Lecture 3 - Thinking for Yourself in Religion
This is the third Lecture from Lectures on the Evidence for the Authenticity of BASIC CHRISTIANITY by
Stanley D. Walters, Ph. D., a book we're editing for distribution by
Nineveh's Crossing or a more prominent publisher. You can read a brief
background of the project at the beginning of the first lecture HERE.
Independent Thinking
The lecture for this morning is on the general subject: Think
for Yourself in Religion!
Most of us, by the time we are college students have
developed a lot of uneasiness about accepting things just because we are told so.
If we have some self-awareness, we know that we cannot totally divest ourselves
of our childhood training, nor do most of us want to. And at the same time, we
begin to think that we ought to understand why we are supposed to believe
things, why they are true, on some more substantial ground than that our
parents or the pastor says so. And perhaps even more substantial grounds than
that the Bible says so, although that’s really an answer of a different sort.
Now, I want to raise the question this morning and try to
answer it. “How much independent thinking...
is a college student capable of anyway?” And, I’m going to assume he’s capable of some, and I’m going to talk about it—that you’re capable of some—and I’m then going to talk about the techniques, if you please, or the ways by which we can learn to do valid independent thinking specifically about matters of religion.
is a college student capable of anyway?” And, I’m going to assume he’s capable of some, and I’m going to talk about it—that you’re capable of some—and I’m then going to talk about the techniques, if you please, or the ways by which we can learn to do valid independent thinking specifically about matters of religion.
Do You Have Your Own Opinion?
But first I want to ask you if you really do have your own
opinions on very many subjects. I mean opinions that you have wrought out
yourself and are your own because you have drawn them on the basis of evidence
which you have yourself collected. For example: What are your opinions about
Vietnam?[1] Have
you done any independent thinking on this subject? Or have you adopted, after
some thoughtfulness but very much first-hand investigation of the situation or
very much reading, have you adopted one of the two or three current opinions on
Vietnam? Is it your own or not? Have you an independent opinion, or have you
taken over someone else’s? After all, most of what we know has been told to us
by someone else.
Or, what about your term papers, if you’ve written any? I
guess we don't get to terms papers until second semester in English
Composition, but even so, you’ve done writing of this sort in high school and
many of you already in college. Are your term papers really independent
efforts? Let’s suppose you’re going to write a term paper of the causes of the
Civil War. Will you present the professor with an independent judgment on this?
Or is it not likely that you will work over a vast amount of secondary and
tertiary material and then present to the professor the opinion to be shared by
the most scholars in the field? Now you may have worked it all through for
yourself, but this can hardly qualify as an independent judgment on the causes
of the Civil War.
Or, what about the great questions of science? For example: What
about the origin of the solar system or the supposed evolutionary origin of
human life? A number of you, if I called for an opinion on organic evolution
would have one. You would say, “Yes, a Christian can believe in evolution.” Or,
“No, a Christian cannot believe in evolution.” But I ask you, “Is that your own
opinion, which you have arrived at by your own pains-taking examination of the
data? Or have you taken over somebody else’s idea because you liked it for one
reason or another?” I don’t mean you haven’t thought about it at all. I’m just
asking you, “Is it really an
independent judgment?”
You may begin to feel that I think there are limitations to
the kind of independence we can attain as a college student. Where does this
leave us then in the matter of religion?
Can We Think for Ourselves About Religion?
Can we think for ourselves in religion with any degree of
independence?
Well, I think I could say that you can think for yourself in
religion about to the same degree that you think for yourself in any other
field. I could say that you can think for yourself in religion about the same
as you can think for yourself in medicine. You can diagnose your own ailments,
prescribe your own drugs, and appraise your own recovery. There are persons who
do this. I remember once I saw a man who had cut himself while he was opening a
tin can. Cut himself on his thumb, and it was rather a nasty gash. I saw him
give himself a shot of procaine and suture up his own hand. Now you can do
that. He did. You can diagnose your own ailments, prescribe your own remedies,
appraise your own recoveries. Why not? You can do that, if you’re an MD. And
there’s nothing keeping you from becoming an MD, if you want to. You can learn
how to achieve independence of judgment and skill in that area. Although, you
will have to submit yourself to a particular regimen of instruction and
training in order to make that possible. There is nothing impossible about it
at all, though there are certain steps you want to go through in doing this.
