which it is perfectly reasonable to believe that the sky is green. In other words, the very analogy he presented to “prove” his case that faith is unreasonable actually proves precisely the opposite.
On with the fleshing out of the analogy a little further:
If you were a member of a family who, for generations, had been imprisoned underground and if none of the previous generations of your family had the opportunity to see the sky with their own eyes, they would, of course, have to rely on the testimony of another who has (or who they have good reason to believe has seen the sky). And there must exist some premise by which your family has good reason to believe that such a thing as the sky does exist, so it seems fair to introduce another person who may have told them that the sky is green.
Let’s say this other person was not imprisoned with them but was their jail-keeper. The jail-keeper routinely speaks of the great-outdoors, his own family and other freedoms for the sole intent of teasing his prisoners and during such discussions he tells them – perhaps for cheek – that the sky is green.
Now, if the jail-keeper routinely watches over them and then disappears for a time (knocks off work), it is reasonable for your mothers’ to assume that he ventures outside and would be in a position to know the colour of the sky.
Hence, while your mothers’ have never seen the sky, they have the testimony of one who has (or says he has); for them to believe that the sky is green, as they have been told, is not blind faith – it is reasonable faith for they make the most rational decision based on the information that they have been presented with.
This faith is reasonable even despite the fact that what is believed is incorrect.
Now we come to you. Like your mother, and those before her, you also have been imprisoned all your life and have never seen the sky, but have always been told it’s green. Again, your belief that the sky is green is reasonable – we can presume that you were told of that jail-keeper who told your original mother that the sky is green. In other words, the testimony has been handed down, faithfully preserved, through the generations.
At this point, yes, you should believe the sky is green. You have no reason to believe otherwise because no evidence to the contrary has presented itself.
But suddenly, you have a visitor, who says that he is from the outside, and he tells you that the sky is blue.
Now you have a dilemma. But your dilemma is not about which person is right and which person is wrong – it’s about the reasons why you believe one person’s testimony over the other’s.
Either way, and still not being able to confirm for yourself what colour the sky is, you would have to rely on the reasons why you would place your faith in either of the two conflicting reports. (Just because one report is now generations old is no reason to exclude it outright over a contrary report that is more recent. After all, the evidence to believe the old report may still be stronger than the evidence to believe the new one.)
From here I presume you would then start asking questions to clarify aspects of both reports and determine from that questioning which report is the more plausible.
Even if you still concluded that the sky is green, it was your rationale that brought you to that position – that you believe your conclusion is correct may be the element of faith, but it’s a conclusion based on reason nonetheless.
So given this scenario, it is plausible to believe that the sky is green and that to do so was a process of reasonable faith.
Now how does this relate to the authority of the Bible and of the claims that it makes? The age of the accounts ought not discount themselves – that is no real reason to deny any claim. Yet the claims of the Bible undergo the same process of rationale – a weighing-up of eye witness accounts, cultural records, archaeological finds and examination of all the corroborative evidence at hand.
Christianity is not based on a blind faith – it is very much a carefully reasoned out faith, such as believing that the sky is green in the above analogy.
Of course, where the analogy breaks down is that we know that the sky is not green; this brings me to this admission: while Christians are certain of their faith and that there is ample evidence on which to place their faith, the reason why the word faith is used at all is because there is a possibility that it is not true.
When we say, and where scripture says, that we are certain of our faith we mean that we trust in the deductive reasoning process that brought us to the conclusions of our convictions. But to admit as such is not at all to say that our faith is blind, as I’m sure you’ll now agree that – at least – you can hold a reasonable faith in something while still allowing for the possibility that it may or may not be true.
* The forum thread was initiated by a member of Christ Church St Ives, Sydney, Australia, and was launched to assist them in gathering people’s feedback for their preaching series: Dealbreakers – six reasons not to believe. Audio downloads of the series will be available soon. Return to article
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Tags: Apologetics > Christianity > faith > Philosophy > Religion
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3 Responses to “How you can reasonably believe that the sky is green (and why Christianity is reasonable)”
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July 10th, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
I agree that I could be convinced that the sky is green also, being a reasonable person. In fact, if my eternal destiny rested on me knowing the color of the sky, I would be sure to come to the most reasonable, and I might add, open minded, conclusion I could possible come to. The fact that we COULD be wrong does not either mean that we are, nor that it is unreasonable to believe that we're not. How reasonable is it to conclude that the sky is actually red, green, and blue simultaneously? Yet this is the “accepted” position of the ilk from which those who hold the views held by the subject of this post are drawn.
The scenario given reveals 3 things about the thinking of the person using it.
1. The scenario would make the same points if a blue sky had been used, but it would have revealed his own condition as well. So the starting point in the scenario reveals the conclusion that already exists in his mind, that the object of our faith is contrary to reality.
2. His starting point determines his ending point. It is similar to the Rajah, the blind Priests, and the elephant. The scenario is given from a presumptive, but impossible, perspective. We know the sky is blue. But who has left this earth, searched the heavens (seen the sky) and returned to reveal to us cellar dwellers the truth? Does this person have illusions of divinity? In the end he is only making another presentation of what COULD be, but he forgets, when it comes to the existence of God, he is a fellow cellar dweller, and so consequently his position actually requires more faith concerning the colour of the sky because his conclusions are not based on reason but on his own imaginationing of seeing from a god like, or outside the cellar, perspective. This brings me to the third.
3. The ignorance of his own arrogance. People of faith, are the ones in the dark cellar. And he is an “objective” observer amused at our actually believing something so silly as “the sky is green”.
BTW, I did a similar post on the Folly of the Rajah a couple of years back:
http://thebumblinggenius.blogspot.com/2007/06/r...
Thanks for a great post.
July 11th, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
Very wise points, Dan, and very true. The illustration provided does say a lot about such people who believe it is enough to discount the Christian claim – as you mention in your third point, the illustration reveals the ignorance of those who hold this view.
Accusations that Christians have a blind faith has persistently been a pet peeve of mine – I can get really rankled. Especially when those who promote such tripe presume to know more about Christianity than do Christians themselves! (Although, sadly, that may be true in some instances. I try to tackle similar themes in other posts, Why Christians Suck and Why Religion Sucks (and will destroy your soul).)
I hadn't thought about what you mentioned in points – but they are very true: we could replace the colour green with the colour blue and, based on the arguer's original presumptions, he would be “blindly” believing what actually mirrors reality, yet he would think this was a preposterous conclusion to draw and would discount reality on the same grounds. Good pick up!
I had a read of your Raja post – well done on that! Very clear and does the job of dismantling the fable particularly well.
July 11th, 2009 @ 3:51 pm
Very wise points, Dan, and very true. The illustration provided does say a lot about such people who believe it is enough to discount the Christian claim – as you mention in your third point, the illustration reveals the ignorance of those who hold this view.
Accusations that Christians have a blind faith has persistently been a pet peeve of mine – I can get really rankled. Especially when those who promote such tripe presume to know more about Christianity than do Christians themselves! (Although, sadly, that may be true in some instances. I try to tackle similar themes in other posts, Why Christians Suck and Why Religion Sucks (and will destroy your soul).)
I hadn't thought about what you mentioned in your points – but they are very true: we could replace the colour green with the colour blue and, based on the arguer's original presumptions, he would be “blindly” believing what actually mirrors reality, yet he would think this was a preposterous conclusion to draw and would discount reality on the same grounds. Good pick up!
I had a read of your Raja post – well done on that! Very clear and does the job of dismantling the fable particularly well.