A reason to doubt

If you are a Christian, I have a question for you. It is not a hard question, it is not unanswerable, but it may be a little heartbreaking to answer.

Have you ever given someone a reason to doubt?

I have a great little book entitled, On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt. His blatant use of French aside, Henry has written the most interesting paper – now in book form. Here’s an excerpt:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what function it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us.

As Christians, we live in this culture of bullshit. Unfortunately, we contribute to it. I don’t just mean the pastors in the tabloids or those who display airline arrogance – all of us. Here’s the thing though – I think we have misinterpreted our role a little. We have grown to think that if we tell the truth about our lives – our inner thinking, our failures, our own moments of uncertainty – then we are causing others to doubt. The exact opposite is really true. I have discovered that when I am honest about my journey, both the best and worst parts of it, my experience rings true for others. No one believes my bullshit anyway.

But far more important, I need to remember that I must always start with God and work my way to humankind. If I try to discern the truth of God using my own perceptions and experiences as a foundation, I will end up with a distorted understanding of Who He is and how He operates (and, thus, add to the bullshit). Instead, I must always understand Who God is first, and then see myself in light of Him – not the other way around. More about this idea next Monday.

Harry finishes like this:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not particularly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.