Another copy and pasted article from my blog. Don't worry, I normally don't post this much. Substack link if you want pictures.
My struggles as an Orthodox Christian convert, and why I can't seem to walk away from Christ despite my doubts
Going to church today for the proto-anastasian liturgy (Easter is tomorrow for us Orthodox Christians), I have to admit I have some doubts about the Resurrection and the whole story of Christ being the Son of God.
Usually I can sort of deny these doubts within myself, but during Holy Week, the sincerity of the people around me, the Church services every night and during the day (not that I go to them all), and just the general intensity of everything really brings my cognitive dissonance to the forefront.
I’m about a year and a half post my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and when I took the vows to follow Christ, bear His cross, and keep to the strictures of the Nicene Creed, I was sincere. At least as sincere as I could be. I had doubts of course, and my priest was well aware. After all, I took the name of the premier doubter in the Christian mythos, Saint Thomas the Apostle.
When I was converting, I had multiple experiences of Christ coming to me. I dealt with extreme chronic pain, debilitating suffering, and He saved me. I don’t talk about this often online because it feels gauche, and I won’t go into detail now. But suffice to say I had genuine experiential evidence to believe the Christian story.
Unfortunately, as Christianity has ceased to be novel and exciting and a big change in my life, that evidence feels more and more hollow, less convincing to my overly rationalized, modern mind.
More and more I find myself thinking: “Is this really true? What if His body was just snatched away and lies were spread? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all the women at the tomb and the apostles to just be delusional, even if they genuinely believed it? The Jews said that they stole the body, the early Christians obviously claimed they were lying, how can we ever know for sure?”
When I first started to doubt, even before I converted, these thoughts would plague and torment me. Sitting there in church I would fret, “How can I feel this way and sing hymns, how can I take communion while not genuinely believing that it’s the Body and Blood of Christ?”
Still today these doubts and thoughts bother me, but I’m learning to be more at home with them. I can’t ever know the truth of the Resurrection. In all likelihood, the intense experiences that convinced me to convert won’t come back. My spiritual father and my elders in the faith have all warned me that’s the case.
So, if I doubt the Christian story so much, why continue going? Aren’t I living a double life? Aren’t I lying to myself and my community?
Perhaps I am. It certainly bothers me, as I pride myself (heh) on being an honest and open person. I discuss my doubts with my priest and close confidants, but generally keep them close to the chest in my broader church community.
In a way it would be easier to just leave church. To take the path I took as a teenager, be an atheist, say it’s all fake. But I simply can’t deny the beauty of Holy Orthodoxy, the haunting power of Christ’s story, and His words.
When I first saw an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, I was blown away. I came back a second time and ended up bawling the entire service, crying more in that couple of hours than I had my entire life prior. Eventually one of the parish council members had to shoo me out of the pews, because I stayed there crying so long that everyone had packed up and they were closing the church.
Something about Orthodoxy, something about Christ, just compels me. Even if it doesn’t make sense to my rational mind, my heart can’t let go of Him. Reading the pre-communion prayers, I do honestly have difficulty firmly and strongly acclaiming that YES, I DO believe this bread is the Body of Christ, and the wine is the Blood of Christ.
But I can honestly say that I love Him, that I want Him dearly, that I long for Him to be a part of me. I can say that when I participate in the Eucharist, I feel filled with a mysterious life that I can’t explain, that perhaps isn’t divine but certainly is closer than almost anything else I’ve experienced in this world.
Who knows what actually happened two thousand years ago in the tomb of Christ, it’s probably one of, if not the most, controversial historical topics ever. We will never truly know what happened, regardless of what evidence comes out or new techniques archaeologists discover.
All I know is that for me, the beauty and power of Christ’s Church and His legacy that has been kept alive for almost two thousands years by His followers is something I can’t seem to do without. It has made my life better in every way, and made me more like Him. My role model, my Lord, my Savior. When the mood strikes me, my King and my God.
Perhaps I’m a hypocrite, one of those people Christ condemned that mouthed the prayers without really believing deep in their hearts. I certainly know I’m a sinner. But ultimately, I just can’t seem to walk away despite the dissonance and the doubts and the confusion.
I’m reminded of the story in the Gospel, when Christ was about to go to His Passion, and he gave his disciples the ritual of the Eucharist. He told them that they would be eating His body, drinking His blood. Many of His followers, even those healed by Him, were freaked out, and understandably so!