You can think for yourself in Vietnam. You can go, as did
Harrison Salisbury (1908-1993) of the New York Times, to North Vietnam. You can
observe. You can take notes. You can file dispatches. You can visit Saigon and
all the military installations of the South. You can fly in a helicopter to
observe battles and rescues. You can visit the hamlets and interview the
nationals. If you gather up enough information and are an acute enough analyst,
you may come up with a valid, independent opinion on Vietnam. It’s not
impossible. It can be done.
Now, when I’ve discussed these two particular incidences: the
matter of medicine and the matter of Vietnam, you see that thinking for
yourselves depends directly on certain disciplines of observation, analysis,
and training. And, without those disciplines your thinking really cannot be
called independent. I want to discuss, therefore, 3 Steps which are part of
independent thinking. Some are true for any creative endeavor and some true
particularly in the serious thinking about religion.
Thinking for Yourself in Religion
All right, Thinking for Yourself in Religion…
First. Get the facts!
Now, what we want is to find out for ourselves. We want to
be sure of our position, not because someone told us so, but because we are
acquainted with the situation and know. This means that we must begin by
familiarizing ourselves with the facts, and unless we do, we can never know
that our opinions are really grounded in reality. This is what’s so hard about
thinking about Vietnam. I wish I knew what I thought about it. And I’m sure I
haven’t read as much as some of you have read on it. Perhaps I’ve read more
than some of you. But, I’m not sure what to think about it. It is so
complex. And it is so hard to be sure you are really in touch with the facts. And,
even if I should go there, how would I know, as George Romney thought, I wasn’t
being brainwashed by the military.[2] How
do you know this? They’re the guys that tell you. They’re the ones that tell
you what the count of the dead is, and what’s going on in the hamlets and about
the infiltration. It’s just awfully hard to be sure you have really got the
facts in this particular situation. And yet, until you have the facts you can’t know that your opinions are grounded
in reality. Well, fortunately, it isn’t so complex in all areas of endeavor,
as seems to be the current situation in Vietnam. But, my point is, that until
we acquaint ourselves with as many of the facts we can get ahold of, we have no
way of knowing that fancy and prejudice have not been dispelled. Only by
getting ahold of the facts, can we dispel wishful thinking and errors. Now this
is very, very clear of matters of science and history.
How can you tell that a statement is true? By checking it
with the facts! How can you know if there is gold to be found in Colorado? By
going to Colorado and finding out for yourself. How can you form opinions on
the origin of human life? You familiarize yourself with the facts and the
alleged facts. You try to distinguish fact from theory, fact from
interpretation. How can you work on the problems of the Civil War? Well, it
depends! If you want to go into it in a fresh, creative way, you make a trek
across the deep south. You read small town newspapers of a hundred years ago. You
investigate the journals of generals and soldiers. And try to get all the
primary data you possibly can. And then, you put this together and try to come
up with a synthesis, which rests on your own first-hand acquaintance with the facts.
