It's all one question

Over at Stone the Preacher (yes, I'm still processing my reactions to that site), Pastor Steve said:

I will never answer the majority of the questions unbelievers have about God, questions that deal with proof that God exists; to do so would violate the “faith clause” that is a condition of becoming a Christian.

Which is presumably what led one of his readers ("Bro 310") to remark in the comments:

Part of the atheist religion is argueing. You cannot adequately answer an atheist’s question. The most eloquent, thought out response will not satisfy them. If you answer one question they have two more to ask. Sisyphus has a better chance at finishing his task than a believer getting an atheist to stop argueing.

Now, if you browse through that comment thread - or, well, pretty much any of the Atheist Tuesday threads on that site - you'll see that both Bro 310 and Pastor Steve have a point. The atheists (maybe I should say "unbelievers," as I'm not sure they're all atheists per se) do ask a lot of questions, and then we ask more questions about the answers to previous questions.

(This, by the way, brings me to one more thing that I find admirable about Pastor Steve - he's responded to at least one question with a simple, "I dunno." There are way too many people who don't seem to think they're allowed to admit that.)

And so but anyway, upon reading Bro 310's comment, I had another one of those That's not quite right reactions. Because while they do have a point about the sheer volume of questions, and even about the cascading nature of the questions, in a sense all those questions are really just specific cases of a single, overarching question: Why should I believe this?

...Have I just discovered a Grand Unification Theory for atheist questions about religion?

Faith for Unbelievers

I mentioned in a footnote to a previous post that I actually do think it's important to have faith. Now, I'm not religious, but that's okay: I don't think faith has all that much to do with religion anyway, which is one of the reasons why I tend to get confused when I hear people talk about faith as an aspect of their religious beliefs.

So I dropped that footnote in, with a vague thought that I might come back and do a post on the topic of faith: how I hear the word used, what I mean when I use it, and why I think it's important.

This morning, I found that Geds has more or less written it for me. Go read it. You can thank me later.