1) What were the circumstances surrounding your leap of faith? Or is it more of a product of upbringing? Do you feel you had a choice about making the leap, or was it something that happened without your conscious control?

I think I had made the leap by the time I reached college, but I’m not certain precisely when I would say I completed it, and I’m not sure just how much choice I had in it. There was some conscious effort involved, but an objective observer would lack the facts, and while I think I have most of the facts, I’m not an objective observer of my mental processes.

2) In general, do you feel that the ability to make leaps of faith is a good or bad thing? Or does it depend on the circumstances? If so, under what circumstances is it justifiable?

I think leaps of faith can be extremely dangerous under many circumstances. If I decide that I can fly as a leap of faith, I’m likely to end up smashed on some rocks somewhere.

The best test from my point of view is simply to ask if this contradicts my best efforts to understand the physical world. If I say that God is the ground of all being, it becomes an organizing principle for my philosophy, but it doesn’t suggest I have to ignore physical reality in any way. On the other hand, there are those whose leap of faith results in them believing that God will heal all their diseases and thus they need not go to the doctor. They pay the penalty.

So I see some danger, but I don’t see much more danger than there is in being human and error-prone in the first place.

3) Is there any possible set of evidence that could dissuade you of God’s existence? Feel free to get very very hypothetical here (aliens landing, discovering you’re in the Matrix, etc).

The problem here is that no set of evidence made me believe in God in the first place. There’s a difference between realizing after the fact that a certain concept of God will not conflict with reality as I see it, as opposed to looking at all the things that don’t conflict and calling them evidence for the existence of God.

I’m not so certain we aren’t living in the matrix. I don’t have any evidence that we are, so I don’t sit around and worry about this sort of thing. I’m guessing, however, that a well-made matrix might be much harder to perceive than the one in the movie was. I imagine it may be possible at some time in the future to create a virtual world in a super-duper-computer in which processes believe themselves to be physical beings in a physical universe, and have no way of detecting that they aren’t.

So off hand I can’t think of any set of physical evidence that would convince me there was no God.

I’m also aware that some Christians feel their belief is imposed on them by something out of their conscious control – they just can’t help believing.

There is such a thing as a spiritual experience that seems overwhelming. Personally I don’t think I’m forced into it, but as I mentioned, lacking an objective observer to sort out the details, I cannot be certain of that. I probably do believe I’m more rational than I am. Most of us do, I think.

A couple of follow-up questions, if you have a moment:

1) What were the circumstances surrounding your leap of faith? Or is it more of a product of upbringing? Do you feel you had a choice about making the leap, or was it something that happened without your conscious control?

2) In general, do you feel that the ability to make leaps of faith is a good or bad thing? Or does it depend on the circumstances? If so, under what circumstances is it justifiable?

3) Is there any possible set of evidence that could dissuade you of God’s existence? Feel free to get very very hypothetical here (aliens landing, discovering you’re in the Matrix, etc).

My view on question #2 is that leaps of faith are usually a bad thing – they lead too easily to Jonestown and similar malarkey. However, I can imagine circumstances in which they might be justifiable. I’m also aware that some Christians feel their belief is imposed on them by something out of their conscious control – they just can’t help believing.

Can I just clarify: is this “come up a failure” in the sense of being psychologically unable to disbelieve, or in the sense of finding disbelief intellectually untenable?

Good question. I have to slice and dice it a bit to answer, so first let me give the short answer. The issue was psychological, but the struggle was really both to understand why I did believe certain things, and second to distinguish what I did believe from associated ideas that I knew to be false.

I’d divide things in which I might believe into three categories:

1) Those that I know to be false. I know, for example, that I cannot pray that I be made lighter than air and then jump off a cliff, floating safely to the bottom. If I psychologically believed I could, and still had the rationality to examine that belief, I would reject it, and get treatment for the condition.

2. Those I can demonstrate objectively to be true.

3. Things that do not contradict existing reality but for which I have insufficient objective evidence. Belief in God falls into this third category. I don’t believe my concept of God contradicts any objectively knowable facts, yet I cannot present you or anyone else (or myself) with sufficient evidence to believe this as, for example, I believe that if I jump off a cliff I will fall.

So the more equivocal answer is that there was a great deal of introspection involved, examining my thinking, but this did not involve discovering that disbelief was intellectually untenable. In fact, from an intellectual point of view I think I understand quite well the intellectual basis for being an unbeliever.

I, on the other hand, have made a leap of faith that I think is probably a one way street. If you’ve really made it, you will almost never go back from it. I don’t make any effort to snare you into my belief system, because I don’t think there is any means to do that. It’s an intellectually unsatisfying answer, I know, but it’s what I have.

I would also note that my morality didn’t really change during the time I attempted unbelief. I am able to express my moral positions from either a theistic or an atheistic point of view, thus I don’t accept the notion many theists have that atheists will be immoral. Note also that my moral believes are not part of that “true belief” that I described. The core that I found I inescapably believed in was simply that there is a spiritual realm and that there is more to life than this physical life. All details about that fall into three categories: 1) Language that we use to encapsulate spiritual experience, 2) educated guessing based on my belief (i.e. if my belief is true, what then?) and 3) Speculation.

As you can see I don’t make a great evangelist or apologist.

I hope in all that rambling I answered your question.

Can I just clarify: is this “come up a failure” in the sense of being psychologically unable to disbelieve, or in the sense of finding disbelief intellectually untenable?

If the former, I’d be interested to hear the effects on you of trying to disbelieve (since it’s something I’ve never had to do – as far as I can recall I’ve always been atheist). If the latter, I’d be interested to hear your logic.

The other thing that bugs me is that I’ve struggled off and on with certainty, but the one constant for me is that I keep coming back to the beliefs I hold (although they are sometimes modified, especially as I grow older and more reflective). I think this has been valuable for me because it tests what I believe, and my beliefs come out the stronger for it.

I have no reason to doubt that Jesus existed; I have reason to doubt the existence of a God that is independent of human experience. I see myself as a believer and a Christian, but I am comfortable with the fact that many people would not see me as a “real” Christian.