How does a software developer retain a religious faith?
In software development when there is a bug in your code you go back and rework or rewrite it until the code executes successfully without any internal logical failures.
How can someone who understands this process look at an ancient holy book filled with contradictions, inconsistencies, stretched truths, thinly veiled metaphor, lies, and sporadic facts and support both its proponents’ refusal to change it and its proponents’ insistence that it be used as a guide to living life in contemporary society?
Why recognize and revere the faith in rigor when concerning one’s self with something as inconsequential as a to do list app, but throw that all away when concerning one’s self with topics as important as identity, morality, and humanism?
It’s a little hard to answer a question so loaded with presupposition. It seems like you’re initially trying to frame your objection in terms of logic and reason, but your criticism is of the moral implications. My observation is that logical reasoning has little bearing on the divide between Christian and secular. There is no shortage of logical and illogical people in both camps. The objection, as seems to be the case here, is rarely on a rational level but rather a moral level. The idea of a moral authority that transcends humanity, by which humanity is to be judged is highly offensive. We naturally want to be our own moral authority. But if we are our own authority, who are you to determine what I should hold as “contradictions, inconsistencies, stretched truths, thinly veiled metaphor, lies...”? You’re objection appeals to the notion of an absolute objective authority on truth, while at the same time rejecting it.
If logical reason is truly what you’re interested in understanding the Christian world-view, there is no shortage of resources in the arena of apologetics. For easy reading you can start with something like Tim Keller’s two books, “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” and “Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World” or perhaps C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”. If you want something of a more academic grade:
- “Christian Apologetics (2nd edition)” by Douglas Groothuis
- “Reasonable Faith, Christian Truth and Apologetics (3rd edition)” by William Craig
- “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2nd edition)” by William Craig and JP Moreland
This is a very small minded take. I personally also find religious beliefs to be unpalatable to myself personally, and when I see people talking about it as settled fact I find it a bit cringy and silly, but I have to remind myself that people believe what they believe and religion says very little if anything about intelligence and problem solving skill. Faith is just faith, you don't know something is true for a fact, you just accept it as so, it's standing on a branch and being sure it won't break. People do it and it's fine.
Lots of very technical people are very religious. I'm not sure why, but it is very common. Doctors are the most prominent one, most doctors are very religious. You can ask, how can someone see the inner workings of the body, understand evolution, all the scientific rigor that goes into understanding that and still believe some guy was born of a virgin and died and was resurrected? I don't get it either, but they know why, and it's their life, and accepting that humans do this and leaving them alone, respecting their autonomy, not picking on people about their religious beliefs is how I think we should behave. There's merit in the conduct a lot of it brings out of people if nothing else.
We all have faith in something. We are all members of some type of cult, with or without the negative connotations that come with that word, most of us that would classify ourselves as atheist would never admit that many of our beliefs are faith, that we go with the flow of social expectations, that we are probably wrong about most of what we believe, it's as real to us as anything, and we would do well to look at ourselves rather than heckle people we don't understand.
But this fails to address the question and just reasserts that what I asked is true while seemingly sounding like you’re attacking me for bringing it up…?
> we would do well to look at ourselves rather than heckle people we don't understand.
When a question asked in good faith about faith is answered by accusing the asker of being a heckler is usually a sign that that bit of faith is threatened by critical thinking.
> it's standing on a branch and being sure it won't break.
When your branch has the political will to harm others you can believe I’ll be asking questions why you think that branch will hold.
I just hope you have the conviction of belief to answer honestly.
> accepting that humans do this and leaving them alone, respecting their autonomy, not picking on people
I like a simplified version of your suggested world
First, I'm not religious in any way. I thought that was clear but maybe not.
Second, I'm not attacking you. My candor comes across as brash sometimes.
Asking "how come smart people often believe stupid shit" (again, candor, that's basically what you're asking) doesn't really have a reply that would satisfy you. But you don't have to understand it, they do. All you have to do is acknowledge that people believe what they believe and let them be.
