Questions
In arguing religion, I more often renounce faith than any particular religious claim, although I suppose that’s more a product of my choice of friends, none of whom are literalists, than of my relationship with religion generally. Any system of belief which seeks to rope off certain ideas as not subject to question should be questioned, and aggressively, especially on those points it seeks to remove from questioning. In my experience, those are the points which have proven indefensible.
Some of my friends have defended a church as encouraging questions. This may well be. But, apart from the Unitarians, I have yet to find a church that encourages different answers.
Lest Jen feel I’m picking on her, I’ll draw instead on Eileene’s tale of her family minister when she was an impressionable young adolescent. She liked him, and with good reason. He recognized her intelligence, and encouraged her study of the Bible by engaging her arguments over particular passages. Naturally, being much more experienced and professionally trained, he had ready answers for objections she raised. I suspect, too, that the questions weren’t the really hard ones, since Eileene was then still a believer herself. The really tough questions come from outside belief, rooted in the denial of the authority of religious texts in the first place. Nonetheless, the minister deserves credit for going so far as dealing with easier questions, and probably for being willing to tackle harder ones as Eileene got older and more sophisticated.
He never got the chance. Higher-ups in INC decided that developing questioning minds was inappropriate, and replaced him with a more doctrinaire minister, one who turned the entire congregation back to rote recital of biblical passages and reinstated church authority as the sole source of religious understanding.
But even had the older, less authoritarian minister remained, I suspect there were lines of questioning he would not tolerate. Sometimes, people ask questions and find the answers leading them away from God. Never—never!—have I heard a friend describe an expression of doubt to a minister that caused the minister to say, “Ah! I’m glad to see you making so much progress. If you’ve decided that you no longer believe, then all our discussions have borne fruit.” For that matter, I’ve never read a stranger’s account of such an event, either. When the questions get too pointed, churches keep falling back on faith: “Your direct experience in contradiction to church doctrine doesn’t mean the doctrine is wrong; it just means you didn’t experience it right. Trust in the litany.”
This is my fundamental reason to refuse to consider science co-equal with religion, or reason co-equal with faith. (I’ll go back to picking on Jen a moment here.) Jen thinks the two are just different sets of beliefs, with no way to choose between them, except personal preference. Science and reason eagerly seek out challenges as a means of refining understanding. If sufficient evidence against gravity could be brought to bear, the theory of gravity would be tossed aside, reluctantly perhaps, in the face of accumulated evidence in its favor, but with excitement, too, with enthusiasm for what new ideas might be found. That willingness to change belief provides a form of error-correction that faith can never replicate.
It’s not sufficient to endure questions; a belief system must be prepared to concede if the questions are pointed enough, and be prepared to abandon its seat entirely in the face of hard answers.