Curiosity, Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Faith

Can a critical thinker also be a person of traditional religious faith? It is true that many are, or at least appear to be, but who knows what goes on in another’s mind. As a purely theoretical question, the answer must be: perhaps. Two variables skew the response: the thinker’s curiosity and the reasonableness of the article of faith. Faith may not demand that critical thinkers affirm something they know to be patently false. Critical thinkers by their very nature are curious. Leading them to evaluate and critique the evidence before making a decision, or making a faith commitment. Curiosity is the mother’s milk of critical thinking. Without it there will be little critical thought.

            Religion in Western culture is generally conservative and offers its propositional truths as paradigmatically absolute; they are the product of divine revelation, we are told, to be questioned only at the risk of one’s immortal soul. Nevertheless, critical thinkers are not typically so generous as to affirm without critiquing. Regardless of the stakes, an individual who suppresses curiosity and affirms a religious proposition without serious challenge is not thinking critically.

            The real difficulty with religious truths, however, is that the absolute religious truth of one group frequently refutes the absolute religious truth of another group. Here is an example of one divine truth canceling another. Catholics regard the wine and bread of the Mass as transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. Lutherans reject this view but affirm that in some way Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Baptists and others, on the other hand, regard the bread and grape juice (for Baptists certainly not wine!) of the Lord’s Supper as only symbolical. The bread and grape juice only represent the body and blood of Christ. As long as such ideas as these are considered simply different “beliefs” between religious groups, it is merely an oddity prompting the response, “how odd. How can people in the same religion who use the same holy books believe such remarkably different things?” But when it is remembered that these three groups hold that their respective views are absolutely binding on their memberships as the product of divine wisdom, it should strike a critical thinker as a curiosity for further investigation, particularly into the rationale of each group. Of course, they cannot all be the result of divine revelation! But the solution is not as easy as determining which is the correct view and eliminating the other two.

            The problem really goes to the nature of “religious truth.” Religious truth is not objective like mathematics—like 2+2=4, for example. Rather religious truth is only subjective truth in every case. Like beauty, religious truth lies in the eye, or in this case mind, of the beholder. That the character of the propositional truth is absolute is only true for the one who believes it is true. It is unlike Einstein’s theory of relativity E = MC², which is universally true—although true believers are scarcely apt to agree. Such an uncritical perspective is apt to strike the critical thinker as suspicious—if not worthy of complete skepticism.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay first appeared in Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 39–41. It appears here newly edited and under a new title.

Lady Luck or Divine Providence?

Perhaps God has nothing to do with the weather at all and the climate of a given region is a natural phenomenon. As such, the weather is simply due to luck, an observation that begs the following question: what controls our lives Divine Providence or Lady Luck? At some point everyone has exclaimed, "What a great stroke of luck," or "We survived by the providence of God." As a Baptist, I have grown up with the concept of "the providence of God," but what exactly is luck and how do I reconcile it to a dominate idea in Western culture that God somehow regulates the universe?

            My brother-in-law had a great game of golf one weekend—even for him. He shot 67 for 18 holes, including a hole-in-one. His wife (my sister) chalked up the hole-in-one to his skill with the clubs. But he insisted, "No, any time you shoot a hole-in-one, it's luck." I thought about it for a moment and had to agree. If holes-in-one were due to skill there would be more of them. So, I suggested, "Perhaps it was divine providence." My brother-in-law replied, "No, it's luck. God doesn't care about golf." My brother-in-law is a Baptist Deacon, so I had to take him seriously. Golf is a game where you play against yourself, so the only reason for God to intervene in his game and bless him with a hole-in-one was to lower his golf score and make him feel rather smug. We usually like to think that God has bigger issues on his plate, which is what I think he meant when he said, "God couldn't care less about golf."

            What we seem to mean by luck is that sometimes things go in our favor and at other times they do not, including even the most trivial matters. We seem to conceive of luck as a pervasive random force in the universe that, for whatever reason, is erratic or whimsical in its application. If this is true, we do not live in a universe where everything is micromanaged by God. Hence, people who believe in God's providence must cope with the disturbing idea that God (if God there be) manages some things that happen, but, on the other hand, God allows other things simply to happen, as they will, without his oversight. Or perhaps we do live in a world where God micromanages everything and must be given the credit (or take the blame) for everything that happens. If God is to be given the credit for everything that happens, then we humans bear no responsibility for global warming, poverty, the breach of the ozone layer, or the failure of the levees in New Orleans in 2005. Somehow, however, we instinctively know that we cannot make God the scapegoat for all the misfortunes of the world. Most of us realize (I hope) that God is not responsible for the incompetent response of the Federal Government to the disaster in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, or the current bumbling administration presently making a mockery of the democratic ideals of the nation. Voters at least must share the blame for that debacle.

            Perhaps luck is only a more or less natural force in the universe, something like gravity for example. While the ancient Greeks and Romans personified it into a deity named Tychē (Greek) or Fortuna (Roman), we moderns have secularized the force. Nevertheless, the idea that some things just happen for no apparent reason is a disturbing concept for those who think that God guides a master plan for the universe. If things happen for no reason, then we have a universe permeated by a principle of randomness that suggests God may guide matters in the universe in most instances, but leaves others to happen without his guidance. Such a possibility raises the question how can we tell benevolent concern from random event? Perhaps we cannot.

            The Bible is full of bad things perpetrated by the biblical God on basically decent people. Many believers seem willing to accept that sometimes God does bad things to good people for reasons they cannot understand. Job thought so as well: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil" (Job 2:10 RSV)? Maybe we invented the idea of luck because such capricious behavior on God's part is simply inconsistent with the idea of a benevolent God. But if we invented luck, we could have invented God as well.¹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, Or: Cascade, 2009), 6–7. This essay first appeared before 2009 as a Religion and Ethics Editorial in the daily Newspaper, The Springfield News Leader.