They went Ok dude, we can accept that you’re a holy prophet healing us, but you want us to be cannibals? You want us to EAT you?! That’s a little too weird for me, sorry, I’m out.
Christ turned to His disciples and said, “Will ye also go away?”
Simon Peter responded, in a quote that haunts me two thousand years later because I feel the exact same damn way. He looked at this beautiful Man, this incredible healer, teacher, prophet, king. He searched his heart, and responded:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
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Notes -
To Whom Shall We Go?
A response to Faith and Doubt During Holy Week by Thomas Del Vasto
by J. Nelson Rushton
Note: This is the first in a series of posts in response to the OP. It contains only the introduction and the first section.
Introduction
When I first began seriously attending a Christian church, two opposing thoughts impressed themselves upon me with great and equal force: first, this is clearly the truest thing I have ever seen, and, second, this is clearly not true. I believed then, and I believe now, that both of those thoughts have their merits -- and it took a long time, and a determined, humble search for me to come to terms with their conjunction. Incidentally, whenever I have veered toward actually leaving the church, the verse that always came into focus and sobered me (or beguiled me, as atheists will allege) was the same one Thomas Del Vasto mentions, John 6:68: To whom shall we go?
This essay is the product of my journey to reconcile faith and reason. It is arranged as follows:
1. Science and the Scientific Revolution
Science
I will define science as the effort to reveal the laws of nature to the faculties of objective reason. This definition, however, raises more questions than it answers: What is nature, and what does it mean to be a law thereof? What is reason? And what makes reasoning objective? Let's dive in.
By nature, I mean the totality of facts and causal laws of the material world that are not the product of human invention or decision. For example, whether or not it rains tomorrow is for nature to decide; whether I bring an umbrella to work is for me to decide. This raises the delicate question of whether human decisions -- or at least what appear to be human decisions -- are actually part of nature, as the field of psychology, for example, sometimes treats them. We will return to this question later.
By laws of nature, I mean principles and patterns that persistently govern the way nature behaves -- such as Newton's laws of gravity and motion, the law of conservation of momentum, and Kepler's laws of orbital motion. Such laws are the subject matter of science.
While laws of nature are the subject of science, not all inquiries into the laws of nature can be considered scientific. First, for an investigation to qualify as scientific, its methods must be reasonable. For example, a project to discern the laws of chemistry by consulting a Ouija board(TM) would not be a scientific investigation, because it would not be reasonable. I define reason as the reliance on evidence of sorts that tend reliably to reveal truth. Unless I am badly mistaken, Ouija boards do not count.
Not even every reasonable inquiry into the laws of nature counts as being scientific. For example, if an astronomy student asks his professor what stars are made of, and the professor replies that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, it is perfectly reasonable for the student to believe his professor. Astronomy professors tend to be a reliable source of truth about astronomy, especially when they speak dispositively. Of course they are not infallible -- but neither are the statistical methods used in medicine and the social sciences, or the experimental methods used in the physical sciences. Expert opinion, under some circumstances at least, can be a perfectly good reason to believe.
However, in the case described here, the student's inquiry (by asking his professor) is not a scientific investigation in the strict sense. This is not because his methods are unreasonable; it is because they do not rest on objective evidence. Objective evidence is impersonal evidence -- that is, it is evidence that is independent of any person's feelings, opinions, or perspectives. In particular, objective evidence cannot rest for its persuasive force on any person's perceived rank, expertise, or authority. Objective evidence is evidence that lets the reader see for himself that a proposition is true.
The insistence on objective evidence is the distinguishing hallmark of scientific thought. This is why, when a mathematician publishes a theorem, it is accompanied by a proof that can be independently verified by properly educated readers. It is why, when a scientist publishes an experimental finding, it is accompanied by a description of the experiment, precise enough that it can be repeated by skeptical colleagues. It is why students of physics and chemistry are expected to perform laboratory experiments, to verify long-known textbook laws for themselves. A scientist's job is not to tell you what is true; it is to give you a roadmap to where you can see for yourself what is true. The principle of independent reason is enshrined in the motto of the Royal Society -- the world's oldest existing academy of sciences -- as nullius in verba (Latin: nothing on the word; in context, take no one's word).
In summary, I define *science *as the effort to reveal the laws of nature to the faculties of objective reason, where
C’est ça (that's that).