Now, class, in this connection I think it’s important for us
to see that for most of our knowledge about life, we are dependent on
authorities, or people to claim to be authorities. And, as I said earlier, most
of what we know we've been told by others. We rely on others for most of what
we know about world affairs today. For everything which happens today, that you
are not personally involved in, you must take someone’s word for what’s going
on. If you couldn’t depend on an authority, you would know nothing about the
world situation today. John Plu may have been to Vietnam, but most of you
haven’t. And, anyway, he’s not there today, and he doesn’t know what’s going on
there today without taking the word of somebody else who’s there, …a lot of
somebodies who are there. For everything that happened before you were born,
you are shut out to depending on authority. I doubt if there is a single person
here, who knows by direct, first-hand contact that there was such a person as
FDR. You would have to have seen him personally. …not seeing him on TV, not
hearing him on the radio. That doesn’t count. How do you know it was FDR on the
radio? How do you know that’s FDR on the TV, who’s long since gone? You see,
that won’t count. You’ve got to see him in person. Then you’ve got first-hand
experience that there was such a person as FDR. Otherwise, it’s an authority,
and you depend on it for much of what has happened.
It’s true of science also. We do have lab courses, but it
would virtually impossible for you to duplicate the experiments of the ages,
which have brought us to our present state of knowledge. You accept the
roundness of the earth without ever having experiments to prove it. Boy, are we
gullible! Who of you knows from experiment that the earth is round? You accept
the movement of the solar system, the purity of the water you ingest. All of
these things, we take on authority. And so, when I talk about thinking for
ourselves, it’s clear that this does not mean abandoning authorities. The most
that we shall be able to do in most areas of life, is to make a wise and
judicious selection of authorities. For not every authority is an expert on
what they claim.
This is what I do on Vietnam. I have to pick out the men
that I think know the most about it and are giving the most objective reports. And,
I just kind of follow them blindly. They know more than I do, and I have to
make as wise a selection of authorities as possible.
Now, I’m talking about getting the facts, and the point just
is that can’t get the facts in most cases, without taking somebody’s word for
it, though there will be areas in which we do first hand investigation of a lot
of things. But, it is astounding how many people have religious opinions,
without knowing anything about religion. A student once told me that in his
judgment, Jesus was an unattractive personality, …weak, effeminate, and
helpless. I was unkind enough to ask him if he had read the Gospels. He had
not.
I said, “Where did you get your information on Jesus?”
“Oh,” he responded, “our neighborhood theatre showed a movie
about him once.”
All right, if we’re going to think for ourselves about
religion, we must get the facts. Otherwise, our opinions will not be grounded
in reality. Or if they are, it will be an accident. It happened in spite of
ourselves. Get the facts!
Second. Accept Outside Information.
Now, when I’ve talked about getting the facts, this is
something that can be applied to any area of study. We want to talk about
religion. And class, when we talk about religion we are really interested in
knowing more than just… well, …what did Jesus do, and what did Paul do, and
Moses do. Of course, we’re interested in such things, but the important
questions about religion don't really have to do with, “Where was Moses when
the lights went out?” The important questions about religion are not primarily
factual. They have to do with questions of value. It’s important for us to
know, I guess, how human life arose. And there is an answer to this question
even though we may not have it. What’s more important for us is to know whether
life has any meaning. Science may be able to tell us how life arose. Science
cannot tell us whether life has meaning or not. This is an old distinction, a
distinction between questions of fact and questions of value.
Let me illustrate just for a minute. It is a question of
fact, the distance between Seattle and Moscow. There may be several different
answers being given to this, but it’s only one distance and if we have accurate
measuring equipment, we can find out the distance from Seattle to Moscow. It is
a question of fact whether or not Richard Speck (1941-1991) killed the student
nurses. We may not know for sure, but either he did or he didn’t. That’s a
question of fact. And as well as that question can be settled, it’ll be settled
on the basis of evidences which have been collected and gathered.
Now, it is a question of value when I say, “If Richard Spec
killed the nurses, he should be executed.” That’s something else. That’s not
the kind of question you can answer by collecting facts, whether he should be
executed. And people don’t agree on that, but when you see that question, we
have moved into a different area. We’ve left the realm of facts, where
everything can be measured and an answer gotten if only you have the proper
kind of instruments and are patient and cleaver enough. Instead, you’ve entered
the realm of value, where you can’t get answers just by collecting data. How do
you know that a man should die, if he’s killed 8 people? I’m saying that most
of our questions about religion are questions of value.
