Getting In Touch with Our Feelings

You find out you’re supposed to have a ready answer when people ask about your faith, and so you head to the bookstore and buy a guide to apologetics.

As you read, a terrible weight settles on your shoulders. Your sleep is peppered with nightmares: Karl Marx and Charles Darwin chase you through a gray, deserted cityscape—you turn a corner to escape, only to be pounced on by Sigmund Freud! The more you read, the more it seems that to stand up to all these challenges, you’ll have to become a philosopher, a theologian, a psychiatrist, and (you are beginning to suspect) a magician. Having a ready answer for everyone is a daunting task.

So you study first principles in search of a short cut, one ‘magic bullet’ you can use against every unbeliever.

Revelation Trumps Reason

The magic bullet is epistemology, how we know things. Rationalists say we gain knowledge through reason and logic. Empiricists say we know things through our senses. Both views have their merits, but how do we account for things beyond human reason, or things that are real and yet cannot be ‘sensed’? The Bible’s answer is the only one I’m aware of: these things are known only through revelation.

Just think about that profound classic of Reformation theology, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The tragic Dane doesn’t see his father’s murder, nor does he discover it by logical analysis of the evidence. Instead, it takes a visit from the underworld to clue Hamlet in—and even then he spends so much time worrying about the nature of revelation that events take care of themselves! Of course, some people might object that Hamlet is just a play, and I have no answer to that. How can you argue with such philistines?

Under the assumption that the enemies of faith are rationalism and empiricism, Christian apologists have skewered hypothetical exponents of both views for generations. But after all those years of jousting, we are beginning to suspect that the monsters we tilted at were windmills after all. People claim to be convinced by reason or sensory evidence, but there is far different, terribly subjective mechanism at work.

Trust Your Heart—Right?

Descartes tell us, “I think, therefore I am.” And you read that and think, “So what?” It may be a profound philosophical expression, but it isn’t, well…relevant. I mean, how many hours have you spent wondering whether or not you are? You already know you are! The question is, how? David Hume might say you know because you sense it. Descartes says, quite rationally, that it’s because you conceive of it intellectually.

I’m going to suggest that you know it because you feel it.

Your senses may deceive you, your mind may short circuit, but if worse comes to worse you can just ‘let go and trust your heart’—right? Well, right or wrong, it appears to be true. No evidence of the senses, no conception of the mind seems powerful enough to shake the faith we have in our feelings.

When all else fails, feel.

I hate this. Nothing frustrates me more than the knowledge that no matter how right I am, you won’t agree because what is right doesn’t ‘feel’ right to you. If I could, I would drag everyone kicking and screaming to the proper understanding of all things. And, um, how do I know that I’m right about everything? Because it feels right! And believe me, I hate that even more.

Feelings are the worst kind of argument. Robert Hughes describes a head-on collision with emotional knowledge in his book Culture of Complaint:

Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual information, the students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived ‘rights’; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape.[i]

How many of your attempts at rational, even-handed apologetics have ended up at a similar dead end? If you assert the truth claims of Jesus Christ, you are doing more than putting forward a positive argument for Christianity; you are insulting the unbeliever, attacking his rights, exposing him to a ‘hostile conversational environment.’ If you doubt it for one second, think about the stereotype of evangelism as “forcing your beliefs” on other people. Mention Christ and you’ve committed assault with intent to proselytize.

In context, Hughes has in mind students whose education has been neglected. If they had been trained in logic and taught to interpret texts, he thinks the outcome would have been different. I’m not so sure. It would have seemed different, certainly—but when all is said and done, our evidence and our logical arguments often amount to little more than a sophisticated way of expressing our feelings. That’s why no one on the nightly talk shows ends the half-hour agreeing with the other side. We adopt our arguments according to our beliefs and not the other way around.

Rational Knowledge, Irrational Belief

“How do I know you exist? Maybe you are just a figment of my imagination, one of the many delusions that populate my dream?” This is a familiar mind-game, the equivalent of looking at the reflection of a mirror in another mirror—a world of infinite layers, none of them real. We know that other people exist, but we don’t really know it. The thing that prevents us from treating them like figments of our imagination is not empirical knowledge but belief.

Many people assume, of course, that the word ‘irrational’ is implicit in belief, but the belief that other people exist is surely rational. As Christians, we must acknowledge that there is a type of belief not born of reason, but consistent with it. This form of belief is the substance of knowledge obtained through revelation.

Subjective and Certain

The problem with this line of argument is that it opens me up to the charge of relativism. If our beliefs are not derived from objective evidence, then why should you trade in Your Truth for My Truth? The answer is that, as a Christian, I’m only interested in promoting His Truth.

I am subjective—hopelessly subjective. To put my trust in my own reason or senses would be to build on sinking ground. Helpful as my mind and my senses have proven, I would no more trust my eternal soul to them than I would stand on a busy highway and trust my legs to jump clear at the right moment. The only solid ground I can count on is God’s. And I found out about it not by logic or by listening, but  by revelation.

You must have a ready answer for the hope that lies within you, but that doesn’t mean you have to have an answer to everything. How often are we tempted to say nothing because we cannot say it all? Answer not a fool according to his folly. Your arguments can’t change another person’s mind, but your Savior can change his heart. It’s good to be an apologist, but sometimes it’s wiser to be just a witness.