The problem with blind spots is that we can’t see them. Atheists and agnostics often critique religious people for being ‘narrow-minded,’ and ‘dogmatic’ about things, while failing to realize that in criticizing people for these things, they are themselves being dogmatic (about not being dogmatic!). The problem is that these critics often don’t see the contradiction – some going as far to say that “Atheism is not a philosophy…not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.”[1]

I became a Christian when I was a teenager. When I would talk to my friends about Christianity, they would often say that they ‘didn’t want to make a final decision about God or the afterlife.’ They insisted that they didn’t know the answer to the question of God for sure. They knew this life was real, and they were simply going to make the best of that and worry about the rest later. In other words, as people say n the modern western world all the time: ‘I choose not to commit to any one belief about spiritual or ultimate things.’ People do not catch the irony: to choose not to commit to any belief about spiritual matters is itself a choice to commit to a belief about spiritual matters. To choose not to make a choice is itself the choice.[2]

Many people admit that they hold a belief system, but quickly add that such beliefs are not based on ‘faith’ (a God they can’t see, etc.) but rather based on ‘evidence’. The reality is, however, that there are aspects to every person’s worldview, including the most ardent atheist’s that rely on faith. For instance (to take a classic philosopher’s example) no one can prove that we’re not all butterflies dreaming that we’re human beings. We can believe that about ourselves, and follow particular evidences that we aren’t, but we can’t give conclusive proof for it. At the end of the day it is a position of faith. Not to mention the added complexity for atheists that if our minds and cognitive faculties really are just a product of evolutionary development, we can’t trust them anyway (about what they tell us about being human or butterflies!) because they are wired not for what is true but only for what works – to keep us alive and reproducing. Which is why Darwin asked the haunting question: “Can anyone really trust the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there is any convictions in such a mind?” (Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin, 1897; repr., Boston: Elibron, 2005, 1:285).

There are of course a thousand examples of this but at the end of the day, as Timothy Keller points out in his book The Reason for God, all doubts that we have are simply a set of alternate beliefs. “You cannot doubt un-provable Christian Belief A,” he says, “except from a position of faith in un-provable non-Christian Belief B.”[3] Take for instance your possible doubt that Jesus Christ really rose from the dead. Why don’t you believe this happened? Likely because you already hold the belief that when people die there is no coming back – that there is no such thing as a miracle which defies scientific conclusions and the natural order of things (that death cannot be reversed). This is the position of ‘New Atheism’ of course, and the position of the science and philosophy of the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment (of which we are all products) most popularly, the conclusions of the Scottish skeptic David Hume.

But we must understand that this belief (in the finality of death, and the fact that things that defy nature are impossible) is itself un-provable and more a product of an Enlightenment worldview, which deduced that there are only natural causes to the universe, than anything else. In fact many non-Christian scholars believe that miracles like the resurrection are completely possible given the scientific discoveries of the modern era, which have over turned those of the Enlightenment again and again, even in the last few decades (for instance, Quantum Mechanics has re-drawn some aspects of Newtonian physics, showing them to be misguided at best, and some wrong).

The flat objection to miracles has now been shown to have flowed “from a rigid application of the modern worldview’s definition of reality…[which] is but one of a large number of humanly constructed maps of reality…impressive because of the degree of control it has given us; but it is no more an absolute map of reality than any of the previous maps.”[4] All the maps humankind has come up with over time are simply products of particular histories and cultures, and “the modern one,” which we are most heavily influence by, “like its predecessors, will be superseded.”[5] That is what Marcus Borg argued back in 1991, and today the old map has been superseded because of new developments in science, which show the old constructs as misguided and ill informed. A fact that should cause any modern skeptic to be careful when making dogmatic statements about the impossibility of miracles, or anything else that assumes a construct of reality wherein God doesn’t exist based on observational evidences.

Suffice it to say for now when we conclude that miracles can’t happen, or God doesn’t exist, it is not a neutral point of view, or an innocent conclusion by objective ‘evidence,’ but the result of a larger framework of thought informed by the western institutions we live in (school, media, family) and their conclusions about the world. This is why Craig Keener goes as far to say that “To rule out even asking questions about divine activity is not neutral, but…an act of cultural hegemony.”[6] A ploy by the dominant cultural narrative we live within to tell a secular story wherein science, the state, the enlightened self, and even sexuality, are the savior of humankind, not God. Not anything outside of ourselves, which is of course the ultimate offense to western, democratic, self-made, capitalist human beings.

Alternate, un-provable Belief B indeed.

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[1] Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 51.
[2] Greg A. Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the idol of Certainty (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013), 47.
[3] Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), xvii.
[4] Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (Canada: Harper Collins, 1991), 33-34.
[5] Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, 34.
[6] Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, 194-195.