Let me take some other examples. I want this to be clear.
I can run an inductive survey… Mr. Kinsey did this. Mr.
Kinsey ran a survey to discover the sexual habits of the American male and the
American female. This was a question of fact, at least presumably it was. And
it turns out that American males do this, this, this, and this. American
females do this, this, this, and this. These are questions of fact. Alright? We
put the question very differently, when we ask, “Should a fellow and a girl
have sexual relations before they’re married? And you can’t get an answer to
that question by interviewing a thousand-one people. You can find out what
fellows and girls do by interviewing them, at least if they’re telling the
truth. But how do you find out what they should do? What they ought to be
doing? That’s entirely different. No number of interviews will help you settle
that question—the difference between questions of fact and questions of value.
And so, when we think for ourselves about religion, we have
to move beyond questions of fact, which are accessible easily to us, and ask,
“How are we going to get information about right and wrong?” And especially, as
I’ll say in my next lecture, “How will we get information about God?”
Dealing with God, a Special Problem
Now, there’s a special problem here: God, by any definition,
is a greater person than human person. Don’t get confused by the word person there. I’m using it very broadly!
God, by any definition that really counts, is a greater person than a human
person. We can find out what we want to know about other people, at least if
they’ll talk and tell us the truth, we can. But, what do you do with a super
person?
Now, I think you’ll have to agree that God is a greater person
than a human person. If he isn’t greater than a human person, then he’s unimportant
to our thinking about religion. For example, it’s claimed by religion that a
man has responsibility to God. Well, I know how to cope with responsibility to
other people. If I break the law, I take the rap—or else I don’t get caught,
which is better still—but the rap isn’t necessarily that bad. I know how to
assume my responsibility to other people.
Now, if God is just another person, on my own level, I know
how to handle Him already. It is only if he is a cosmic person, a deity, that
the question of my responsibility to Him becomes urgent. I can handle my
responsibilities to other people, but what am I going to do if I am responsible
to a super person? Or it is alleged by religion that God can give help in daily
living. Now, I do need help in life. But, if God is just another human being on
my own level, I don’t need him. I have enough friends as things now stand. I
can call on them to help me. What I really need, is help from beyond the human
level. And I am only interested in God’s help if he is more than a mortal. Now,
I’m trying to say that if God exists, we will have to understand Him as a deity
and not as a person. Otherwise, he’s of no interest to us at all. If God could
be figured out by us, he wouldn’t be worth having around. So, what we need is
information about a deity then. How do we get this?
Now it will help us if we know how to get information about
persons on our own level. How can I find out about the character, the wishes,
and the reactions of other people? What can I tell about you if you never talk?
Well, I can tell a little by seeing what you do and how you react to people in
situations. But, I would learn relatively little by observation only.
Suppose that in the second place, you would consent to
answer my questions. In that case, I could learn a great deal more about you,
provided you told me the truth. You could always be evasive or deceptive, and I
might not know the right questions to ask, and you could effectively keep me
from knowing what you are really like. Is it not clear, that in order for me to
really know you, you must voluntarily let me know what you are really like? You
must open yourself to me. You must tell me the truth about yourself. No amount
of observation or prying will let me get at the real you. The real YOU must be
given to me by you yourself. Now this is in a way a kind of revelation of
yourself, an opening, a disclosure, a making bare...and you do, do this, at
least with your best friends. I think we do. There are people who know the real
me and the real you, but they found that out because we let them know, because
we opened our self to them.
Now, if it is true that knowledge of another person depends
on voluntary self-disclosure, how much more is it likely to be so with the
knowledge of God. If one person cannot really plum the personality of another
person, without revelation of that person, how could you dope out God? My point
is, if you could, He wouldn’t be God! He’d be just another person.
