Sometimes belief can get you the job, secure the win, or help you make a difference. Other times, through, belief doesn't seem to help much at all. Can we know which beliefs are worth believing in? And when do we just need to take a leap of faith?
In today’s episode, our speakers wrestle with these questions. Psychology professor Matthew Vess (Texas A&M) is in dialogue with Sean McDowell (Biola), a professor of Apologetics. They discuss how certainty and belief interact and whether the claims of Christianity could ever be worth dying for.
This Forum event was held at Texas A&M in Spring 2023. Thank you to the Forum planning team who made this discussion possible!
It's possible to know something, think that you're right, but be incorrect. So to know something is to have justified true belief. You can think something is true deeply but be mistaken about it. Take, for example, martyrs. Martyrs have to be pretty confident to lay down their lives. A Muslim terrorist, a Christian martyr. Both might have equal psychological confidence, but psychological confidence is not enough.
Christianity is rooted essentially on the claim that Jesus lived, died, was buried, and rose on the third day. So, is there a way we can test and see if there are other hypotheses that better explain this? Is it knowable? There certainly is an element of trust, right? I'm not saying it's reduced down to just certain things that we know, but it's not just trusting blindly without reason.
Obviously, we're intelligent; we fear death, and then we're drawn towards the systems that help us cope with our own mortality. Now, I look at that data as a Christian, and I think that coming up with these explanations to face fear of death is one way to make sense of that data. Another way could be is that there is a God, and he made us to be in relationship with him—made us smart, made us aware of our own finitude.