The Scientific Revolution
Science, in the sense defined in the previous section, originated with the classical Greeks. However, as far as the physical sciences are concerned, they were not very good at it.
The Greeks were very good at mathematics, and they made many mathematical discoveries that are still part of the curriculum today. More importantly, the classical Greek method of giving evidence for mathematical propositions -- formal deductive inference from self-evident axioms, or what is now called mathematical proof -- is still the primary form of evidence accepted in the field of mathematics. I believe it is fair to say that in its critical mass, the modern approach to mathematics is largely a legacy bequeathed to us by the classical Greeks.
In the physical sciences, on the other hand, relatively little of what we see in modern science textbooks was discovered by the Greeks, and much of what they wrote on the subject was incorrect or incoherent. More importantly, the methods by which Greeks investigated the physical sciences are now obsolete. The method of giving evidence for universal causal laws by testing them experimentally -- or what is today sometimes called the "scientific method" -- is remarkably scarce in classical Greek writing.
The Greeks did engage in scientific inquiry, at least by my definition: they investigated the laws of nature, and they agreed among themselves that only objective evidence was to be accepted on the subject. So, if not by the so-called scientific method, what mode of reasoning did the Greeks employ in the physical sciences? The following passage from Aristotle's Physics is typical:
Here, Aristotle is arguing against the existence of a void, as Democritus is supposed to have posited. Motion requires a medium, Aristotle argues, and the void is not a medium in the proper sense; thus, since motion does occur, there is no void.
Aristotle's argument does not make much sense to me, but perhaps I am missing something. In any case, whichever side of the argument one comes down on, he would not need to leave his office chair to complete the analysis. The only observation Aristotle relies on, and the only prediction he makes, is that objects move -- which is something everyone on both sides of the argument already knew. What is conspicuously missing from Aristotle's analysis, at least from a modern standpoint, is any mention of observations made under conditions deliberately designed to test the theory, aka experimentation. This is typical of Greek writing on science.
The Greek reluctance to perform experiments sometimes led to errors that would be difficult, if not impossible, to make under modern rules of evidence. For example, immediately after the passage quoted above, Aristotle writes,
In other words, Aristotle asserts that objects fall at speeds proportional to their weight. On this theory, for example, a ten pound rock would fall twice as fast as a five pound rock under the influence of gravity. Unlike the passage quoted previously, this one does make a nontrivial prediction -- but it is a prediction that can be falsified simply by dropping two objects of unequal weight from chest height. You would probably not need to leave the room you are in to perform the experiment, and probably neither would Aristotle on the day that he wrote it. Nevertheless, evidently, for some strange reason (or at least reasons strange to us), he did not bother to perform the experiment.
The Greeks' findings and methods, sans experiments, would be canonized, and practically sanctified, by thinkers from the middle ages through the end of the Renaissance. As Stillman Drake wrote,
So, it would be almost two thousand years before a notable author invited his readers to put Aristotle's predictions to an experimental test. It was Galileo Galilei who made the invitation, as follows:
This is not exactly modern scientific rigor, but it is in the ballpark of modern scientific rigor, in a way that the writing of Aristotle and other Greek writers was not. This is the kind of thinking, starting perhaps with Copernicus in the mid 1500s, that ushered in what is now called the scientific revolution. Along with this change in methods came an unprecedented cascade of new and deep discoveries in the physical sciences.
Because the Greeks so rarely wrote about experiments, and because we now know that experiments are essential to progress in the physical sciences, the mainstream view today is that the Greeks were not really doing science in the first place. Inquiry into the laws of nature before the mid 1500s is usually said to fall under the heading of natural philosophy -- an activity distinct from science, defined by inquiry into the laws of nature, exercising objective reason, but without recorded experiments. My view is that this fails to put the Greek contribution to science in its proper place. Experimentation is a technique, while objective reason is an ethos -- or a tao, in Eastern terms. I hold it was the Greeks who bequeathed us the tao of science, even if they didn't make a great deal of progress, and even if they did not discover the techniques we now use.
Ironically, it may have been the Greeks' smashing success in mathematics that handicapped them in the physical sciences. Readers familiar with Euclid's Elements will immediately recognize the style of Aristotle's prose in the passage arguing against the existence of a void: when he wanted to get serious, Aristotle wrote in the style of mathematics, viz., formal deduction from (allegedly) self-evident axioms. This is, after all, the style of inquiry and evidence that marked the greatest of Greek intellectual achievements. Give a boy a hammer, and all the world's a nail! The problem with this particular hammer is that the laws of the physical sciences are not self-evident, and cannot be logically derived from anything that is self-evident. An analogy might help explain that situation, and is given in the following paragraphs.
