When asked, many people will say
they believe in God. Often such persons
admit to seldom going to church, perhaps at Easter and Christmas. Others who say they believe in God feel little
need to go to church at all.
Nevertheless they are convinced they believe in God and who are we to
tell them otherwise? How could we
possibly know if they believe in God or not?
I’d like to turn the question around, how do they know they believe in God?
Merely saying they believe is not evidence of belief for me or for them.
Is there a difference between
thinking you believe and actually believing?
Is believing little more than a thought in our heads which says I
believe this or I believe that? I can
think the earth is flat, does that mean I believe it? Admittedly we can believe anything we can
think (Griffiths,
A.P pg.128.) but must we
believe everything we think? And what is
the difference between thinking something is the case and believing it is the
case? Do we think before we are able to
believe or do we believe before we can think?
Strange as it may seem thinking
and believing are isomorphic; they evolved at the same time. They are much like the notion of colour and
shape. There is no colour without shape
and no shape without colour. If this is
difficult to grasp consider when it was you first believed anything? Those who have watched infants grasp an
understanding of language may recognize belief and thought as they
evolved. For me it was when I walked
into the room and my infant daughter saw me and cried out ‘Da-da’. Those were her first words and it was clear
she was convinced her claim was correct.
She believed what she was saying.
This should give us a clue as to what is entailed in believing. Believing is tied to our language use. I will make a long story short and assert
that believing is the conviction that
our language use is correct. Not
true or false but correct. When we learn
language we learn what is correct to say and what is incorrect; what is right
language use and wrong language use. We
may make a mistake and misuse language but until we are corrected our
conviction holds. It was correct for my
daughter to apply the tag Da-da to me.
This was her first experience of believing. (Wittgenstein, L. #141.)
So saying we believe in God is merely an
exercise in correct language use unless we can offer more evidence to determine
the truth of our statement. How do we
determine our statement to be true rather than merely correct? How do we know we are not merely thinking: ‘I
believe in God’ and taking it for granted this is all that is necessary? How do we know such a thought is the truth? Surely thinking and/or saying ‘I believe’ in
God’ is necessary to establish a belief in God but as we have seen it is not
sufficient. There must be something else
that is necessary to determine such a belief to be the truth.
Traditionally we determine a
person’s actual believing from merely the espousing of a belief by measuring
the conviction they have for their language use. A belief entails conviction. No conviction, no belief however much they
may say so. I knew when my daughter raised
her arms and exclaimed ‘Da-da’ she was convinced I was the one who belonged to
that tag and that I would accommodate her by picking her up. She had demonstrated her conviction, her belief
and I reinforced her language use by complying with her request.
Let’s return to the question:
‘How do you know you believe in God?’
How do you demonstrate your conviction to yourself and to others? Many of you go to church to worship once a
week and consequently hold this, in some small way, is evidence of your
conviction. It is also evidence of your
faith. In philosophical circles evidence of belief
is called conviction but when discussing God, evidence of belief is called
faith. Faith and conviction are
synonymous terms. We demonstrate our
faith by how we behave; by going to church to worship, by talking about God, by
praying to God, by writing about God, by undertaking works in God’s name, by
preaching about God’s word. Whatever it
is we do in God’s name is evidence of our faith. The seeming fanatic standing on the street
holding up a sign saying: ‘Repent!’ ‘The
End Is Near!’ is demonstrating his/her faith.
We demonstrate our faith by asking God to bless others and thanking him
for our blessings. We demonstrate our
faith by trying to follow God’s Commandments and asking his forgiveness when we
fail.
While demonstrating our faith is
often a public act most of us feel uncomfortable pronouncing on our faith to
friends, workmates and acquaintances who are faithless. Such behaviour is looked upon as unwanted
proselytizing. One consequence of this
is that our church community and church organized activities become the focal
point for our demonstration of our faith. Churches provide discussion groups, prayer
meetings and mentoring sessions for those seeking to confirm their faith to
themselves and others. Repetition is one
means of demonstrating ‘how we know’ we believe in God; it refreshes our
willingness to welcome the spirit of God into our life.
It may be informative to ask:
“Are there degrees of Faith? Do some
people have more faith than others?” Jesus
Christ seems to think so. In four
instances he chastises the apostles for their little faith. See Mathew 6:30, 8:26, 16:8 and Luke
12:28. At this time in His ministry it
would seem that the apostles should be the ones to have the most faith in
God. After all they had previously been
versed in the Jewish tradition of worship and they followed Christ as a
demonstration of faith. In Mathew 8:10
Jesus marvels at the faith of the Centurion and proclaims: “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no,
not in Israel.” In Mathew 15:28 Jesus heals the daughter of the Canaanite woman proclaiming “O woman, great is the faith: be it unto
thee even as thou wilt.” So we have
circumstances of Jesus proclaiming great faith and of little faith. I think that the implication of these two latter
stories is that the faith each expressed is not short-lived though we have no
way of determining its longevity. This, of
course, leads to the obvious question: “How much faith does it take to be with
Jesus Christ at the end of days and/or to get into heaven?” In Romans 10: 9-10
we read “That if thou shalt confess with
thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised
him from the dead thou shalt be saved.
For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession
is made unto salvation.”(KJV) At first glance this would seem a minimum
requirement for those wishing to be with Christ at the end of days but we must
not kid ourselves that this is all that is necessary.
Surely there are many who
regularly attend church for an hour or so each week convinced they are paying
their dues to God and their tithes to the church because their heart is sincere
this day. After all God set aside this
day for worship. This is what he asks of
us because he recognizes we are constantly involved with the business of living
during the rest of the week. Whoa! What
are you thinking? You have a once-a-week
God? No, of course not. We’re comfortable in the knowledge that he is
always there. You’re comfortable? Yes.
You’re saying you can’t always attend to him? Well, yes, if you put it that way. There’s another way to put it?
We are all sinners every day and
every day we must renew our commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. The worship of the Lord Jesus Christ is not a
part-time or casual activity. Diligence
is required. A fisherman does not cast
his line and in a moment retrieve it and leave for home satisfied he has been
fishing. The true fisherman stays at the
water all day, casting his line many, many times before he is convinced he has
been fishing. Can we be satisfied that
our appearances at church at Easter and Christmas is sufficient to ensure we
are destined for heaven? Can we be
convinced that once a week is enough? What
do we risk?
We can’t all be pastors who
devote their life to the service of God.
How do we fulfil the demands placed upon us by an all-loving,
all-protecting God? In cases concerning
worship God provides the questions. We
must provide the answers. We each are our
own apostle; we initiate and reform ourselves and we are never satisfied with
our results. Is this asking too
much? That depends on what we believe
our reward is worth.
©Launt Thompson
Auckland, New
Zealand
2018
References
Griffiths,
A. P., ed. Knowledge and Belief,
Oxford University Press, London (1973) Wittgenstein, L., On Certainty,
Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1974)
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