And so, this brings us to a peculiar problem in our thinking
about religion. There is information that we cannot get by the best gathering
devices that we have. Who will photograph God? Who will put him on tape? How
will LIFE Magazine run an interview? How do you find out what God is like? Well,
you will find out if, and only if, God lets you know. That’s all. If somehow, He
lets you know what He is like, then you will have some of the information about
Him which you need to answer the questions of value which are pressing. And,
this is what I mean by outside information. It’s one thing to say, “I’ve got to
depend on some authority for my knowledge of Vietnam.” It’s another thing to
say, “There are some facts that I can’t get at all and have got to be given me
voluntarily and graciously by God Himself!” It’s not just that I have to take
some authority about what God is like. It’s that if He doesn’t open and let me
know, I will never find out at all. Now, right now. I’m not talking about how
this information about God is available if it is available. I’m just pointing
out that when you’re talking about God, you put yourself in a situation
different from that of science. In talking about God, mere cleverness and
patience, mere observation and analysis, will not suffice. We must be GIVEN
information that is not otherwise available to us. Only this will enable us to
answer the questions of value and meaning which plague our thinking.
Poet, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) has put it this way,
We who must die, demand a miracle.
How could the eternal do a temporal act?
The infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle.[3]
Is that a paradox? “Nothing can save us that is possible?”
“Nothing can save us that is possible.
“Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle.”
How do you say what I've been saying? We can’t get it on our
own. It’s impossible! And yet, we have to have it, or we can’t answer our most
pressing questions.”
So, here it is, class. Accept outside information—thinking
about religion is different than thinking about any other subject. We will have
to have some revelation, God’s voluntary self-disclosure, or we can do no
thinking at all.
Finally, in the third place...THINK!
That’s all. Think! Now, that may seem tautologist[4] to
say, but it is not enough to have gathered facts. It is not enough even to have
gathered information about God… information which has come from beyond our own
investigative capacities. You must do something with the facts. Selectivity
must be employed. Some facts are important. Some are not. You must know which
are which. Perspective is required… a certain breadth which enables you to see
an isolated fact as important because it is part of a much larger issue.
Let me talk about this perspective, for a minute. Take a
matter of current affairs. When the Arab/Israeli crises was on during the past
summer, one news commentator noted how angry Russia was at Israel’s action. In
fact, we all noted this, but what’s the significance of that particular fact? Why
was Russia so angry? Well, one commentator suggested… he may not be right, but
it illustrates what I mean by perspective, besides being an interesting idea on
its own... one commentator suggested that perhaps Russia’s anger at Israel’s
action was partly because Israel had acted as a great power, acting
unilaterally in its own interest, letting the chips fall, and holding its
gains.
Now see, that’s not the way a little power acts. That’s the
way a great world power acts. And perhaps Russia was angry, because a little
power had suddenly begun to act like a great power. And there’s also Russia’s
embarrassment at having poured arms and finances into Arab countries and having
to see the Arabs suffer a severe military defeat.
Now the commentator that says these things has got to have a
certain background knowledge, a certain ability to rise above the present
situation and to see it in a much broader light. This is perspective. It’s not
just the facts that you got. It’s what you do with them. It’s how you tell
which are important and which aren’t and how you put the facts together to make
valid conclusions. This is what really counts. So, when you think for yourself
in religion, you must really wrestle with the facts and with their
significance. Now, this is not done very often.
