The Christian Quadrillema

In medical school year 4, I sat in a lecture given by an Associate Professor in ENT Surgery. I can’t remember the exact title of the lecture but I remember him digressing to talk about miracles. The following is just a paraphrase of what he said but it went a bit like this:

“I see pastors on TV who claim they can perform miracles by laying hands on people. There was one I saw the other day where the pastor laid hands on a man who was supposedly blind from birth. The pastor laid hands on him, and then the pastor asked him a question to confirm his healing. The pastor asked: ‘What colour is this?’ To my great astonishment the man responded: ‘Red!’ Now my question to you all is this:

How did a man who has never seen colour in his life know how to identify the colour red? Tell me, how does a person who was supposedly born deaf instantly respond when someone calls out their name? Do you not know that language depends on the working of the senses? That the ability to comprehend speech, or colour, is a skill that develops from the time a person is born? If that man’s vision was impaired from birth, as that pastor claimed, then I would expect his newfound abilities to be rudimentary at best.”

I remember scanning the room and seeing disillusionment on the faces of the Christian students I knew in class. It was a large pill to swallow. In fairness to the professor, I was also skeptical of public miracle performances by celebrity pastors. For me, it was more of an unconscious distrust than an intellectual objection. There was a part of me that wanted miracles like those to be true, but another part of me felt suspicious of coordinated quackery. In retrospect, his lecture hit another nail in the coffin of my withering faith in God at that time.

In my earliest days as a medical student, I strongly identified as a Christian. I did the usual Christian things like go to church and attend campus fellowship. But as the years passed, I noticed that I was increasingly becoming agnostic. I had many troubling questions that regular sermons and Bible studies did not address. Questions about creation, sin, faith, redemption and more.

I did not go full blown atheist because I could not disprove, for myself, the existence of God. But I was also at a point where I could not sufficiently demonstrate the proof, or need, for God in my own life. Suffice to say I could no longer justify keeping up my usual Christian habits just to continue appearing Christian. So when I left medical school, I stopped. Without any announcement, I just stopped.

Many Christians have been in a similar position at one time or another. Feeling stuck in a limbo of doubt and, worse, being patronized by other Christians who attempt to provide answers they really don’t have. As a result, said Christians find themselves torn between four different options:

1. Become agnostic

2. Embrace atheism

3. Pursue faith with intellectual honesty

4. Remain content with dubious Christianity

I call this the Christian quadrilemma. Each one is a path a Christian might consciously choose or unconsciously drift into. For a few years I drifted along Path 1, but I ran into some issues. The summary of it was that agnosticism did not satisfy me. It felt like a form of escapism. My approach to being agnostic could be summed up in this statement: “I am not sure if God exists, but whether or not it is true, I choose not to be bothered.”

Ultimately, I was not able to maintain this indifference. I was trying to organize my life around this detachment but it led to moments of moral conflict. I found that agnosticism made my character inconsistent because my choices were determined by what was expedient. In the end, I had to accept that living a life where your convictions change for the sake of what is convenient is not properly genuine.

Path 2 was a tempting option. Perhaps because it was, and still is, the favoured philosophy among the supposedly intelligent. But I never went this far for two reasons:

First, if agnosticism was an ambivalent path to tread, atheism, to me, was the dead end of that street. Second, and more importantly, being an atheist required me to start from a position that was clearly untenable. I saw a serious logical problem with the belief that a thing can emerge from nothing. On a scale of things that made sense, it objectively ranked lower than the chance that all things emerged from Something. And the famous “big bang” could not be the Something because it does not answer the question of a cause that is itself uncaused.

I figured, if I were to make atheism the foundation of my entire worldview, I could not possibly justify it. Such a starting point requires even the most rational atheist to be a fool incognito — and I have yet to meet an atheist who is honest enough to admit that.

If Path 1 was unsatisfying and 2 was illogical, I was left with 3 and 4. Let me jump to 4 and finish with 3. As I mentioned earlier, the thing that triggers this quadrilemma is the poverty of useful answers to serious questions. Mainstream Christianity, or should I say, Christianity as practiced in the standard church setting does not do a good job at asking or answering questions.

Take, for instance, the pastor that my ENT professor spoke about. If he were asked to explain how prior perception of colour was not necessary for the healed person to correctly identify colour, I doubt he would be able to come up with an adequate response. However, there are Christians who are content to not be offered any such explanations. For them, it is enough that a once blind man was afterwards able to see. I have known a great many Christians who fall into this category, and I can understand why the world is frustrated by them.

Path 3 is the hardest choice. Because 1, 2 and 4 share something in common. Being unbothered, irreligious, or complacent requires no effort. Some might want to argue that atheism requires critical thinking. It doesn’t. For something as personal as deciding what to believe, anyone can choose atheism and go to bed. Trying to openly reason your way out of a flawed premise is not effort. It is insanity.

The only real effort that atheists make is to disparage belief in God — which is an optional thing to do. Others might want to argue that they have explored the possibility of God to the fullest extent and that they came up short. I respect the striving, but I would urge them not to resign. Because if they are not yet dead, then there is yet something to be discovered.

Pursuing faith with intellectual honesty is hard work. Because you are navigating your way to the Something — say God, or Truth — and you are questioning your judgement as you go along. You do not want to lie to yourself. At times you find things that make sense, other times you find things that don’t. What I have noticed is that the answers eventually come to you, if you don’t stop searching.

Do not make the mistake of thinking you can reason your way to God. No one can. But God will find you if you are willing to have faith.

Personally, I take the claims of miracle-working pastors with a pinch of salt. But I also think it is important to seriously consider the proposition that God is real. Not for the sake of believing miracles or converting to a particular religion. But because the more you consider it, the more you find that it is, actually, true.