When I was in 8th grade, I imagined (and hoped) that perhaps there was a single equation for everything. I also imagined that if you solved the equation-for-everything, it would reduce to 0 = 0. That was my naive way of postulating that the laws of nature constituted a tautology -- that is, a statement that can be known to be true by purely logical thought, independent of observation. If the laws of nature are indeed a tautology, then to know them by pure logical thought is a noble and heady proposition. Unfortunately, in the light of modern logic, we know that the laws of nature are not tautologies. The proof of this is simple: there exist logically consistent possible worlds that are different from the one we inhabit. For example, there is a logically possible world consisting of a single particle bouncing back and forth within the interval [0,1] at a constant speed of one unit of space per unit time. For all logic can tell, the universe could have been that. Fortunately, for some reason or perhaps for no reason, the universe is not that.
Consequently, our knowledge of the laws of nature must come, at least in part, from observations. In practice, it seems it must come from carefully designed, often expensive observations. The universe is a certain way, and it could have been a different way, and we can only tell the way it is by looking at, and looking at it closely, in ways that are carefully designed to probe the corners of its design. Clever as they were, somehow the Greeks missed that -- and somehow, the scientists of the 1600s, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, did not.
The scientific revolution culminated with the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica. It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Newton's work, both technical and cultural. By the mid 17th century, it was known that objects in free fall near the Earth move according to Galileo's law of falling bodies, and objects in the heavens move according to Kepler's laws of orbital motion. These are both profound discoveries, but before Newton, the two theories Galileo and Kepler were irreducible and independent. That is, we had one theory for motion in the heavens, and another theory for motion near the Earth. Coincidentally, there is an analogous situation in modern physics, where our best theory of change on a small scale is quantum mechanics, our best theory of change on a large scale is general relativity, and the laws of these two theories are distinct and incompatible. In the 17th Century, as now, the holy grail of physics was a grand unified theory: a single theory that would yield, as mathematical consequences, the seemingly separate laws that seem to apply in different places. In Principia, Newton proposed a single theory of gravity and motion, and showed that Kepler's law of planetary motion and Galileo's law of falling bodies could both be derived from it as mathematical consequences. Thus, what is now known as "Newtonian mechanics", including Newton's own work and a few elaborations that followed in its wake, constituted the grand unified theory of its time.
As mentioned above, Newtonian mechanics had a tremendous, perhaps even transformative, impact on the intellectual life of the West. The story begins with the classical Greek thinker Democritus, who hypothesized that fundamentally, the universe consists of atoms in the void -- little balls bouncing around against each other and through space. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said of this idea,
Now if the universe fundamentally consists of little balls moving through space, this raises a question: by what law do things move through space? We often ask what makes something (or someone) tick -- in other words, what are the principles that govern its (or his or her) behavior? The phrase calls to mind the workings of an old fashioned watch. Every second or so, the watch's second-hand moves clockwise by 6 degrees, and makes a quiet but distinctive tick. During that second, also, the minute hand moves one tenth of the degree, and the hour hand approximately 1/120'th of a degree. Inside the watch, hidden from view during normal operation, is the elaborate, and to the uninitiated, arcane, mechanism that makes all of this happen. That mechanism is what makes the watch tick: the hidden workings that govern its transition from one state to the next.
If the universe consists of objects moving through space, and Newtonian mechanics governs how objects move through space, then, in a fairly serious sense, to know it is to know what makes the universe tick. Of course there is more to know, but the laws of motion and gravity are the linchpin, or the central gear, that sets the stage for filling in the remaining details. They are our biggest glimpse under the hood of the universe, at what makes it tick. Could anything be more awesome than that?
(remaining sections to come)
This is an exciting series man! I went through many of the same thoughts on the scientific revolution, it was my field of study in college when I got my bachelors in history. I'd be curious to see where you're going with this, though it's a good overview of the scientific revolution in broad strokes.
Are you planning on posting this elsewhere? I'd love to share it on twitter and substack if you have a blog I can promote.
Thanks for the encouragement. When I get all the sections done I am going to put it on my substack: https://jnelsonrushton.substack.com/
Awesome, make sure to ping me. I'd love to keep reading.
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