Whether someone else's branch is harmful says something about your particular brand of faith. They don't think it harms others. Would anything you believe in harm people if it were implemented? Is everything you think good and correct? People don't owe you an explanation for what they believe, just like you don't owe me answers to these two questions. We all believe things others don't like, we all believe things that others would view as harmful, and we all believe things we don't understand.
None of the doctors I've known have been overtly religious. None of my small sample of 3 that I know personally are religious. A quick search and everything about it seems to link back to one survey of US doctors in 2005.
The US is a very religious country compared to where I live, and it got me wondering if maybe the relationship is inverse - you're more likely to become a doctor if you're from a religious background. After all, it's a very well respected career and as Father Ted stated, the intelligent child would go off to train as a doctor and the stupid one would become a priest "your brother's a doctor isn't he Ted?"
What seems to underly your question appears to be a belief that people are primarily rational creatures.
If that were so, then it would indeed be hard to understand.
For most, if not all, rationality is a tool, not something that informs every aspect of their lives.
Religion provides community, meaning, continuity and a moral framework. I have also met very few religious people who are fundamentalist in their belief. Most acknowledge there are inconsistencies and things they can't explain.
I’ll ignore the religious part of you statement because I think it’s posed in bad faith (bad pun).
Programmers aren’t rational in the slightest. How many tech leads and senior engineers write bad code and design bad systems and behave completely irrational about it when it yields bad results. No, they double down on things and dance around the root cause.
So I'm a Christian and a developer that retains faith - so I can answer you from a sample size of one.
My faith comes from prolonged personal encounter with Christ, not the acceptance of some dry set of creeds.
Yes, it's mystical.
Yes, it is non-rational - in the strict definition that it depends on things that can be experienced and known spiritually, but that can't be explained through reason.
So after coming to faith as an atheist the Bible didn't make much sense: the gospels sort of made sense, especially John and the letters weren't too bad.
They were describing Someone who matched my experiences.
The prophets were just plain trippy, the old covenant rituals confusing and weird, the history more than a bit unclear.
So over the years that has clarified a lot. Spending time asking Him what was up with all of this has resulted in personal answers.
The rituals are a kind of children's Bible - a symbolic pictorial language that explains things that aren't easy to project to where we live otherwise.
Prophecy is a rich set of symbols - Western thought is quite limited in its ability to express some kinds of thinking.
After spending time with mnemonic systems I've come to recognize how some of these techniques match the grain of the human mind much better that
a textbook approach.
I've come to appreciate its structure and perfection.
Many fail to parse it, partly because parsing it requires non-reason processes, but when it has been parsed it is reasonable.
This might not be very convincing and I lack the bandwidth to explain much in a comment, but it has a unifying superstructure:
It starts with "in the beginning" and ends with "amen".
Like verse it starts with the themes: creation, the marriage of the first man, the fall induced by the serpent and then ends with the fall of Satan, the marriage of the Lamb and then the new creation.
It's macro structure is:
A beginning,
Three sections: a covenant, history of the covenant,
writings about a covenant,
Then a repeat of three sections for a new covenant.
Then an ending.
This is the same logical structure in outline of the first 7 day (period) creation scheme.
A start, three days of creation, three days of infilling and a final closing day.
Internally these sections have cross-references that match the structure.
These structures are preserved across multiple human authors, across millennia.
It is actually a good guide in contemporary life - as a simplifying assumption you can only look at instructions given in the letters, since these match the age we are currently in.
As a second parse for instructions, look at the Proverbs, which are mostly universal principles.
Instructions given to other peoples and for other times are interesting and give insight into God's principles, but aren't directly applicable.
But in the end the book is useless to you without the Author. Approach Him first.
If you approach Him through the Bible, I'd recommend starting with John and the Acts and the letters - and then trying to ask Him to open it up further.
