Nature of Religious Certainty

Many people are skeptical about whether anyone can achieve religious certainty. They doubt that genuine religions knowledge is possible.

Knowledge has traditionally been defined by philosophers as true beliefs supported by sound evidence: justified true beliefs. Although some philosophers take issue with one or another feature of this definition, it continues to be the generally accepted definition of knowledge.

Few challenge that knowledge must be based on belief. How can you claim to know something you don’t even believe? The real debate is whether a particular belief is true, which raises questions about the evidence that supports it.

If you think carefully about what you assume you know, you may realize that you have accepted the word of others for much of it. Those we believe know more than we do express beliefs that, in turn, often become our beliefs. How, never having climbed it, do I know that Mt. Everest is in the Himalayas, it is over 29,000 feet tall, and its peak lies along the border between China and Nepal? Because long ago a teach told me the first two things and I just looked up the third in Wikipedia.

Perhaps only a solipsist, someone who doubts you can know anything beyond your own mind such as whether other people exist, denies that we have certainly about the physical world. When it comes to the non-physical, such as whether capitalism or socialism is better, the evidence becomes murkier. Religious and philosophic beliefs are even further removed from evidence that everyone would regard as sufficient justification.

Thoughtful Christians shy away from trying to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that Christianity rests on tangible verifiable knowledge and can therefore be objectively shown to be true. Even people with strong faith in God through Christ often realize that an intellectually aggressive college student familiar with the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology) could pose unanswerable questions. All the student need do is keep asking, “Why do you believe that?” Sooner or later the person of faith is likely to answer, “I just do!”

Books have been written that purport to present the reader with compelling evidence for the claims of Christianity. The problem is that these authors want the reader first to accept that the New Testament contains accurate accounts of what happened two thousand years ago. Pointing to the beliefs of influential Christians who laid out the conceptual and doctrinal foundations of Christianity (early Christian fathers) still leaves open the question of why they believed what they did.

Some Christians argue that the New Testament is self-validating, by which they mean that, as a whole, it presents a compelling case for Christianity. Christians believe this, but many understand that it is self-validating only to some, and by no means to all.

Nearly five centuries ago, the French Christian mathematician Blaise Pascal quipped that evidence in support of Christianity is only persuasive to those who already believe. The Book of Mormon is self-validating to Latter Day Saints, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures to Christian Scientists, the Koran to Muslims, and so on.

How, then, can anyone attain religious certainty? A person only becomes a Christian upon meeting Christ as a living presence. He or she must acknowledge the need for a spiritual and moral rescuer, and fall on God’s grace to forgive past offenses against God and others because of what Jesus accomplished on his or her behalf. And that happens because of the action of the Holy Spirit on the person’s heart and mind.

Theologians have written about the inner witness or testimony of the Spirit, the ultimate source of religious certitude. The route to the Spirit and how to prevent ourselves from confusing our personal biases and individual desires what the Spirit’s work is, first, to saturate ourselves with the Bible, and second to attend a church faithful to it.