Several years ago, I knew a fellow when I was in the east, a
high school senior of considerable ability. He graduated from high school the
year I left the east, and I did not see him during the year that followed. I
was back in the east during that summer and I ran into this guy out in the
shopping plaza someplace. We edged into a sandwich shop and sat down, cuz I
wanted to talk to him. Well, during that year, he’d gone to a state college in
his hometown but quit because he saw he was going to flunk, and he spent the
rest of the year—that was before the draft—he spent the rest of the year
sacking hamburgers at a McDonald’s stand and working part-time in a ski shop
downtown. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he told me, “and I decided the
time had come that I wanted to think for myself and stop taking the opinions of
my parents and my church. I decided that all I believed, I’d been told to
believe.” Well, I was a little embarrassed by this. I was embarrassed because I
was basically in favor of doing this kind of independent thinking your own. So,
what do I say to a guy who says, “I’ve been doing this, and I’ve come up in a
different place. I’ve had to give up a lot of the traditional beliefs”?
I didn’t know what to say really. I hemmed and hawed, and
finally I said, “Well, Richie, when you began to think for yourself, what did
you decide about Jesus Christ?” To my amazement, he blushed, he stammered… it
only took an instant before he recovered himself, but I detected immediately
the true situation. He had not thought at all. He finally got something out,
but the case was clear.
Think hard about the things that matter most.
Now, giving up what you’ve been taught is not the same as
thinking for yourself. When you think for yourself you MAY give up what you’ve
been taught. I can’t control this. But, don’t think that you are engaging in
independent thinking if you just abandon what you’ve been taught. These are not
the same thing. And my young friend, I’m sure, had not done any real thinking. He
had merely given up. And, that’s why I say the third point here: Think hard about the things that matter
most.
After you have collected the facts and been willing to
accept some outside information about God, you still have the hard work of
thinking about these things. You’ve struggled with this on the paper about the
presuppositions of your life. Quite a few of you have come to me and talk with
me about it, and I see that it’s been hard for you to think about these
things... partly because you aren’t used to doing this kind of thinking, but
partly for other reasons, and some of you have made this clear. It’s painful to
think about yourself very deeply. You don’t always like what you find. Sometimes
illusions about our self are more comforting and pleasant than the truth about
our self. But we want to be mature persons. We want to be persons who do know
ourselves as we are, without illusion. We want to be persons who can face
ourselves and can face life as it really is. And, therefore, I say, by all
means, make this a semester of independent thinking about religion. But let
your thinking be governed and guided by the conditions under which alone your
thinking will have any validity. And by all means, when it comes right down to
the hard work of actually weighing opinions, contrasting them, evaluating them,
trying to discover the stronger, don’t chicken out, because it’s gotten hard. Hold
steady, and light will come at the end of that hard struggle.
Now this assumption, that you can do some kind of thinking
for yourself about religion is going to run through the whole semester’s work. In
one way or another, I’ll be calling on you at different times to formulate your
own opinions and to give the grounds for those opinions. I haven’t decided just
what the paper topics will be for the semester, but for example: I sometimes
have asked students to write just a little paper on “What is a Christian?” And
when I read that paper, I want to know how you know that’s what a Christian is.
Everybody and his brother has got religious opinions. What I want to know is,
do you have any evidence to back your opinions up. So that makes the semester
an interesting challenge for you. I think all of us really have questions about
religion for which we want answers. Let’s have eyes open and ears open and
minds open to the ways by which we can best come to conclusions on these
questions.
And that’s all for this morning.
[1]
The Vietnam War raged from 1955-1975.
[2] George W. Romney, then governor of Michigan, was
a candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. In September 1967,
he accepted an interview by Lou Gordon, a Detroit television commentator and
newsman. When asked about the Vietnam War, Romney told Gordon he that he had
been "brainwashed" by American generals into supporting the Vietnam
war effort while touring Southeast Asia in 1965. No one thought much about the
comment until it appeared in print. Romney tried subsequently to explain
himself but he was relentlessly attacked by his opponents and the press.
Romney's candidacy never recovered. A U.S. president is not supposed to be
susceptible to brainwashing, especially by his generals.
[3]
FOR THE TIME BEING: A Christmas Oratorio,
by W.H. Auden’s long poem written during the dark days of World War II
[4]
One who makes tautologies, or arguments which repeats an assertion using
different phrasing.
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