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Ironically enough, the belief systems most susceptible to self-destruction are those most coherent, self-consistent, and easily-defensible. The vulnerability of such systems arises from a fundamental part of human psychology. Because such belief systems appear to their adherents to be problem-free, all-explanatory, and equally convincing in all their components, any actual objective weakness in their explanations potentially poses a threat to their entire validity. When one’s ideas hang together perfectly and without need for re-examination or self-doubt, a challenge to any component belief can domino into every other aspect of the system. The sense of certainty and psychological security fostered by coherency puts all aspects of a worldview at risk when any part of it is challenged.
Consider Christian fundamentalism. This religious system comes packaged with extensive apologetics that render it almost entirely self-consistent and apparently coherent. Fundamentalism offers an answer to every challenge. But though Christian fundamentalism does contain some ideas that are meaningful and true, its contains many significant flaws that represent neither the true message of Jesus nor the nature of broader reality. Awareness of these flaws does more than cause an adherent to change specific beliefs; rather, such awareness can challenge the entire coherency of the fundamentalist system and by implication cause the former adherent to reject all aspects of his or her religion, both the good and the bad.
Thus, because virtually every human belief system is flawed in some way, the very coherency of such a system can in the end lead to the rejection of all its components, regardless of their individual merit — a sort of “guilt by association” of beliefs. Anecdotal evidence for this claim is found in the many stories of Christian fundamentalists who eventually become atheists, rather than, say, moderate or liberal Christians, after they are forced to recognize the error of some component of their fundamentalism.
What we need most then in our worldviews is not total coherency and self-consistency, with the resultant false security of certainty. Rather, we should be willing to let paradox, mystery, and doubt break into our faith, lending us humility and the willingness to not have it all figured out at once. The willingness to accept uncertainty or even apparent contradiction will give our faith a different sort of coherence, a fluid coherence that allows our ideas to adapt to our changing experiences of God and of people. When we accept paradox as a means to the end of truth, our religious worldviews will be more mature, more resilient, and more effective as methodologies for understanding and knowing God.
It is critically important in theological discussion to carefully distinguish between the terms belief and faith. These terms are used in multiple (often conflicting) ways among various thinkers, but for my purposes I generally distinguish them as follows.
Belief is a mental state of confidence in the factuality (or lack of factuality) of a fact-claim about “the way things are”. I can believe that the world is roughly spherical and not; I can believe that the sky is red (though that would be an incorrect belief); I can believe that the Gospel According to Matthew is literally historical, word-for-word (almost certainly also an incorrect belief, though); and so on. Faith, in contrast, has little to do with belief in a fact-claim per se, but has everything to do with orientation towards or ultimate concern for a person, event, or story, independent of the validity of any fact-claims about that subject. (The idea of faith as “ultimate concern” comes from Paul Tillich, who in Dynamics of Faith makes the point that idolatrous faith thus occurs when one’s ultimate concern is oriented towards something that is not in fact ultimate, like the nation-state). Thus, we have beliefs about propositional statements regarding reality, but we have faith in narratives and in people.
Any definition of “being”, “existence”, “actuality”, “ousia”, “essence”, etc, etc, etc, is inadequate as a description of the mystery that we call “God”. Thus we must be extremely careful in believing that “God exists” or in believing that “God is real”. Perhaps, in fact, we must remain agnostic about the “existence” of God, if only as a way of coping with this divine transcendence of human ontological categories. But as the above discussion makes clear, holding belief (and disbelief) in suspension in no way rules out the potential for faith. It is fully possible to have faith in this God, the question of whose existence is meaningless. For we understand that the idea of God as a person has been made relevant though the powerful narratives we tell in order to understand the world in a God-oriented way (such as the Gospel According to Matthew, which thus does not need to be factual (belief-worthy) to be true (faith-worthy)). We can have faith (as defined here) in the “person” of God, in the narratives about God, and we can use this faith as a lens to understand the world and guide our actions in it. We can have faith in God without belief in God’s existence.
